Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/60

 3. The Religion of Being-within-self.

(a.) Its conception.

The general basis here is still the same as that which is peculiar to the Indian religion; what advance there is merely consists in the necessity felt that the characteristics of the Indian religion should be brought together again out of their wild, lawless independence, out of their merely natural state of dispersion, placed in their inner relation, and have their unstable chaos reduced to a state of rest. This religion of Being-within-self is the concentration and tranquillisation of spirit as it returns out of the arid disorder of the Indian religion into itself and into essential unity.

The essential unity and the differences have hitherto continued to keep apart to such an extent that the latter were essentially independent, and only vanished in the unity in order at once to reappear in all their independence. The relation of the unity and the differences was an infinite progression, a perennial alternation of the vanishing of differences in unity, and their reappearance in their own essential independence. This alternation is now arrested, because that which is potentially contained in it, namely, the coming together of the differentiations in the catagory of unity, is actually posited.

In its character as this Being-within-itself, for which all relation to another is now precluded, the essence is essentiality existing within itself, reflection of negativity into itself, and is thus that which is at rest within itself and persists.

However defective this determination may be, for the Being-within-itself is not as yet concrete, is only the disappearance of the independent differences, yet we are on firm ground here; it is a true determination of God which constitutes the foundation.

If we compare this general conception with the assumption that we know nothing of God, then this religion,