Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/65

 these that the spirit of nature is conscious spirit, nor in using them are we thinking of anything conscious. The natural laws of plants, animals, of their organisation and action, are devoid of consciousness: these laws are the substantial element, are their nature, their notion; they are this implicitly, are the reason that is immanent in them, but without consciousness.

Man is Spirit, and his spirit determines itself as soul, as this unity of what has life. This its life force, which in the unfolding of his organised existence is one only, permeating and sustaining everything, this activity is present in man so long as he lives, without his knowing it or willing it; and yet his living soul is the cause, the originating agency, the Substance, which produces it. Man, this living soul, knows nothing of this; he does not will this circulation of the blood, does not prescribe it to himself; yet he does it: it is his deed. Man is the acting, working power in that which goes on in his organism. This unconscious active rationality or unconscious rational activity is the ruling of the world by vovs; among the ancients the νους of Anaxagoras. This is not conscious reason. By modern philosophers, especially by Schelling, this rational activity has been also called perception or intuition—God as intuitive intelligence. God, intelligence, reason as intellectual intuition, is the eternal creation of nature, what is called the maintenance of nature; for creation and preservation are inseparable. In perception we are immersed in the objects; they fill us. This is the lower stage of consciousness, this immersion in the objects; to reflect upon them, to arrive at general ideas, to originate points of view, to attach certain determinations to certain objects—to judge—is no longer perception as such.

Such then is this standpoint of substantiality, of intellectual perception or intuition. This is really the standpoint of Pantheism in the true sense of the word, this Oriental knowledge, consciousness, thought of this