Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/79

 with the substance, which determines itself within itself, and is not merely abstract Power.

The other equally essential determination is that with this the separation of the empirical self-consciousness from the Absolute, from the content of the Highest, for the first time takes place, that here for the first time God attains true objectivity. At the former stages it is the empirical self-consciousness immersed in itself which is Brahma, this abstraction within self, or, in other words, the Highest is present as a human being. Thus substantial unity is still inseparable from the subject, and in so far as it is still something imperfect, is not as yet in its very nature subjective unity; it still has the subject outside of it. The objectivity of the Absolute, the consciousness of its independence in its own right, is not present.

Here this breach between subjectivity and objectivity takes place for the first time, and it is here that objectivity for the first time properly deserves the name of God; and we have this objectivity of God here because this content has determined itself by its own act to be potentially concrete totality. The meaning of this is that God is a Spirit, that God is the Spirit in all religious.

When, as happens with special frequency at the present day, we hear it said that subjective consciousness forms a part of religion, the idea expressed is a correct one. We have here the instinct that subjectivity belongs to religion. But people have an idea that the spiritual can exist as an empirical subject, which then as empirical consciousness can have a natural thing for its God, and this means that spirituality can come into consciousness only, and God, too, as a natural existence, can be an object for this consciousness.

Thus, on the one side, we have God as a natural existence; but God is essentially Spirit, and this is the absolute characteristic quality of religion in general, and