Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/80

 therefore the fundamental characteristic, the substantial basis, in every form of religion. The natural thing is presented in a human fashion, and also as personality, as spirit, as consciousness; but the deities of the Hindus are still superficial personifications—the personification by no means implies that the object, God, is known as Spirit. It is these particular objects, the sun, a tree, which are personified. The incarnations of the deities, too, have their place here; the particular objects have, however, an independence, and because they are particular and natural objects the independence is only a fictitious one.

But the Highest is Spirit, and it is from the empirical subjective spirit in the first instance that this spiritual determination and independence is derived, either where it gets a definite shape, or where Brahma has his existence in and through immersion of the subject in itself. Now, however, it is no longer the case that man is God or God is man—that God exists merely in an empiricohuman mode; on the contrary, God is truly objective in His own nature, is in His very Being totality, concretely determined in Himself, that is to say, known as being in His real nature subjective, and thus is He for the first time essentially an Object, and stands over against man in general.

The return to the thought that God appears as man, as God-man, we shall find later on; but it is here that this objectivity of God has its beginning.

Now if the Universal be conceived as determination of self within self, then it comes into opposition with what is Other than itself, and represents strife with the Other of itself. In the religion of Power there is no opposition, no strife, for the accidental has no value for Substance.

Power now determining itself by its own act, has not, indeed, these determinations as something finite. On the contrary, what is determined exists in its complete and