Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/81

 independent truth. By means of this, God is determined as the Good; goodness is not laid down as a predicate here, but He is simply the Good. In what has no determinate character there is neither good nor evil. The Good, on the other hand, is here the Universal, but with one purpose or end—a determinate character, which is commensurate with the universality in which it is.

To begin with, however, the self-determination of self is at this stage exclusive. Thus the Good comes into relation with what is Other, the Evil, and this relation is strife—dualism. Reconciliation, here a becoming or something that ought-to-be only, is not as yet thought of as in and pertaining to this Goodness itself.

Here it is at once posited as a necessary consequence that the strife comes to be known as a characteristic of Substance itself. The Negative is posited in Spirit itself, and this is compared with its affirmation, so that this comparison is present in felt experience, and constitutes pain, death. And here, finally, the strife, which dies away, is the wrestling of Spirit to come to itself, to attain to freedom.

From these fundamental determinations the following divisions of this transition stage result:—

1. The first determination is that of the Persian religion. Here the actual Being of the Good is still of a superficial kind, consequently it has a natural form, but a natural existence which is formless—Light.

2. The form of religion in which strife, pain, death itself actually appear in the Essence—the Syrian religion.

3. The struggling out of the strife, the going onward to the true destiny of free spirituality, the overcoming of evil, complete transition to the religion of free spirituality—the Egyptian religion.

Speaking generally, however, the characteristic common to these three forms of religion is the resumption of wild, unrestrained totality into concrete unity. This giddy whirl, in which the determinations of unity are