Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/88

 nature, namely, that light and its negation lie side by side, although, indeed, light is the power to drive away darkness. This determination in God is itself as yet that element of impotence which, because of its abstraction, is not as yet able to contain and endure the opposition, the contradiction within itself, but has the Evil alongside of it. Light is the Good and the Good is light; this is the indivisible unity which we have here.

But light is in conflict with darkness, with evil, which it is to overcome, though ideally only, for it does not actually succeed in doing this.

Light is an infinite expansion, it is as rapid as Thought; but in order that its manifestation be real, it must strike upon something that is dark. Nothing is made manifest by pure light; only in this Other does definite manifestation make its appearance, and with this, Good appears in opposition to Evil. This manifestation is a determining but not as yet concrete development of determination; the concreteness of determination is therefore outside of it, because of its abstraction it has its determination in the Other. Without the opposition Spirit does not exist, and in the development of Spirit the point of importance is merely as to the position this opposition assumes relatively to mediation and to the original unity.

Thus the Good in its universality has a natural form, namely, this pure manifestation of nature, Light. The Good is the universal determinateness of things. Since it is thus abstract subjectivity, the moment of particularity or singularity, the moment, the mode, by which it is for Other, is itself as yet in sensuous perception something externally present, which, however, may come to be adequate to the content, for all particularity is taken up into the Universal; particularity of this more precise kind, in accordance with which it is the mode of perception, the mode of immediateness, is then capable of seeming adequate to the content. Brahma, for example, is merely abstract thought; looked upon in a sensuous