Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/99

 itself, to be the force or energy which is able to endure this contradiction, and to dissolve it within itself.

Ormazd has always Ahriman confronting him; we also find the idea, it is true, that Ahriman is at last overcome, and Ormazd alone reigns; but that is merely expressed as something in the future, not as anything that belongs to the present. God, Essence, Spirit, the True, must be present, not transported in idea into the past or the future. The Good—and this is the most immediate demand—must also be posited in actual fact as real power in itself, and being conceived of as universal, must thus be conceived of as real subjectivity.

What we have at the present standpoint is this unity of subjectivity, and the fact that by means of these distinguished moments, affirmation passes through negation itself, and ends with return into itself and reconciliation; in such a way, however, that the action of this subjectivity is more the mere effervescence of it than the subjectivity which has actually attained to itself completely, and already reached its consummation.

One single subject constitutes this difference, a something concrete in itself, one development. Thus this subjectivity imports itself into developed powers, and so unites them that they are set free. This subject has a history, is the history of life, of Spirit, of movement within itself, in which it breaks up into the differentiation of these powers, and in differentiation this subject converts itself into what is heterogeneous relatively to itself.

Light does not become extinct, does not set, but here it is one single subject, which alienates itself from itself, is arrested in the negativity of itself, but reinstates itself by its own act in and from out of this estrangement. The result is the conception of free Spirit, not yet, however, as true ideality, but, to begin with, as merely the impulse to bring the ideality into actual existence.

Here we have reached the ultimate determination of