Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/113

 it is simple determinateness. But individuality in its character as independent Being, Being-for-self, is this act of allowing the differentiated moments to reach free immediacy and independence, it shuts them off from each other; individuality just means that it has at the same time to be empirical individuality.

Individuality as exclusive is for others immediacy, and is the return from the Other into self. The individuality of the Divine Idea, the Divine Idea as a person, first attains to completeness in reality, since at first it has the many individuals confronting it, and brings these back into the unity of Spirit, into the Church or Spiritual Community, and exists here as real, universal self-consciousness.

It is just in connection with the act whereby the definite transition of the Idea to the sensuous present is accomplished that we have what is most distinctive in the religion of Spirit, namely, that all the moments are developed till they have reached definiteness and completeness in their most external forms. But even in this condition of extreme opposition Spirit is certain of itself as being absolute truth, and consequently it is afraid of nothing, not even of the sensuous present. It is part of the cowardice of abstract thought that it shuns the sensuous present in a monkish fashion; modern abstraction takes up this attitude of fastidious gentility towards the moment of the sensuous present.

It is next required of the individuals in the Community or Church that they should revere the Divine Idea in the form of individuality, and appropriate it to themselves. For the tender, loving disposition, that of woman, this is easy; but then, on the other side, we are confronted with the fact that the subject on which this demand is made is in a condition of infinite freedom, and has come to understand the substantiality of its self-consciousness; for the independent Notion, the man, this demand is accordingly infinitely hard. The freedom of the subject rebels against