Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/115

 sensuous mode must disappear and mount into the region of idea or mental representation. One of the constituent parts of the formation of the Church is that this sensuous form passes over into a spiritual element. The mode in which this purification from immediate Being takes place implies that the sensuous element in it is preserved; the fact that it passes away is negation, as this is posited in and appears in one particular sensuous individual as such. It is only in a single individual that this sensuous representation is found, it is not something which can be inherited, and is not capable of renewal as the manifestation of substance in the Lama is, it cannot appear in such a way because the sensuous manifestation as a definite individual manifestation is in its nature momentary; it has to be spiritualised, and is therefore essentially a manifestation that has already been, and so is raised to the region of idea or mental representation.

It is possible also to occupy a standpoint at which we do not get beyond the Son and His appearance in time. This is the case in Catholicism, in which the intercession of Mary and the Saints is added to the reconciling power of the Son, and where the Spirit is present, rather in the Church as a hierarchy merely, and not in the Community of believers. Here, however, the second element in the specification of the Idea is not so much spiritualised, but rather remains in the region of ordinary thought. Or to put it otherwise, Spirit is not so much known as objective, but merely as the particular subjective form in which it appears in the sensuous present as the Church and lives in tradition. Spirit in this outward form of reality is, as it were, the Third Person.

For the spirit which stands in need of it, the sensuous present can be given a permanent existence in pictures, though these are not indeed works of art, but are rather miracle-working pictures, regarded, that is to say, as existing in a definite material form. It follows from this that it is not merely the corporeal form and the body of