Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/153

 The determination of the Good here is the arbitrariness, the accidental nature of the subject in general, and this latter is thus the extreme or culminating point of this subjectivity, the freedom which renounces its claim to truth and to the development of truth, which thus moves within itself and knows that what it considers as having validity is simply its own determinations, and that it has the mastery over all that is called good and evil.

This is an inner self-enclosed life which may indeed coexist with calm, lofty, and pious aspirations, but may as readily appear as hypocrisy or as vanity in its most extreme form. It is what is called the pious life of feeling, to which Pietism also restricts itself. Pietism recognises no objective truth, sets itself in opposition to dogmas, to the content of religion, and though it does indeed preserve the element of mediation, and still maintains a certain relation to Christ, yet this relation is supposed to remain in the sphere of feeling, in the sphere of inner sentiment. Each person has thus his own God, Christ, &c. The element of particularity in which each has his own individual religion, his own theory of the Universe, &c., does undoubtedly exist in Man; but in religion it is absorbed by life in the Spiritual Community, and for the truly pious man it has no longer any real worth and is laid aside.

On this side of the empty essence of God there thus stands a finitude which is free on its own account and has become independent, which has an absolute value in itself, e.g., in the shape of the righteousness of individuals. The further consequence is, that not only is the objectivity of God thus put in a sphere beyond the present and negated, but all other objective characteristics which have validity in-and-for-themselves, and which have appeared in the world as Right, as what is moral, &c., absolutely disappear. Since the subject thus retreats to the extreme point of its infinity, the Good, all that is right, &c., are contained only in it, it takes all this as constituting