Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/290

 renounced everything. It thus transforms into freedom the compulsion exercised upon it by fatality. For this force or compulsion can lay hold of it only by seizing on those sides of its nature which in its concrete existence have an inner and an outer determinate Being. As connected with external existence, Man is under the influence of external force in the shape of other men, of circumstances, and so on; but external existence has its roots in what is inward, in his impulses, interests, and aims; they are the bonds, morally justifiable and morally ordained, or, it may be, not justifiable, which bring him into subjection to force. But the roots belong to his inner life, they are his; he can tear them out of his heart; his will, his freedom represent that power of abstraction from everything whereby the heart can make itself the grave of the heart. When the heart thus inwardly renounces itself, it leaves to force nothing upon which it can lay hold. What is crushed by force is a form of existence which is devoid of heart, an externality in which force can no longer affect Man: he is outside of the sphere in which force can strike.

It has been previously remarked that the result, it is so, is the result of the necessity, to which Man clings; and he abides by it as a result, that is, in the sense that it is he who produces this abstract Being. This is the other moment of necessity, mediation through the negation of otherness. This Other is the determinate in general, which we have seen in the form of inner existence, the giving up of concrete aims and interests; for they are not only the ties which bind Man to externality, and consequently bring him into subjection to it, but they themselves represent the particular element, and are external to what is most inward, the self-thinking pure universality, the pure relation of freedom to itself. It is the strength of this freedom that it can in this abstract way comprise within itself and put within itself that particular element which is outside of itself, and can thus make it