Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/46

. It is what is potential and essential, but it is what appears later in knowledge, and reaches the stage of consciousness and knowledge later.

The Form of the Idea actually appears as a result which, however, is essentially potentiality; and just as the content of the Idea means that the last is the first and the first is the last, so what appears as a result is the presupposition, potentiality, basis. This Idea is now to be considered as it appears in the second element, in the element of manifestation in general. In its form as objectivity, or as potential, the absolute Idea is complete; but this is not the case with the Idea in its subjective aspect, either in itself as such, or when subjectivity actually appears in the Divine Idea. The progress of the Idea here referred to may be looked at from two sides.

Looking at it from the first of these, we see that the subject for which this Idea exists is the thinking subject. Even the forms used by ordinary conception do not take anything from the nature of the fundamental form, nor hinder this fundamental form from being for man a form characterised by thought. The subject, speaking generally, exists as something which thinks, it thinks this Idea, and yet it is concrete self-consciousness. This Idea must exist for the subject as concrete self-consciousness, as an actual subject.

Or it may be put thus—the Idea in its first form is the absolute truth, while in its subjective form it exists for thought; but not only must the Idea be truth for the subject, the subject on its part must have the certainty of the Idea, i.e., the certainty which belongs to this subject as such, as finite, as a subject which is empirical, concrete, and belonging to the sphere of sense.

The Idea possesses certainty for the subject, and the subject has this certainty only in so far as the Idea is actually perceived, in so far as it exists for the subject. If I can say of anything, “that is,” then it possesses