Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/48

 considered to be the same; we have not yet reached that determination according to which the things differentiated should have a different determination. Regarded from this side, we have to think of the judgment or differentiating act of the Idea as implying that the Son gets the determination of the Other as such, that He exists as a free personality, independently or for Himself, that He appears as something real outside of and apart from God, as something, in fact, which actually is.

His ideality, His eternal return into essential Being, is posited in the Idea in its first form as immediate and identical. In order that there may be difference, and in order that it may be properly recognised, it is necessary to have the element of Otherness, necessary that what is thus distinguished should appear as Otherness which is possessed of Being.

It is only the absolute Idea which determines itself, and which, in determining itself, is inwardly certain that it is absolutely free in itself; and in thus determining itself it implies that what is thus determined is allowed to exist as something which is free, as something independent, as an independent object. The Free exists only for the Free, and it is only for free men that an other is free too.

The absolute freedom of the Idea means that in determining itself, in the act of judgment, or differentiation, it grants the free independent existence of the Other. This Other, as something thus allowed to have an independent existence, is represented by the World taken in a general sense. The absolute act of judgment which gives independence to that aspect of Being called Other-Being might also be called Goodness, which bestows upon this side of Being in its state of estrangement the whole Idea, in so far as and in the way in which it is able to receive and represent the Idea.

2. The truth of the world is its ideality only, and does not imply that it possesses true reality; it is involved in its