Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/51

 the same, we must carefully define the sense in which this is to be understood, else we may get a false meaning and an incorrect conception, implying that the eternal Son of the Father, the Godhead who exists objectively for Himself, is the same as the world, and that we are to understand by the former nothing more than what we mean by the latter.

It has been already remarked, and is, indeed, self-evident, that it is only the Idea of God as previously unfolded in what was called the first sphere which is the true and eternal God, while His higher realisation and manifestation in the detailed process of Spirit is what is treated of in the third sphere.

When the world in its immediate form is taken as something which has an essential existence of its own, and when the sensuous and the temporal are regarded as having Being, then either the false meaning before referred to is attached to what is thus predicated of them, or else we are, at the very outset, forced to think of there being two eternal acts on the part of God. God’s active working, however, is emphatically one and the same, and does not show itself in manifold forms of varying activity, such as is expressed by the terms now, after, separate, &c.

Thus this differentiation when it takes the form of independence is merely the negative moment of Other-Being in an independent form or for itself, or of Being external to itself, which as such has no truth, but is merely a stage, and regarded from the point of time is merely a moment, and not even a moment, but something which possesses this kind of independence only as contrasted with finite Spirit, inasmuch as it itself as actually existing represents this kind and mode of independence. In God Himself this Now, this independent existence or Being-for-self, is the vanishing moment of manifestation.

This moment certainly now has the extension, breadth,