Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/57

 absolute Idea and its manifestation come to exist for it. What comes first here is the necessity or need of truth, while the kind and manner of the manifestation of the truth is what is second.

As regards the first point, the necessity for truth, it is presupposed that there exists in subjective Spirit a demand to know the absolute truth. This necessity directly involves the supposition that the subject exists in a state of untruth; as Spirit, however, the subject is at the same time implicitly raised above this state of untruth, and for this reason its condition of untruth is one which has to be surmounted.

Untruth more strictly defined means that the subject is in a state of alienation from itself, and the need for truth so far expresses itself in the fact that this division or alienation is in the subject, and is just because of this also annulled by truth, that it is thus changed into reconciliation, and that this reconciliation which is within itself can only be a reconciliation with the truth.

This is the necessity or need of truth in its more strictly defined form. Its essential character implies that the alienation is really in the subject, that the subject is evil, that it is inner division or alienation, inherent contradiction, not, however, contradiction of the mutually exclusive kind, but is something which at the same time keeps itself together, and that the alienation takes place only when it is an inner contradiction in the subject.

3. This reminds us that we are called on to define the nature or essential character of Man, and to show how it is to be regarded, how Man ought to regard it, and what he has got to know of it.

And here we (1) at once meet with characteristics which are mutually opposed: Man is by nature good, he is not divided against himself, but, on the contrary, his essence, his Notion, consists in this, that he is by nature good, that he represents what is harmony with itself, inner peace; and—Man is by nature evil.