Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/68

 he is, that he must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, that he must produce the nature which is his, belongs to what is essential to and most distinctive of Man, and is necessarily connected with the knowledge of good and evil.

The story further describes how the tree of life also stood in the garden; and the representation of this fact is of a simple and childlike character. The Good towards which men direct their wishes is of two kinds. Man wishes, on the one hand, to live in undisturbed happiness, in harmony with himself and outward Nature; the animal continues in this condition of unity, but Man has to pass beyond it; his other wish practically is to live eternally—and it is in accordance with these wishes that this pictorial conception has been constructed.

When we consider this representation of primitive man more closely, it is at once seen to be of a merely childlike sort. Man as an individual living thing, his individual life, his natural life, must die. But when we look more narrowly at the narrative, this is seen to be the wonderful part of it, the self-contradictory element in it.

In this contradiction Man is characterised as having an existence of his own, as being for himself. Being-for-self, in its character as consciousness, self-consciousness, is infinite self-consciousness, abstractly infinite. The fact that he is conscious of his freedom, of his absolutely abstract freedom, constitutes his infinite Being-for-self, which did not thus come into consciousness in the earlier religions in which the contrast or opposition did not get to this absolute stage, nor attain to this depth. Owing to the fact that this has happened here, the worth or dignity of Man is directly put on a much higher level. The subject has hereby attained absolute importance; it is essentially an object of interest to God, since it is self-consciousness which exists on its own account. It appears as the pure certainty of itself