Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/69

 within itself, there exists in it a centre or point of infinite subjectivity; it is certainly abstract, but it is abstract essential Being, Being in-and-for-self. This takes the form of the assertion that Man as Spirit is immortal, is an object of God’s interest, is raised above finitude and dependence, above external circumstances, that he has freedom to abstract himself from everything, and this implies that he can escape mortality. It is in religion that the immortality of the soul is the element of supreme importance, because the antithesis involved in religion is of an infinite kind.

What is mortal is what can die; what is immortal is what can reach a state in which death cannot enter. Combustible and incombustible are terms implying that combustion is a possibility merely, which attaches to the object in an external way. The essential character of Being is not, however, a possibility after this fashion, but, on the contrary, is an affirmative determinate quality which it already now possesses in itself.

Thus the immortality of the soul must not be represented as first entering the sphere of reality only at a later stage; it is the actual present quality of Spirit; Spirit is eternal, and for this reason is already present. Spirit, as possessed of freedom, does not belong to the sphere of things limited; it, as being what thinks and knows in an absolute way, has the Universal for its object; this is eternity, which is not simply duration, as duration can be predicated of mountains, but knowledge. The eternity of Spirit is here brought into consciousness, and is found in this reasoned knowledge, in this very separation, which has reached the infinitude of Being-for-self, and which is no longer entangled in what is natural, contingent, and external. This eternity of Spirit in itself means that Spirit is, to begin with, potential; but the next standpoint implies that Spirit ought not to continue to be merely natural Spirit, but that it ought to be what it is in its essential and complete nature, in-and-for-self.