Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/74

 itself as evil, the want of correspondence between myself and the Absolute, my inadequacy to express my essence, remain, and thus, from whichever side I regard myself, I always know myself to be something which ought not to be.

This expresses the relation in reference to the one extreme, and the result, this sorrow in a more definite form, is my humility, the feeling of contrition, the fact that I experience sorrow because I as a natural being do not correspond to what I at the same time know myself to be in my knowledge and will.

(b.) As regards the relation to the other extreme, the separation appears in this case in the form of misery arising from the fact that Man does not find satisfaction in the world. His desire for satisfaction, his natural wants have no longer any rights, any claims to be satisfied. As a natural being, Man stands related to an Other, and that Other is related to him in the form of forces, and his existence is to this extent contingent, just as that of other things is.

The demands of his nature, however, in reference to morality, the higher moral claims of his nature, are demands and determinations of freedom. In so far as these demands, which are implicitly legitimate, and are grounded in his notion or conception—for he knows about the Good, and the Good is in him—do not find their satisfaction in the existing order of things, in the external world, he is in a state of misery.

It is misery which drives Man into himself, forces him back into himself, and because this fixed demand that the world should be rational exists in him, he gives up the world, and seeks happiness, satisfaction, in himself, as the harmony of the affirmative side of his nature with himself. Because he seeks after this, he gives up the external world, transfers his happiness into himself, and finds satisfaction in himself.

We had this demand and this unhappiness in the