Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/75

 two following forms. We saw how the sorrow which comes from universality, from above, was found amongst the Jewish people; in connection with it there is ever present the infinite demand for absolute purity in my natural existence, in my empirical willing and knowing. The other form they took, the retreat from misery into self, represents the standpoint at which the Roman world arrived and where it ended, namely, the universal misery of the world.

We saw how this formal inwardness which finds satisfaction in the world, this dominion as being the aim or end of God, was represented, and known, and thought of as worldly dominion. Both of these aspects of the truth are one-sided; the first may be defined as the feeling of humiliation, the other is the abstract elevation of Man in himself, of Man as self-centred. Thus it is Stoicism or Scepticism.

According to the Stoical or Sceptical view, Man is driven back upon himself, he has to find satisfaction in himself, in this state of independence; in remaining inflexibly self-centred he has to find happiness, inner harmony of soul, he is to rest in this abstract, present, self-conscious inwardness of his.

It is in this separation or disunion, as we have said, that the subject thus takes on a definite character, and conceives of itself as the extreme of abstract Being-for-self, of abstract freedom; the soul plunges into its depths, into its absolute abyss. This soul is the undeveloped monad, the naked monad, the empty soul devoid of content; but since it is potentially the Notion, the concrete, this emptiness or abstraction stands in a relation of contradiction to its essential character, which is, to be concrete.

Thus the universal element is represented by the fact that in this separation which develops into an infinite antithesis, the abstraction is to be done away with and absorbed. This abstract “I” is also in itself, a will, it is