Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/76

 concrete, but the immediate element which is present in it and gives it substance is the natural will. The soul finds nothing in itself except desires, selfishness, &c.; and this is one of the forms of the opposition, that “I,” as representing the soul in the depth of its nature, and the real side, are distinct from one another, and in such a way that the real side is not something which has been made adequate to express the Notion and is accordingly carried back to it, but, on the contrary, finds in itself only the natural will.

The sphere of opposition in which the real side is further developed, is the world, and thus the unity of the Notion has opposed to it the natural will as a whole, the principle of which is selfishness, and the realisation of which appears in the form of depravity, cruelty, &c. The objectivity which this pure “I” has, and which exists for it as something adequate to express it, is not found in the natural will, nor in the world either; on the contrary, the objectivity which adequately corresponds to it is the universal Essence only, that One which does not find its realisation or fulness in it, and which has all that supplies realisation, or the world, confronting it.

Accordingly the consciousness of this opposition, of this division between the “I” and the natural will, is that of an infinite contradiction. This “I” exists in an immediate relation to the natural will and to the world, and at the same time it is repelled by them. This is infinite sorrow, the world’s Passion. The reconciliation which we have hitherto found to be connected with this standpoint is only partial, and for that reason unsatisfactory. The harmony of the “I” within itself, which it attains in the Stoic philosophy, is of a merely abstract kind; it here knows itself as what thinks, and its object is what is thought, the Universal, and this is for it simply everything, the true essentiality, and thus this has for it the value of something thought, and has value for the subject as being what it itself has posited. This