Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/78

. Since this is a fleeing from reality, it is also a fleeing from my reality, not a fleeing from external reality, but from the reality of my own volition.

The reality of my volition, I as a definite subject, the will in a realised form, are no longer mine; but what is left to me is the immediacy of my self-consciousness, the individual self-consciousness. This is certainly completely abstract, still this final point of the spirit’s depth is contained in it, and I have preserved myself in it.

This abstraction from my abstract reality is not in me or in my immediate self-consciousness, in the immediacy of my self-consciousness. On this side, therefore, it is affirmation which is the predominant factor, affirmation without the negation of the one-sidedness of immediate Being. In the other case it is the negation which is one-sided.

These are the two moments which contain the necessity for transition. The conception or notion of the preceding religions has purified itself and thus reached this antithesis, and the fact that this antithesis or opposition has shown itself to be, and has taken the form of, an actually existing necessity, is expressed by the words, “When the time was fulfilled,” i.e., Spirit, the demand of Spirit, is actually present, Spirit which points the way to reconciliation.

(c.) Reconciliation.—The deepest need of Spirit consists in the fact that the opposition in the subject itself has attained its universal, i.e., its most abstract extreme. This is the division, the sorrow referred to. That these two sides are not mutually exclusive, but constitute this contradiction in one, is what directly proves the subject to be an infinite force of unity; it can bear this contradiction. This is the formal, abstract, but also infinite energy of the unity which it possesses.

What satisfies this need, we call the consciousness of reconcilement, the consciousness of the abolition, of the nullity of the opposition, the consciousness that this