Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/82

 We may express it in a more definite form by saying that the opposition is inadequacy in general. The opposition, Evil, represents the natural aspect of human existence and volition, or immediacy. This is just the mode of existence characteristic of the natural life; it is just when we have immediacy that we have finitude, and this finitude or natural life is inadequate to express the universality of God, of the absolutely free, self-existent, infinite, eternal Idea.

This inadequacy is the starting-point which constitutes the need of reconciliation. The stricter definition of it would not consist in saying that the inadequacy attaching to both sides disappears for consciousness. The inadequacy exists; it is involved in what is spiritual. Spirit means self-differentiation, the positing or making explicit of differences.

If these are different, then, by the very fact that according to this moment they are differences, they are not alike; they are distinguished from each other, they do not correspond to each other. The inadequacy or want of correspondence cannot disappear; if it were to disappear then Spirit’s power of judgment or differentiation, its life, would disappear, in which case it would cease to be Spirit.

2. A further determination is reached when we say that, spite of this want of correspondence, the identity of the two exists; that otherness or Other-Being, finitude, weakness, the frailty of human nature, cannot in any way impair the value of that unity which forms the substantial element in reconciliation.

This, too, we recognised as present in the divine Idea; for the Son is other than the Father, and this Other-Being is difference, for if it were not, it would not be Spirit. But the Other is God, and has the entire fulness of the Divine nature in Himself. The characteristic of Other-Being in no way detracts from the value of the fact that this Other is the Son of God, and is