Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/86

 It is with this certainty and sensuous view that we are concerned, and not merely with a divine teacher, nor indeed simply with morality, nor even in any way simply with a teacher of this Idea either. It is not with ordinary thought or with conviction that we have got to do, but with this immediate presence and certainty of the Divine; for the immediate certainty of what is present represents the infinite form and mode which the “Is” takes for the natural consciousness. This Is destroys all trace of mediation; it is the final point, the last touch of light which is laid on. This Is is wanting in mediation of any kind such as is given through feeling, pictorial ideas, reasons; and it is only in philosophical knowledge, by means of the Notion only in the element of universality, that it returns again.

The Divine is not to be conceived of merely as a universal thought, or as something inward and having potential existence only; the objectifying of the Divine is not to be conceived of simply as the objective form it takes in all men, for in that case it would be conceived of simply as representing the manifold forms of the Spiritual in general, and the development which the Absolute Spirit has in itself and which has to advance till it reaches the form of what is the form of immediacy, would not be contained in it.

The One we find in the Jewish religion exists in thought, not in the form of sense-perception, and consequently has not reached the perfect form of Spirit. It is just this attaining of a complete and perfect form in Spirit which we call subjectivity, which endlessly alienates or estranges itself, and then from this absolute opposition, from the furthest point of manifestation, returns to itself.

The principle of individuality, it is true, was already present in the Greek ideal, but there it was wanting just in that universal essentially existing infinitude; the