Since, then, in religion, the peculiar characteristic of what is properly consciousness of spirit does not have the form of detached and external otherness, the existence of spirit is distinct from its self-conscious- ness, and its actual reality proper falls outside religion. There is no doubt one spirit in both, but its conscious- ness does not embrace both together; and religion appears as a part of existence, of acting, and of striving, whose other part is the life lived within its own actual world. As we now know that spirit in its own world and spirit conscious of itself as spirit, i.e. spirit in the sphere of religion, are the same, the completion of religion consists in the two forms becoming identical with one another: not merely in its reality being grasped and embraced by religion, but conversely — it, as spirit * Vorstellung. t Begriff.
Religion 689 conscious of itself, becomes actual to itself, and real object of its own consciousness.
So far as spirit in religion presents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality enclosed within it is the shape and garment in which it clothes its idea of itself. The reality, however, does not in this presentation get proper justice done to it, that is to say, it does not get to be an independent and free objective existence and not merely a garment. And conversely, because that reality lacks within itself its completion, it is a determinate shape or form, which does not attain to what it ought to reveal, viz. spirit conscious of itself. That its form might express spirit itself, the form would have to be nothing else than spirit, and spirit would have to appear to itself, or to be actual, as it is in its own essential being. Only thereby, too, would be attained — what may seem to demand the opposite — that the object of its consciousness has, at the same time, the form of free and independent reality. But only spirit which is object to itself in the shape of Absolute Spirit, is as much aware of being a free and independent reality as it remains therein conscious of itself.
Since in the first instance self-consciousness and con- sciousness simply, religion, and spirit as it is externally in its world, or the objective existence of spirit, are distinct, the latter consists in the totality of spirit, so far as its moments are separated from each other and each is set forth by itself. These moments, however, are consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit — spirit, that is, qua immediate spirit, which is not yet consciousness of spirit. Its totality, taken all together, constitutes the mundane existence of spirit as a whole; VOL. II. — T 690 Phenomenology of Mind spirit as such contains the previous separate embodi- ments in the form of universal determinations of its own being, in those moments just named. Religion presupposes that these have completely run their course, and is their simple totality, their absolute Self and soul.
* The course which these traverse is, moreover, in relation to religion, not to be pictured as a temporal sequence. It is only spirit in its entirety that is in time, and the shapes assumed, which are specific embodiments of the whole of spirit as such, present themselves in a sequence one after the other. For it is only the whole- which properly has reality, and hence the form of pure freedom relatively to any- thing else, the form which takes expression as time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, have, because they are moments, no existence separate from one another.
Just as spirit was distinct from its moments, we have further, in the third place, to distinguish from these moments their specific individuated char- acter. Each of those moments, in itself, we saw broke up again in a process of development all its own, and took various shapes and forms: as e.g. in the case of consciousness, sensuous certainty and perception were distinct phases. These latter aspects fall apart in time from one another, and belong to a specific particular whole. For spirit descends from its universality to assume an individual form through specification, by determination. This deter- mination, or mediate element, is consciousness, self- * The two following paragraphs form a break in the analysis, and may be regarded as an explanatory note.
Religion 691 consciousness, and so on. Now the forms assumed by these moments constitute individuality. Hence these exhibit and reveal spirit in its individuality or con- crete reality, and are distinguished in time from one another, though in such a way that the succeeding re- tains within it the preceding.
While, therefore, religion is the completion of the life of spirit, its final and complete expression, into which, as being their ground, its individual moments, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, return and have returned, they, at the same time, together constitute the objectively existing realisation of spirit in its totality; as such spirit is real only as the moving process of these aspects which it possesses, a process of distinguishing them and returning back into itself. In the process of these universal moments is con- tained the development of religion generally. Since, however, each of these attributes was set forth and presented, not only in the way it in general determines itself, but as it is in and for itself, i.e. as, within its own being, running its course as a distinct whole — there has thus arisen not merely the development of religion generally; those independently complete processes pur- sued by the individual phases and stages of spirit contain at the same time the determinate forms of religion itself. Spirit in its entirety, spirit in religion, is once more the process from its immediacy to the attainment of a knowledge of what it implicitly or immediately is; and is the process of attaining the state where the shape and form, in which it appears as an object for its own consciousness, will be perfectly identical with and adequate to its essential nature, and where it will behold itself as it is.
692 Phenomenology of Mind In this development of religion, then, spirit itself as- sumes definite forms, which constitute the distinctions involved in this process: and at the same time a deter- minate or specific form of religion has likewise an actual spirit of a specific character. Thus, if consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit belong to self- knowing spirit in general, in a similar way the specific shapes, which self-knowing spirit assumes, appropriate and adopt the distinctive forms which were specially developed in the case of each of the stages — con- sciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit. The determinate shape, assumed in a given case by re- ligion, appropriates, from among the forms belonging to each of its moments, the one adapted to it, and makes this its actual spirit. This one determinate attitude of religion pervades and permeates all aspects of its actual existence, and stamps them with this common feature.
In this way the arrangement now assumed by the forms and shapes which. have thus far appeared, is different from the way they appeared in their own order. On this point we may note shortly at the out- set what is of chief importance. In the series we con- sidered, each moment, exhaustively elaborating its entire content, evolved and formed itself into a single whole within its own peculiar principle. And knowledge was the inner depth, or the spirit, wherein the elements, having no subsistence of their own, possessed their substance. This substance, however, has now at length made its appearance; it is the deep life of spirit certain of itself; it does not allow the principle be- longing to each individual form to get isolated, and become a whole within itself: rather it collects all Religion 693 these moments into its own content, keeps them to- gether, and advances within this total wealth of its concrete actual spirit; while all its particular moments take into themselves and receive together in common the like determinate character of the whole. This spirit certain of itself and the process it goes through — this is their true reality, the independent self -subsistence, which belongs to each individually.
Thus while the previous linear series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by knots, but thence went forward again in one linear stretch, it is now, as it were, broken at these knots, these universal moments, and radiates into many lines, which, being bound together into a single bundle, combine at the same time symmetrically, so that the similar distinctions, in which each separately took shape within its own sphere, meet together.
For the rest, it is self-evident from the whole argu- ment, how this co-ordination of universal directions, just mentioned, is to be understood; so that it be- comes superfluous to remark that these distinctions are to be taken to mean essentially and only moments of the process of development, not parts. In the case of actual concrete spirit they are attributes of its substance; in religion, on the other hand, they are only predicates of the subject. In the same way, indeed, all forms in general are, in themselves or for us, contained in spirit and contained in every spirit. But the main point of importance, in dealing with its reality, is solely what determinate character it has in its consciousness, in which specific character it has expressed its self, or in what shape it knows its essential nature.
694 Phenomenology of Mind The distinction made between actual spirit and that same spirit which knows itself as spirit, or between itself qua consciousness and qua self-consciousness, is transcended and done away with in the case where spirit knows itself in its real truth. Its consciousness and its self-consciousness have come to terms. But, as religion is here to begin with and immediately, this distinction has not yet reverted to spirit. It is merely the conception, the principle, of religion that is es- tablished at first. In this the essential element is self-consciousness, which is conscious of being all truth, and which contains all reality within that truth. This self-consciousness, being consciousness [and so aware of an object], has itself for its object. Spirit, which knows itself in the first instance immediately, is thus to itself spirit in the form of immediacy; and the specific character of the shape in which it appears to itself is that of pure simple being. This being, this bare existence, has indeed a filling drawn neither from sensation or manifold matter, nor from any other one-sided elements, purposes, and determinations; its filling is solely spirit, and is known by itself to be all truth and reality. Such filling is in this first form not in agreement or identity with its own shape; spirit qua ultimate Reality is not in accord with its consciousness. It is actual only as Absolute Spirit, when it is also to itself in its truth as it is in its certainty of itself, or, when the extremes, into which spirit qua conscious- ness falls, exist for one another in spiritual shape. The embodiment adopted by spirit qua object of its own consciousness, remains filled by the certainty of spirit, and this self-certainty constitutes its substance. Through this content, the degrading of the object to Religion 695 bare objectivity, to the form of something that negates self-consciousness, disappears. The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the fundamental basis, or pure consciousness, inside which consciousness breaks up into its constituent elements [viz. an object with subject over against it]. In this way, shut up within its pure self-consciousness, spirit does not exist in religion as the creator of a nature in general; rather what it produces in the course of this process are its forms and shapes qua spirits, which together constitute all that it can reveal when it is completely manifested. And this process itself is the development of its perfect and com- plete actuality through the individual aspects thereof, i.e. through its imperfect modes of realisation.
The first realisation of spirit is just the principle and notion of religion itself — religion as immediate and thus Natural Religion. Here spirit knows itself as its object in a " natural " or immediate shape. The second realisation, is, however, necessarily that of knowing itself in the shape of transcended and super- seded natural existence, i.e. in the form of self. This is the Religion of Art or productive activity. For the shape it adopts is raised to the form of self through the productive activity of consciousness, by which this consciousness beholds in its object its own action, i.e. sees the self. The third realisation, finally, cancels the one-sidedness of the first two: the self is as much an immediate self as the immediacy is a self. If spirit in the first is in the form of consciousness, and in the second in that of self-consciousness, it is in the third in the form of the unity of both; it has then the shape of what is completely self-contained (An-und Fursichseyns); and since it is thus presented as it 696 Phenomenology of Mind is in and for itself, this is the sphere of Revealed Re- ligion. Although spirit, however, here reaches its true shape, the very shape assumed and the conscious presentation are an aspect and phase still unsurmounted; and from this spirit has to pass over into the life of the Notion, in order therein completely to resolve the form of objectivity, in the notion, which embraces within itself this its own opposite.
It is then that spirit has grasped its own principle, the notion of itself, as so far only we [who analyse spirit] have grasped it; and its form, the element of its existence, since this form is the notion, is then spirit itself.
NATURAL KELIGION NATURAL KELIGION [The arrangement of the analysis of Religion and the divisions into the various subsections are, as indicated in the preceding note (p. 683), determined by the general development of experience. That development is from the immediate through mediation to the fusion of immediacy and mediation. The stages of the development of experience are Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Reason, the latter leading to its highest level — finite Spiritual existence. The development of Religion follows these various ways in which objects are given in experience, and the three chief divisions of Religion are determined accordingly: Natural Religion is religion at the level of Consciousness; Art, Religion at the level of Self-conscious- ness; Revealed Religion is Religion at the level of Reason and Spirit. Each of these is again subdivided, and the subdivision follows more or less closely the various subdivisions of these three ultimate levels of ex- perience— Consciousness, Thus, in Natural Religion, we have Religion at the level of Sense-certainty — " Light ": Religion at the level of Percep- tion— " Life ": and Religion at the level of Understanding — the reciprocal relation constituted by the " play of forces " appears as the relation of the " Artificer " to his own product.
The general principle is not worked out in detail, with the same obviousness, in the case of the other two primary types of Religion — Art and Revealed Religion. But the same general method of development is pursued in these cases.
The historical material before the mind of the writer is, as might be expected, the various religions which have historically appeared amongst mankind. These religions are treated, however, as illustrations of prin- ciples dominating the religious consciousness in general, rather than as merely historical phenomena.
With the succeeding argument should be read Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, Part II, Sections I and II, and Part III.]
NATURAL KELIGION* Spirit knowing spirit is consciousness of itself; and is to itself in the form of objectivity. It is; and is at the same time self -existence (Fursichseiri). It is for self; it is the aspect of self-consciousness, and is so in contrast to the aspect of its consciousness, the aspect by which it relates itself to itself as object. In its consciousness there is the opposition and in consequence the specificity of the form in which it appears to itself and knows itself. It is with this specificity that we have alone to do in considering religion; for its essential unspecified principle, its abstract notion, has already come to light. The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness, however, falls at the same time within this notion. The form or shape of religion does not contain the existence of spirit in the sense of its being nature detached and free from thought, nor in the sense of its being thought detached from existence. The shape assumed by religion is existence contained and preserved in thought, as well as a thought-content which is consciously existent.
It is by the determinate character of this form, in which spirit knows itself, that one religion is dis- tinguished from another. But we have at the same time to note that the systematic exposition of this knowledge about itself, in terms of this particular specific character, does not as a fact exhaust the whole * Primarily Oriental religion.
Natural Religion 699 meaning of a given actual religion. The series of different religions, which will come before us, just as much sets forth again merely the different aspects of a single religion, and indeed of every particular religion, and the ideas, the conscious processes, which seem to mark off one concrete religion from another, make their appearance in each. All the same the diversity must also be looked at as a diversity of religion. For while spirit lives in the distinction of its consciousness and its self-consciousness, the process it goes through finds its goal in the transcendence of this fundamental distinction and in giving the form of self-consciousness to the given shape which is object of consciousness. This distinction, however, is not eo ipso transcended by the fact that the shapes, which that consciousness contains, have also the element of self in them, and that God is represented as self -consciousness. The consciously presented self is not the actual concrete self. In order that this, like every other more specific determination of the form, may in truth belong to this form, it has partly to be put into this form by the action of self- consciousness, and partly the lower determination must show itself to be cancelled and transcended and comprehended by the higher. For what is consciously presented (Vorgstellt) only ceases to be something " presented " and alien, external, to its knowledge, by the self having produced it, and so viewing the deter- mination of the object as its own determination, and hence seeing itself in that object. By this operation, the lower determination [that of being something " pre- sented "] has at once vanished; for doing anything is a negative process which is carried through at the expense of something else. So far as that lower determination - 700 Phenomenology of Mind still continues to appear, it has withdrawn into what is without any essential significance: just as, on the other hand, where the lower still predominates, while the higher is also present, the one co-exists in a self-less way alongside of the other. While, therefore, the various ideas falling within a particular religion no doubt exhibit the whole course its forms take, the character of each is determined by the particular unity of consciousness and self-consciousness; that is to say, by the fact that self-consciousness has taken into itself the determination belonging to the object of consciousness, has, by its own action, made that determination altogether its own, and knows it to be the essential one as compared with the others.
The truth of belief in a given determination of the religious spirit shows itself in this, that the actual spirit is constituted after the same manner as the form in which spirit beholds itself in religion; thus e.g. the in- carnation of God, which is found in Eastern religion, has no truth, because the concrete actual spirit of this re- ligion is without the reconciliation this principle implies.
It is not in place here to return from the totality of specific determinations back to the particular deter- mination, and show in what shape the plenitude of all the others is contained within it and within its par- ticular form of religion. The higher form, when put back under a lower, is deprived of its significance for self-conscious spirit, belongs to spirit merely in a super- ficial way, and is for it at the level of a presentation. The higher form has to be considered in its own peculiar significance, and dealt with where it is the principle of a particular religion, and is certified and approved by its actual spirit.
a GOD AS LIGHT* a GOD AS LIGHT* Spirit, as the absolute Being, which is self-conscious- ness— or the self-conscious absolute Being, which is all truth and knows all reality as itself — is, to begin with, merely its notion and principle in contrast to the reality which it acquires in the process of its con- scious activity. And this conception is, as contrasted with the clear daylight of that explicit development, the darkness and night of its inner life; in contrast to the existence of its various moments as independent forms and shapes, this notion is the creative secret of its birth. This secret has its revelation within itself; for existence has its necessary place in this notion, because this notion is spirit knowing itself, and thus possesses in its own nature the moment of being con- sciousness and of presenting itself objectively. We have here the pure ego, which, in externalising itself, in seeing itself qua universal object, has the certainty of self; in other words, this object is, for the ego, the fusion of all thought and all reality. v When the first and immediate cleavage is made withinX self-knowing Absolute Spirit, its form assumes that character which belongs to immediate consciousness or to sense-certainty. It beholds itself in the form of / being; but not being in the sense of what is without * Parsee religion.
702 Phenomenology of Mind spirit, containing only the contingent qualities of sensa- tion— the kind of being that belongs solely to sense- certainty. Its being is filled with the content of spirit. It also includes within it the form which we found in the case of immediate self-consciousness, the form of lord and master,* with reference to the self -consciousness of spirit which retreats from its object.
This being, having as its content the notion of spirit, is, then, the mode of spirit in relation simply to itself — the form of having no special form at all. In virtue of this characteristic, this mode is the pure all-containing, all-suffusing Light of the East, which preserves itself in its formless indeterminate substanti- ality. Its counterpart, its otherness, is the equally simple negative — Darkness. The processes of its own self-abandonment, its creations in the unresisting element of its counterpart, are bursts of Light. At the same time in their ultimate simplicity they are its way of becoming something for itself, its return from its objective existence, streams of fire consuming its embodiment. The distinction, which it gives itself, no doubt thrives abundantly on the substance of existence, and grows into and assumes the diverse forms of nature. But the essential simplicity of its thought rambles and roves about inconstant and inconsistent, enlarges its bounds to measureless extent, and its beauty heightened to splendour is lost in its sublimity. f The content, which this state of mere being involves, its perceptive activity, is, therefore, an unreal by- play on this substance which merely rises, without descending into itself to become subject and secure * Term applied in e.g. Judaism and Mohammedanism, t Cp. Philos. ofRelig., W.W., XI, 403, 404, 411.
God as Light 703 firmly its distinctions through the self. Its deter- minations are merely attributes, which do not succeed in attaining independence; they remain merely names of the One, called by many names. This One is clothed with the manifold powers of existence and with the shapes of reality, as with a soulless, selfless ornament; they are merely messengers of its mighty power,* claiming no will of their own, visions of its glory, voices in its praise.
This revel of heaving lifef must, however, assume the character of distinctive self-existence, and give enduring subsistence to its fleeting forms. Immediate being, in which it places itself over against its own consciousness, is itself the negative destructive agency which dissolves its distinctions. It is thus in truth the Self; and spirit therefore passes on to know itself in the form of self. Pure Light scatters its simplicity as an infinity of separate forms, and presents itself as an offering to self-existence, that the individual may have sustainment in its substance.
PLANTS AND ANIMALS AS OBJECTS OF RELIGION* Self-conscious spirit, passing away from abstract, formless Essence and going into itself — or, in other words, having raised its immediacy to the level of Self — makes its simple unity assume the character of a manifold of self-existing entities, and is the Religion of spiritual Sense-Perception. Here spirit breaks up into an innumerable plurality of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits. This Pantheism, which, to begin with, consists in the quiescent stability of these spiritual atoms, passes into a process of active internal hostility. The innocence, which characterises the flower and plant religions, and which is merely the selfless idea of Self, gives way to the seriousness of struggling warring life, to the guilt of animal religions; the quiescence and impotence of merely contemplative individuality pass into the destructive violence of separate self-existence.
It is of no avail to have removed the lifelessness of abstraction from the things of perception, and to have raised them to the level of realities of spiritual perception: the animation of this spiritual kingdom has death in the heart of it, owing to the fact of deter- minateness and the inherent negativity, which invades and trenches upon their innocent and harmless indiffer- ence to one another. Owing to this determinateness * Primarily religions of India.
Plants and Animals as Objects of Religion 705 and negativity, the dispersion of passive plant-forms into manifold entities becomes a hostile process, in which the hatred stirred up by their independent self- existence rages and consumes.
The actual self-consciousness at work in this dis- persed and disintegrated spirit, takes the form of a multitude of individualised mutually-antipathetic folk- spirits, who fight and hate each other to the death, and consciously accept certain specific forms of animals as their essential reality, their god *: for they are nothing else than spirits of animals, their animal life separate and cut off from one another, and with no universality consciously present in them.