Great Throughts Treasury

"We can define man as the being that is aware of the world as a whole. Man is therefore a metaphysical or a religious being. He is religious not accidently but essentially."

"Early theological writings outlooks are extremes, and the Greek spirit lies between them. Our extreme is the outlook of reason which sets a soul something negative in the sight of every intellect over against the intellect's object, the dead body."

"The creation of the critical philosophy signifies the first building of a philosophy out of the pure spirit of Protestant Christianity."

"This centrifugal force of the soul explains why the soul must always be provided with the means of estranging itself from its natural condition and essence, and why in particular the young mind must be led into a remote and foreign world. Now, the screen best suited to perform this task of estrangement for the sake of education is the world and language of the ancients. This world separates us from ourselves, but at the same time it grants us the cardinal means of returning to ourselves : we reconcile ourselves with it and thereby find ourselves again in it, but the self which we then find is the one which accords with the tone and universal essence of mind. "

"True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another's eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other. This genuine love excludes all oppositions. It is not the under- standing, whose relations always leave the manifold of related terms as a manifold and whose unity is always a unity of opposites [left as opposites]. It is not reason either, because reason sharply opposes its determining power to what is determined. Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feel- ing, yet not a single feeling [among other single feelings]."

"In the Jewish writings we see past events, individual situations, and a human spirit that has passed away; in their acts of worship we see the doing of what has been commanded, and the spirit, purpose, and rationale of what is done exist for us no longer and no longer have any truth. For the Jews all this still had truth and spirit, but only their truth and their spirit; they did not let it become objective. The spirit they ascribe to passages in the Prophets and other Jewish books consists neither (so far as the Prophets are concerned) in discovering the Prophets' intention to foretell real events nor (so far as the readers are concerned) in applying the prophecies to reality. There is an uncertain formless hovering between reality and spirit. On the one hand, in considering reality, only the spirit is considered; on the other, reality as such is present there, but not fixed."

"The wider this whole [i.e., either the Jewish people or Christendom] extends, the more an equality of rights is transposed into an equality of dependence (as happens when the believer in comprises in his whole the entire human race), the less is dominion over objects granted to any one individual, and the less of the ruling Being's favor does he enjoy. Hence each individual loses more and more of his worth, his pretensions, and his independence. This must happen, because his worth was his share in dominion [over objects] ; for a man without the pride of being the center of things the end of his collective whole is supreme, and being, like all other individuals, so small a part of that, he despises himself. [Here there is no living union between the individual and his world; the object, severed from the subject, is dead; and the only love possible is a sort of relationship between the living subject and the dead objects by which he is surrounded.] Since something dead here forms one term of the love relationship, love is girt by matter alone, and this matter is quite indifferent to it. Love's essence at this level, then, is that the individual in his innermost nature is something opposed [to objectivity]; he is an independent unit for whom everything else is a world external to him. That w r orld is as eternal as he is, and, while the objects by which he is confronted change, they are never absent; they are there, and his God is there, as surely as he is here; this is the ground of his tranquillity in face of loss and his sure confidence that his loss will be compensated, because compensation here is possible. 1 This attitude makes matter something absolute in man's eyes; but, of course, if he never existed, then nothing would exist for him, and what necessity was there for his existence? 2 That he might exist is intelligible enough, because beyond that collection of restricted experiences which make up his consciousness there is nothing whatever; the eternal and self-complete unification [with the object] is lacking."

"Love is a single feeling is only a part and not the whole of life; the life present in a single feeling dissolves its barriers and drives on till it disperses itself in the manifold of feelings with a view to finding itself in the entirety of this manifold. This whole life is not contained in love in the same way as it is in this sum of many particular and isolated feelings; in love, life is present as a duplicate of itself and as a single and unified self. Here life has run through the circle of development from an immature to a completely mature unity : when the unity was immature, there still stood over against it the world and the possibility of a cleavage between itself and the world; as development proceeded, reflection produced more and more oppositions (unified by satisfied impulses) until it set the whole of man's life in opposition [to objectivity]; finally, love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man's opposite of all foreign character, and discovers life itself without any further defect. In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object]. Since love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence in the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole. To say that the lovers have an independence and a living principle peculiar to each of themselves means only that they may die [and may be separated by death] . "

"A pure heart is not ashamed of love; but it is ashamed if its love is incomplete; it upbraids itself if there is some hostile power which hinders love's culmination. Shame enters only through the recollection of the body, through the presence of an [exclusive] personality or the sensing of an [exclusive] individuality. It is not a fear for what is mortal, for what is merely one's own, but rather a fear of it, a fear which vanishes as the separable element in the lover is diminished by his love. Love is stronger than fear."

"The concept of individuality includes opposition to infinite variety and also inner association with it. A human being is an individual life in so far as he is to be distinguished from all the elements and from the infinity of individual beings outside himself. But he is only an individual life in so far as he is at one with all the elements, with the infinity of lives outside himself. He exists only inasmuch as the totality of life is divided into parts, he himself being one part and all the rest the other part; and again he exists only inasmuch as he is no part at all and inasmuch as nothing is separated from him. If we presuppose life undivided as fixed, then we can regard living beings as expressions or manifestations of that life. Precisely because these manifestations are posited, the infinite multiplicity of living beings is posited simultaneously, but reflection then crystallizes this multiplicity into stable, subsistent, and fixed points, i.e., into individuals. If on the contrary we presuppose individual lives, namely, ourselves, as the spectators, then that life which is posited outside our own restricted spheres is an infinite life with an infinite variety, infinite oppositions, infinite relations; as a multiplicity, it is an infinite multiplicity of organizations or individuals, and as a unity it is one unique organized whole, divided and unified in itself Nature. Nature is a positing of life, for reflection has applied to life its concepts of relation and separation, of the self-subsistent particular (something restricted) and the unifying universal (something unrestricted), and by positing these has turned life into nature."

"This self-elevation of man, not from the finite to the infinite (for these terms are only products of mere reflection, and as such their separation is absolute), but from finite life to infinite life, is religion. We may call infinite life a spirit in contrast with the abstract multiplicity, for spirit is the living unity of the manifold if it is contrasted with the manifold as spirit's configuration and not as a mere dead multiplicity; contrasted with the latter, spirit would be nothing but a bare unity which is called law and is something purely conceptual and not a living being. The spirit is an animating law in union with the manifold which is then itself animated."

"Now because life, as an infinity of living beings or as an infinity of figures, is thus, as nature, an infinitely finite, an unrestricted restrictedness, and because this union and this separation of the finite and the infinite are within nature, nature is not itself life but is only a life crystallized by reflection, even though it be treated by reflection in the worthiest manner. 3 Therefore life in thinking and in contemplating nature still senses (or however else one may describe the mode of apprehension involved) this contradiction, this one opposition which still exists between itself and the infinite life; or, in other words, reason still recognizes the one-sidedness of this mode of treating life and of this mode of positing [concepts] . Out of the mortal and perishable figure, out of what is self-opposed and self-antagonistic, this thinking life raises that living being, which would be free from transience; raises a relation between the multiplex elements which is not dead or killing, a relation which is not a [bare] unity, a conceptual abstraction, but is all-living and all-powerful infinite life; and this life it calls God. In this process it is no longer [merely] thinking or contemplating, because its object does not carry in itself anything reflected, anything dead."