Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/329

The misunderstanding which prevails with regard to Pantheism ought not to be allowed to pass without being mentioned and corrected; and after that we shall have to consider in this connection the place of the principle in the higher totality, in the true Idea of God. Since at a previous stage the consideration of the religious form taken by the principle was dispensed with, we may, by way of bringing a picture of it before the mind, take the Hindu religion as representing Pantheism in its most developed form. With this development there is bound up at the same time the fact that the absolute Substance, the sole and only One, is represented in the form of thought as distinguished from the accidental world, as existing. Religion in itself essentially involves the relation of Man to God, and still less when it appears in the form of Pantheism does it leave the one Essence in that condition of objectivity in which metaphysic imagines it has left it as an object while preserving its special character. We have to call attention first of all to the remarkable character of this attempt to bring Substance under the conditions of subjectivity. Self-conscious thought does not only make that abstraction of Substance, but is the very act of abstraction itself. It is just that simple unity as existing for itself which is called Substance. This thought is thus conceived of as the force which creates and preserves the world, and which also alters and changes its existence as this appears in particular forms. This thought is termed Brahma. It exists as the natural self-consciousness of the Brahmans, and as the self-consciousness of others who put under restraint and kill their consciousness in its manifold forms, their sensations, their material and spiritual interests, and all the active life connected with them, and reduce it to the perfect simplicity and emptiness of that substantial unity. Thus this thought, this abstraction of men in themselves, is held to be the force of the world. The universal force takes particular forms in gods, who are nevertheless