Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Revealed Religion 783 mind in this way : it happened once as an event, with no necessity about it, that he lost the form of harmonious unity with himself by plucking the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was driven from the state of conscious innocence, from Paradise, from the garden with all its creatures, and from nature offering its bounties without man's toil.

Since this self-centredness on the part of the existent consciousness directly gives rise to disharmony with itself, Evil appears as the first actual expression of the self-centred consciousness. And because the thoughts of good and evil are utterly opposed, and this opposition is not yet broken down, this consciousness is essentially and merely evil.

At the same time, however, owing to just this very opposition, there is present also the good consciousness opposing the one that is evil, and again their relation to each other.

In so far as immediate existence turns round into thought, and self-absorption, selfcentredness, is just thought, while again the transition to otherness on the part of Being is thereby more precisely determined, — the fact of becoming evil can be removed .further backwards away out of the actually existing world and transferred to the very earhest realm of thought.

It may thus be said that it was the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] who, by becoming self-centred, fell, but that in his place another was at once created.

Such a form of expression as " fallen," belonging merely to figurative thought, and not to the notion, just hke the term " Son," once more transmutes and lowers the moments of the notion to the level of imaginative thought, or, in other words, drags pictures and presentations into the realm of thought.

784 Phenomenology of Mind In the same way, it is matter of indifference to coordinate a multiplicity of other angehe shapes and forms with the simple thought of otherness in the Being of the Eternal, and transfer to them that condition of selfcentredness.

This co-ordination must, all the same, win approval, for the reason that, through it, this moment of otherness does express diversity, as it should do : not indeed as plurahty in general, but as determinate diversity, so that one part is the Son, that which is simple and knows itself to be ultimate Being, while the other part involves the abandonment, the emptying, of self-existence, and merely hves to praise that Being.

To this part may then also be assigned the resumption once again of the self-existence relinquished, and that " self-centredness " characteristic of evil. In so far as this condition of otherness falls into two parts.

Spirit might, as regards its moments, be more exactly expressed numerically as a Quaternity, a four in one, or (because the multiphcity breaks up itself again into two parts, viz. one part which has remained good, the other which has become evil), might be expressed as a Quinity.

Counting the moments, however, can be regarded as altogether useless, since, for one thing, what is distinguished is itself just as truly one and single — viz. the thought of distinction which is only one thought — as the thought is this element distinguished, the second over against the first.

For another thing it is useless to count, because the thought which grasps the many in one has to be dissolved out of its universahty and must be distinguished into more than three or four distinct components. This universahty appears, in contrast to the absolute determinateness of the abstract

Revealed Religion 785 unit — the principle of number — as indeterminateness in relation to number as such ; so that we can only speak in this connexion of numbers in general, i.e. not of a specific number of distinctions. Hence, in general, it is here quite superfluous to think of number and counting, just as, in other connexions, the bare difference of magnitude and multitude says nothing at all and falls outside conceptual thought.

Good and Evil were the specific distinctions of thought which we found. Since their opposition is not yet broken down, and they are represented as essential reahties of thought, each of them independent by itself, man is the self with no essential reahty of his own and the mere ground which keeps them together, and on which they exist and war with one another.

But these universal powers of good and evil belong all the same to the self, or the self is their actuahsing principle. From this point of view it thus comes about that, as evil is nothing else than the natural existence of spirit becoming self-absorbed and self-centred, conversely, good enters into actual reahty and appears as an objectively existing self-consciousness.

The idea of the transition of the Divine Being into otherness is in general merely indicated and hinted at when Spirit is interpreted in terms of pure thought ; for figurative thinking this idea here comes nearer its reahsation : the reahsation is taken to consist in the Divine Being " humbhng '' Itself, and renouncing its abstract nature and unreality.

The other aspect, that of evil, is taken by imagination as an event extraneous and ahen to the Divine Being : to grasp evil in the Divine Being as the wrath of God — that is the supreme effort, the severest strain, of which figurative thought, wresthng with its own Hmita- VOL. II.— 2 B