Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Natural Religion [The arrangement of the analysis of Religion and the divisions into the various subsections are, as indicated in the jDreceding 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-consciousness ; 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 experience— Consciousness, Thus, in Natural Religion, we have Religion at the level of Sense-certainty — " Light " : Religion at the level of Perception— " 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 befoi'e 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 principles 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.]

p. 697

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 {Fürsichsein). 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 rehgion ; for its essential unspecified principle, its abstract notion, has akeady come to light. The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness, however, falls at the same time within this notion. The form or shape of rehgion 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 rehgion 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 rehgion is distinguished 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. 69S

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 rehgion, and indeed of every particular rehgion, 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 rehgion.

For while spirit hves 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, hke 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 selfconsciousness, 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 ahen, external, to its knowledge, by the self having produced it, and so viewing the determination of the object as its own determination, and hence seeing itself in that object.

By this operation, the lower determination [that of being something " presented "] has at once vanished ; for doing anything is a oo^ negative process which is carried through at the expense of something else. So far as that lower determination