Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

God as Light 703 firmly its distinctions through the self. Its determinations 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 reahty, 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 Imow itself in the form of self. Pure Light scatters its simphcity as an infinity of separate forms, and presents itself as an offering to self-existence, that the individual may have sustainment in its substance. * Angels. t Cp. Ency., § 389.

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 E-eligion of spiritual Sense-Perception. Here spirit breaks up into an innumerable plurahty 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 strugghng warring life, to the guilt of animal religions ; the quiescence and impotence of merely contemplative individuahty pass into the destructive violence of separate self-existence.

It is of no avail to have removed the hfelessness of abstraction from the things of perception, and to have raised them to the level of reahties of spiritual perception : the animation of this spiritual kingdom has death in the heart of it, owing to the fact of determinateness and the inherent negativity, which invades and trenches upon their innocent and harmless indifference to one another. Owing to this determinateness * Primarily religions of India. 704

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 selfexistence rages and consumes.

The actual self-consciousness at work in this dispersed and disintegrated spirit, takes the form of a multitude of individuahsed mutually-antipathetic folkspirits, 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 hfe separate and cut ofi from one another, and with no universahty consciously present in them.

The characteristic of purely negative independent self-existence, however, consumes itself in this active hatred towards one another ; and through this process, involved in its very principle, spirit enters into another shape. Independent self-existence cancelled and abohshed is the form of the object, a form which is produced by the self, or rather is the self produced, the self-consuming self, i.e. the self that becomes a " thing.

The agent at work, therefore, retains the upper hand over these animal spirits merely tearing each other to pieces ; and his action is not merely negative, but composed and creative. The consciousness of spirit is, thus, now the process which is above and beyond the immediate inherent [universal] nature, as well as transcends the abstract self-existence in isolation.

Since the imphcit inherent nature is relegated, through opposition, to the level of a specific character, it is no longer the proper form of Absolute Spirit, but a reahty which its consciousness * Sacred animals in Indian religion, VOL. II.— U