one-sided, is taken as merely implicit or potential; and so it appears in this one-sided shape where subjectivity itself is one-sided; it has the characteristic of one of two only, is only infinite form, pure self-consciousness, the pure knowledge of itself, it is potentially without content, because religion as such is conceived of only in its potential character, and is not the religion which is objective to itself, but is only religion in a shape which is not yet real, which has not yet made itself objective or given itself a content. What has no objectivity has no content.
It is one of the rights of truth that knowledge should have in religion the absolute content. Here, however, what we have is not the content in its true form, but only in a stunted form. Thus there must be a content. The content in the present case has, as we have seen, the character of something contingent, finite, empirical, and consequently we have a state of things similar to what existed in Roman times. The times of the Roman Emperors resembled ours in many points. The subject as it actually is, is conceived of as infinite; but as abstract, it changes into the direct opposite, and is merely finite and limited. Its freedom consequently is only of the sort which admits the existence of something beyond the present, an aspiration, a freedom which denies the existence of a distinction in consciousness, and consequently casts aside the essential moment of Spirit, and is thus unspiritual subjectivity, subjectivity without thought.
Religion is the knowledge which Spirit has of itself as Spirit; when it takes the form of pure knowledge it does not know itself as Spirit, and is consequently not substantial but subjective knowledge. The fact, however, that it is nothing more than this, and is therefore limited knowledge, is not apparent to subjectivity in its own form, i.e., in the form or shape of knowledge, but rather it is its immediate potentiality which it finds, to begin
