realising their pervading unity. The true home of religion, on the contrary, is absolute consciousness, and this implies that God is Himself all content, all truth and reality. An object such as this cannot be adequately expressed by mere Reflection.
If we have hitherto made use of the expression “consciousness,” it will be understood that this only expresses the aspect of the outward manifestation of Spirit, the essential relation of knowledge and its object. “I” am thus determined as relation, but it is the essential nature of Spirit not to be merely in relation; finitude belongs to consciousness, and the object remains in consciousness as something independent. Spirit is not merely an act of knowledge in which the existence of the object is separate from the process of knowing it, it does not merely exist as something related, it is not merely the form of consciousness. We abstract from this relation and speak of Spirit, and consciousness then comes to be included as a moment in the being of Spirit; and this at once implies an affirmative relation of the spirit to absolute Spirit. It is only when we have arrived at this identity, where knowledge posits itself for itself in its object, that we are in presence of Spirit, Reason, which exists objectively for itself. Religion is therefore a relation of the spirit to absolute Spirit: thus only is Spirit as that which knows, also that which is known. This is not merely an attitude of the spirit towards absolute Spirit, but absolute Spirit itself is that which is the self-relating element, which brings itself into relation with that which we posited on the other side as the element of difference. Thus when we rise higher, religion is the Idea of the Spirit which relates itself to its own self—it is the self-consciousness of absolute Spirit. Of this, its consciousness which was before defined as relation, forms a part. Consciousness, as such, is finite consciousness, it is the knowledge of something other than the Ego. Religion, too, is consciousness, and consequently has finite consciousness as
