If abstraction rises to as great an eievation as possible, it
arrives at two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and
to recognise its limits. It distinguishes in man something that
continues, and something that changes in cessantly. That which
continues it names his person; that which changes his position, his
condition.
The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which
we represent as one and the same thing in the neces sary being,
are eternally distinct in the finite being. Not withstanding
all continuance in the person, the condition changes; in spite of
all change of condition, the person remains. We pass from rest to
activity, from emotion to indifference, from assent to contradiction,
but we are always we ourselves, and what immediately springs from
ourselves remains. It is only in the absolute subject that all his
determinations continue with his personality. All that Divinity is,
it is because it is so; consequently it is eternally what
it is, because it is eternal.
As the person and the condition are distinct in man, be cause he is
a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor
the person on the condition. Admitting the second case, the person
would have to change; and in the former case, the condition would
have to continue. Thus in either supposition either the personality
or the quality of a finite being would necessarily cease. It is not
because we think, feel, and will, that we are; it is not because we
are that we think, feel, and will. We are because we are. We feel,
think, and will, because there is out of us something that is not
ourselves.
Consequently the person must have its principle of exist ence in
itself because the permanent cannot be derived from the changeable,
and thus we should be at once in possession of the idea of the
absolute being, founded on itself; that is to say, of the idea of
freedom. The condition must have a foundation, and as it is not
through the person, and is not therefore absolute, it must be a
sequence and a result; and thus, in the second place, we should have
arrived at the condition of every dependent being, of everything in
the process of becoming something else: that is, of the idea of
time. "Time is the necessary condition of all processes, of becoming
(werden);" this is an indentical proposition, for it says nothing
but this: "That something may follow, there must be a succession."
The person which manifests itself in the eternally continuing Ego,
or I myself, and only in him, cannot become something or begin in
time, because it is much rather time that must begin with him,
because the permanent must serve as basis to the changeable. That
change may take place, something must change; this something cannot
therefore be the change itself. When we say the flower opens and
fades, we make of this flower a permanent being in the midst of this
transformation; we lend it, in some sort, a personality, in which
these two conditions are manifested. It cannot be objected that man
is born, and becomes something; for man is not only a person simply,
but he is a person finding himself in a determinate condition. Now
our determinate state of condition springs up in time, and it is
thus that man, as a phenomenon or appearance, must have a beginning,
though in him pure intelligence is eternal. Without time, that is,
without a becoming, he would not be a determinate being; his
personality would exist virtually, no doubt, but not in action. It
is not by the succession of its perceptions that the immutable Ego
or person manifests himself to himself.
Thus, therefore, the matter of activity, or reality, that the
supreme intelligence draws from its own being, must be received by
man; and he does, in fact, receive it, through the medium of
perception, as something which is outside him in space, and which
changes in him in time. This matter which changes in him is always
accompanied by the Ego, the personality, that never changes; and the
rule prescribed for man by his rational nature is to remain
immutably himself in the midst of change, to refer all perceptions
to experience, that is, to the unity of knowledge, and to make of
each of its manifestations of its modes in time the law of all time.
The matter only exists in as far as it changes; he, his personality,
only exists in as far as he does not change. Consequently,
represented in his perfection, man would be the permanent unity,
which remains always the same, among the waves of change.
Now, although an infinite being, a divinity could not become (or be
subject to time), still a tendency ought to be named divine which
has for its infinite end the most characteristic attribute of the
divinity; the absolute manifestation of power--the reality of all
the possible--and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the
necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears
within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity.
The way to divinity--if the word "way" can be applied to what never
leads to its end-is open to him in every direction.
Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his
personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible
infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition
nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power.
Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity
of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it,
it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union
between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts
under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if
by this word we point out only the formless contents of time.
Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness that makes his strength
pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that
makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world,
he must give form to matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he
must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him. He gives
matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to
change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego.
He gives a form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining
permanence in change, and by placing the diversity of the world
under the unity of the Ego.
Now from this source issue for man two opposite exigencies, the two
fundamental laws of sensuous-rational nature. The first has for its
object absolute reality; it must make a world of what is only form,
manifest all that in it is only a force. The second law has for its
object absolute formality; it must destroy in him all that is only
world, and carry out harmony in all changes. In other terms, he must
manifest all that is internal, and give form to all that is
external. Considered in its most lofty accomplishment, this twofold
labour brings us back to the idea of humanity which was my starting-
point.