the object be reduced to this simple, specific form of thought, it is then idea, which needs nothing but the word for its manifestation—this simple utterance or outward expression which remains within itself. The manifold content which idea simplifies may be derived from the inner life, from freedom, and then we have ideas of right, of morality, of wickedness. Or it may be derived from external phenomena, too, as, for instance, we may have ideas of battles, or of wars in general.
Religion, when lifted up into the form of idea, directly involves a polemical element. The content is not grasped in sensuous perception, not in a pictorial and immediate manner, but mediately, after the fashion of Abstraction. What is sensuous and pictorial is lifted up into the Universal, and with the elevation into this sphere there is necessarily linked a negative attitude towards what is pictorial. But this negative attitude does not merely concern the form (in which case the distinction between sense-perception and idea would lie in that only), but it also touches the content. The Idea (Idee) and the mode of presentation are so closely related for sense-perception, that the two appear as One, and pictorial art implies that the Idea is essentially linked with it, and could not be severed from it. On the contrary, general idea (Vorstellung) proceeds on the supposition that the absolute, really true Idea cannot be grasped by means of a picture, and that the pictorial mode is a limitation of the content; it therefore does away with that unity of perception, rejects the unity of the picture and its meaning, and brings this meaning into prominence for itself.
Finally, then, religious idea or general conception, is to be understood as embodying truth, objective content, and is thus meant to be antagonistic not only to the pictorial mode of representing truth, but also to other modes of subjectivity. Its content is that which has validity in and for itself, which remains substantially fixed as against individual suppositions and opinions, and
