begin with, and at this stage it is something indefinite, an undefined power or force which cannot as yet be filled up. But since that indefiniteness is not as yet Spirit in its true character, the determinations in Spirit in this form are contingent, they become true only when it is true Spirit, which is consciousness, and which posits them.
The first determination, the beginning of the religion of nature, therefore, is that Spirit is found in an immediate, particular mode of existence.
The religion of nature from the first contains in it the spiritual moment or element, and therefore essentially involves the thought that what is spiritual is for man what is highest. This at once excludes the idea that the religion of nature consists in worshipping natural objects as God; that, indeed, plays a part here, but it is a subordinate part. Yet in the very worst religion the Spiritual is to man as man higher than the Natural: the sun is not higher for him than what is spiritual.
The religion of nature, in this its commencement as immediate religion, means that the Spiritual, a man, even in the natural mode of existence, ranks as what is highest. That religion has not the merely external, physically-natural element as its object, but the spiritually-natural, a definite man as this actual present man. This is not the Idea of man, the Adam Kadmon, the original man, the Son of God—these are more developed conceptions, which are present only through thought and for thought; and therefore it is not the conception of man in his universal essentiality, but of this definite actual natural man; it is the religion of the Spiritual, but in its condition of externality, naturalness, immediacy. We have an interest in getting acquainted with the religion of nature for this reason also, in order that we may even in it bring the truth before consciousness that God has at all times been to man something belonging to the Present, and in order that we may abandon the conception of God as an abstract Being beyond the present.
