There has been an inclination on the part of some (as, for example, in the Kantian philosophy) to consider prayer too as magic, because man seeks to make it effectual, not through mediation, but by starting direct from Spirit. The distinction here, however, is that man appeals to an absolute will, for which even the individual or unit is an object of care, and which can either grant the prayer or not, and which in so acting is determined by general purposes of good. Magic, however, in the general sense, simply amounts to this,—that man has the mastery as he is in his natural state, as possessed of passions and desires.
Such is the general character of this primal and wholly immediate standpoint, namely, that the human consciousness, any definite human being, is recognised as the ruling power over nature in virtue of his own will. The natural has, however, by no means that wide range which it has in our idea of it. For here the greater part of nature still remains indifferent to man, or is just as he is accustomed to see it. Everything is stable. Earthquakes, thunderstorms, floods, animals, which threaten him with death, enemies, and the like, are another matter. To defend himself against these recourse is had to magic.
Such is the oldest mode of religion, the wildest, most barbarous form. It follows from what has been said that God is necessarily of a spiritual nature. This is His fundamental determination. Spiritual existence, in so far as it is an object for self-consciousness, is already a further advance, a differentiation of spirituality as that which is universal and as definite individual empirical self-consciousness; it is already a breaking off of the universal self-consciousness from the empirical spirituality of self-consciousness. At the beginning this does not yet exist.
The religion of nature as that of magic, begins from unfree freedom, so that the single or individual self-con-
