established itself: the determinations of Tâo remain complete abstractions, and life, consciousness, the spiritual element is not found, so to speak, in Tâo itself, but still belongs absolutely and entirely to man in his immediate character.
To us God is the Universal, but determined within Himself; God is Spirit; His existence is spirituality. Here the actuality, the living form of Tâo, is still the actual immediate consciousness. Though it is indeed dead, as represented by Lâo-tsze, it yet transforms itself into other shapes, and is living and actually present in its priests.
Like T‘ien, this One is the governing power, but is only an abstract basis, the Emperor being the actual embodiment of this basis, and, strictly speaking, the real governing power, and the same is the case with the idea of Reason. Reason is, in like manner, the abstract foundation, which only has its actuality in existing human beings.
(c.) Worship or Cultus.—Worship really represents the whole existence of the religion of Measure, the power of Substance not having as yet taken on the form of a stable objectivity, and even the realm of idea or popular conception, so far as it has developed itself in that of the Shăn, is in subjection to the power of the Emperor, who is himself merely the actual embodiment of the Substantial.
When, accordingly, we begin to inquire into worship in the stricter sense, all that is left for us to do is to examine the relation of the universal determinateness of this religion to inner life and to self-consciousness.
The Universal being only the abstract foundation, man remains in it without having a strictly immanent, realised, or concrete inner character; he has no firm hold or stability within himself. Not until freedom, not until rationality comes in does he possess this, for then he is the consciousness of being free, and this freedom develops until it appears as reason.
