This determinateness first referred to, looked at from the point of view of its content, is in its formal aspect this, namely, that the natural, the finite, are simply witnesses to Spirit, are simply subservient to its manifestation. Here we have the religion within which rational Spirit is the content.
The next step in advance, therefore, is that the free form of subjectivity, the consciousness of the Divine, comes into view in an unalloyed and independent form, in the character of free subjectivity, so far as this can be in the first form of spirituality which has become free. That this last, however, is known exclusively for itself, or, in other words, that the Divine is determined on its own account as subjectivity, represents a purifying from the natural, which has been already referred to in the previous discussion. The subject is exclusive; it is the principle of infinite negativity, and since as regards its content it is universal, it leaves nothing existing independently beside it which is devoid of Spirit, or is merely natural; and in like manner nothing which is merely substantial, essentially devoid of form. Subjectivity is infinite Form; and as such, it no more leaves to Form which is not free, that is to say external naturalness, any independent existence along side of it, than it does to empty, pure, undetermined substantiality. The fundamental determination is that God becomes known as freely determining Himself within Himself; still formally, it is true, but yet already freely within Himself. We are able to recognise this emergence of free subjectivity in religions and in the peoples to which such religions belong, principally by observing whether among such peoples universal laws, laws of freedom, justice, and morality, constitute fundamental determinations and have the predominance. God conceived of as subject is conceived of as spontaneously determining himself, i.e., His self-determinations are the laws of freedom; they are the determinations of self-determination, and are of such
