________________
A Modern Understanding of...
where. An ideal everywhere is the final point to be arrived at in the line of progress one is continuously achieving Here, in our present case, the line of progress is that of dissociation from whatever is objective - better, from whatever is simply. tically representable as construction from the soint of vagy of subjectivity Hence its maximum is the ideally perfect blemishless subject, called God, from whose point of view even the individuality of the individual subject is a symbolic of creative representation. To whatever extent, then, in reilgion the individual subject negates himself to be in co. mmunion with this over-personal subject, and the importa .t point to note is that all individual subjects agree that one and the same over-personal ideal subject is the ideal for them all to be in communion with The ideal for different people in the same attitude cannot differ from individual to individual, quite in the same way as the same physical world for common men does not The ideal everywhere is a demanded existence, not what is inimediately there in its actuality. It is a regulative principle, and as such it is felt as what ought to be, what has to be realized, either by way of making it actual through will or by way of experiencing oneself as essentially constituted by it, and in the latter case the experience in question is either one of identity--partial or completo-or some very close relation.
Two other distinctive features of religion may here ba noted. The first is that in religion proper as commumion the individual, before he comes to be in communion with God, has already, through proper discipline, experienced himself as a centre of pure subjectivity he has already freed himself from entanglement with his mind-body compler and a fartipy, through that, from the world of physical things In other words, one who is in religious attitude proper is already at a 6 According to some transcendentalists, representable as created by
(transcendental) will 7 'Subject here means centre of pure consciousness. God is the absolute
final centre of consciousness.
