earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority
of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, freedom from pain.
The world-process is the incarnation, the suffering, and the redemption
of the absolute; the moral task of man is not personal renunciation and
cowardly retirement, but to make the purposes of the Unconscious his own,
with complete resignation to life and its sufferings to labor energetically
in the world-process, and, by the vigorous promotion of consciousness, to
hasten the fulfillment of the redemptive purpose; the condition of morality
is insight into the fruitlessness of all striving after pleasure and into
the essential unity of all individual beings with one another and with the
universal spirit, which exists in the individuals, but at the same time
subsists above them. "To know one's self as of divine nature, this does
away with all divergence between selfwill and universal will, with all
estrangement between man and God, with all undivine, that is, merely
natural, conduct."

[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, _Ueber die Lust als hoechsten Werthmassstab_
(in the _Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie_, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O.
Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. ii. p. 249 _seq_.]

Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the
metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human
individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its
traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of
religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The
religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the
speculative Protestantism of the present, is _concrete monism_ (the divine
unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of
earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract
monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-)
theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline
into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by--Egyptian and
Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German--naturalism, and then by
supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of
the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its
ethics.) The _Religion of Spirit_ divides into three parts. The psychology
of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect,
fai