§ 62. The lordship over the world possessed by believers, which is the aim of reconciliation with God in the Christian sense, has its limits. For in so far as we are individually endowed with a corporeal nature, we are parts of the world and dependent on it as a system. But even “when the earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved,” the Christian hope of the survival of the spiritual life in an appropriate body is an evidence of what is an indispensable assumption, that as individual members of the race of spiritual beings we can never escape from the environment of the world (p. 278). Lordship over the world, therefore, in the empirical sense, can be attributed neither to the individual nor to the human race as moulded by Christianity. No one can alter the mechanical conditions of sensible existence as such, no one can create new organic species; each, to secure his preservation within the system of the phenomenal world, must submit to the laws of mechanism and of organisms, laws which are valid once for all. Only within a limited range, and in harmony with the known laws of nature, can man use nature’s forces, or artificially alter the given form of matter. Within this province the inventive faculty of the human mind and the exertions of conjoint labour may result in an extended range of power, the importance of which is not decreased by the fact that certain species of animals also exhibit a capacity for work of an artificial character and for division of labour. The manifoldness of his work, the discovery of ever new objects and new methods, still constitutes the specific difference between man’s spiritual lordship over nature, and the industrial instincts of social animals. The individual’s field of labour, however, is limited; just as in the application of his powers to it he has to depend on all the others performing their special part, and thus each supporting the other. But even if the individual were to claim for himself this whole system of dominion over the world, because he participates in it through his labour, yet such a view is utterly inadequate to counterbalance the impressions received from the multitude of natural forces which man cannot tame, and the multitude of hindrances which he has to tolerate from those on whose support he is reckoning. However many portions of the world, therefore, man conquers by labour, no one need hope to conquer the whole in this way, even though in moments of elevated feeling he identifies himself with the advancing forces of human civilisation. But man does make a comparison between himself and the whole system of nature when, in his spiritual feeling of self, he apprehends himself as a being who stands near to the supramundane God, and claims to live in despite of the experience of death. This religious estimate of self was not called into existence for the first time by Christianity; in every higher religion it breaks forth as an aspiration, or as a question addressed to the secret of existence. Christianity has only unfolded that view of the world in which this aspiration finds its confirmation, and the question about eternal life is answered.
The final end of the Kingdom of God posits a system of united human action, the motive of which transcends the natural conditions of spiritual existence. Universal love to man, by which distinctions of nationality, position, and sex are reduced to subordinate ethical motives, is a principle which transcends the world, so far as by the world is understood the system of divided and naturally-conditioned existence. But as the motive of universal love to man operates likewise in connection with those who belong to the same country, or vocation, or family, not merely are all these special provinces of moral action combined in a single whole, but the individual, through his corresponding formation of a good character, becomes conscious that he is a whole to whom the special qualities of his family, his vocation and position, as well as of his nationality, are subservient as means. This estimate of self, however, does not rest exclusively upon this moral activity. On the contrary, if it merely related to this, it would be liable to doubt. For the formation of a good character is not only exposed to hindrances which have their roots in an actually present wrong relation between the powers of the will and the tasks appointed it; it is likewise liable to so many disappointments in its expectation of results from moral action, that they outweigh the conviction that the self is a whole in its own order. But these experiences of suffering are counterbalanced by the directly religious view of the world—the certainty, in other words, that the government and care of God, of which we are the objects, has for its aim our attainment of the supramundane goal of life. By this thought, that for those who love God and are loved by Him all things must work for good, the sense of all natural and social evils is changed into the tone of feeling in which we exercise lordship over these experiences. So long as the view is held that certain restrictions of our freedom are evils unconditionally, our dependence on natural and partial causes, that is, our dependence on the world, is admitted. But when we change our feeling as to the value of evils, not merely do we attain freedom from the particular things in which these evils take their rise, but freedom from the world as such. For not only do particular evils represent just those aspects in which the whole world is a restriction on our freedom, but the counterbalancing thought, that we are the objects of Divine care, implies that each of us, as a spiritual whole, has in God’s sight a higher value than the whole world of nature. This is the reason why a man, when by patient endurance of suffering he rules himself, likewise rules the whole world, which is the correlative of the suffering and unhappy Ego.