Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality, which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute--for under this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three phases--each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the next--Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion, and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the _Phenomenology_, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed; and in the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia_ what is subsequently called Art is entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3] it is said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.' It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two phases, Religion and Philosophy.
The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its very objectivity,--God and nothing but God,--and the "explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with God alone.'
Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality, lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more and more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,--which must have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.