Just as the content of the Eastern religions, God, the essentially existent, the eternal, is comprehended somewhat in the light of universal, we find the relative positions of individuals to Him to be the same. In the Eastern religions the first condition is that only the one substance shall, as such, be the true, and that the individual neither can have within himself, nor can he attain to any value in as far as he maintains himself as against the being in and for itself. He can have true value only through an identification with this substance in which he ceases to exist as subject and disappears into unconsciousness. In the Greek and Christian Religion, on the other hand, the subject knows himself to be free and must be maintained as such; and because the individual in this way makes himself independent, it is undoubtedly much more difficult for Thought to free itself from this individuality and to constitute itself in independence. The higher point of view implicitly contained in the Greek individual freedom, this happier, larger life, makes more difficult the work of Thought, which is to give due value to the universal. In the East, on the contrary, the substantial in Religion is certainly on its own view the principal matter, the essential—and with it lawlessness, the absence of individual consciousness is immediately connected—and this substance is undoubtedly a philosophic idea. The negation of the finite is also present, but in such a manner that the individual only reaches to its freedom in this unity with the substantial. In as far as in the Eastern mind, reflection, consciousness come through thought to distinction and to the determination of principles, there exist such categories and such definite ideas not in unity with the substantial. The destruction of all that is particular either is an illimitable, the exaltitude of the East, or, in so far as that which is posited and determined for itself is known, it is a dry, dead understanding, which cannot take up the speculative Notion into itself. To that which is true, this finite can exist only as immersed in substance; if kept apart from this it remains dead and arid. We thus find only dry understanding amongst the Easterns, a mere enumeration of determinations, a logic like the Wolffian of old. It is the same as in their worship, which is complete immersion in devotion and then an endless number of ceremonials and of religious actions; and this on the other side is the exaltitude of that illimitable in which everything disappears. There are two Eastern nations with which I wish just now to deal—the Chinese and the Indian. A. CHINESE PHILOSOPHY.