Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/328

 3^6 LESS/ATG. action, without the experience of changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome. Things are not out of, but in him ; nevertheless (as "contingent") they are distinct from him. The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent distinctions. God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold manner: he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he conceived them as single. Now God's thinking is creation, his ideas actual- ities. By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal image, the Son of God ; the bond between God representing and God represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit. But when he conceived his perfec- tions singly he created the world, in which these manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of par- ticular beings. Every individual is an isolated divine perfec- tion ; the things in the world are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature, though in different degrees. Development is everywhere; at present the soul has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in the future it will have more. At first the actions of men were guided by obscure instinct ; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will, and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct cognitions. Thus freedom is attained in the course of history — the rational and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he who is unfree obeys unconsciously. Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality ; but he rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive reli- gions as necessary transition stages in its attainment. As natural religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers, without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in religious matters. Vortrdge und Abhandlungen, 1877) ; and on his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing's Nathan der Weise, 1864, as well as J. H. Witte's Philosophie unserer Dichterkeroen, vol. i. {Lessing and Herder), i83o. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877, and Encyclopadia Britannica, vol. xiv. pp. 478- 432.— Tr.]