Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/501

 DIALECTIC. 479 knowledge of the absolute identity it would be an absolute knowledge. This is denied, however, to us men, who are never able to rise above the opposition of sensuous and intellectual cognition. The unity of thought and being is presupposed in all thinking, but can never actually be thought. As an Idea this identity is indispensable, but to think it definitely, either by conception or judgment, is impossible. The concepts supreme power (God or creative nature) and supreme cause (fate or providence) do not attain to that which we seek to think in them : that which has in it no opposition is an idea incapable of realization by man, but, nevertheless, a necessary ideal, the presupposition of all cognition (and volition), and the ground of all certitude. All knowledge must be related to the absolute unity and be accompanied by it. Since, then, the absolute identity cannot be presented, but ever sought for only, and absolute knowledge exists only as an ideal, dialectic is not so much a science as a technique of thought and proof, an introduction to philosophic thinking or (since knowledge is thought in common) to discussion in conformity with the rules of the art. With this the name dialectic returns to its original Platonic meaning. The popular ideas of God ill stand examination by the standard furnished by the principle of identity. The plu- rality of attributes which we are accustomed to ascribe to God agree but poorly with his unity free from all contra- riety. In reality God does not possess these manifold attributes; they first arise in the religious consciousness, in which his unconditioned and undivided working is variously reflected and, as it were, divided. They are only the various reflections of his undivided nature in the mind of the observer. In God ability and perform- ance, intelligence and will, his thought of self and his thought of the world coincide in one. Even the con- cept of personality must not be ascribed to God, since it is a limitation of the infinite and belongs to mythology; while the idea of life, on the contrary, is allowable as a protec- tion against atheism and fatalism. When Schleiermacher, further, equates the activity of God and the causality of nature he ranges himself on the pantheistic side in