Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/110

 shape in which this content exists for our minds? Is it found in idea, will, imagination, or feeling? What is the place, where this content, this object has its home? Which of all these supplies the basis of this mental possession?

If we think of the current answers in regard to this, we find it said that God is in us in so far as we believe, feel, form ideas, know. These forms, faculties, aspects of ourselves, namely, feeling, faith, ordinary conception, are to be more particularly considered further on, and especially in relation to this very point. For the present we postpone the search for any reply, nor do we betake ourselves to what we know by experience, observation, namely that we have God in our feeling, &c. To begin with, we shall keep to what we have actually before us, this One, Universal, this Fulness, which is this ever unchangeable transparent ethereal element.

If in considering this One we ask, For which of our faculties or mental activities does this One, this pure Universal, exist? we can only point to the corresponding activity of our mind, the faculty which answers to it, as the soil or substratum in which this content has its home. This is Thought.

Thought alone is the substratum of this content. Thought is the activity of the Universal; it is the Universal in its activity, or operation; or if we express it as the comprehension of the Universal, then that for which the Universal is, is still Thought.

This Universal, which can be produced by Thought, and which is for Thought, may be quite abstract; it is then the Immeasurable, the Infinite, the removal of all limit, of all particularity. This Universal, which is to begin with negative, has its seat in Thought only.

To think of God means to rise above what is sensuous, external, and individual. It means to rise up to what is pure, to that which is in unity with itself; it is a going forth above and beyond the