Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/137

Rh activity of the Universal. This thought is contained in everything, however concrete the relation in any particular case may be; but it is only called thought in so far as the content has the character of something abstract, of a Universal.

Knowledge is here accordingly no immediate knowledge of a corporeal object, but knowledge of God; God is the absolutely universal Object; He is not any kind of particularity, He is the most universal Personality. Immediate knowledge of God is immediate knowledge of an object which is absolutely universal, so that the product only is immediate. Immediate knowledge of God is therefore a thinking of God, for Thought is the activity for which the Universal is.

God has here no other content, no further meaning; He is merely nothing that belongs to the sphere of sense; He is a Universal of which we know only that it does not come within the sphere of immediate sense-perception. It is, in fact, as a movement of mediation that thought first attains its complete state, for it begins from what is “other than itself,” permeates it, and in this movement changes it into what is Universal. But here thought has the merely Universal for its object, as the undetermined or indeterminate Universal; that is, has a quality, a content, which it itself is, in which it is, in fact, in immediate or abstract contact with itself. It is the light which illumines, but has no other content than just light. It is just such an immediateness as is implied when I ask what feels feeling? what perceives perception? and am merely answered, feeling has feeling, perception perceives. In view of this tautology, the relation is an immediate one.

Thus knowledge of God means nothing more than this, I think God. But now it is to be added further that this content of thought, this product, is, it is something existent. God is not only thought by us, but He is; He is not merely a determination of the Universal. We