Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/177

 that mediated knowledge is to be excluded, and that it destroys the certainty, the security of faith, and what really constitutes faith. Here we have this antithesis between immediate and mediated knowledge. Thought, concrete thought, philosophic comprehension, is mediated knowledge. But immediacy and mediation of knowledge are one-sided abstractions, and the one is this as much as the other. What is meant, or presupposed, is not that correctness or truth is to be ascribed to the one to the exclusion of the other, to one or the other by itself, to one of the two as isolated. Further on we shall see that true thought or philosophical comprehension unites both in itself, and does not exclude either.

($$\alpha$$.) To mediated knowledge belongs the deduction of the one from the other, the dependence, conditionality of one determination on another, what we call Reflection. Immediate knowledge discards all differentiations; it puts away these modes of connection, and has only what is simple, one mode of connection, one knowledge, the subjective form, and then, “it is.” In so far as I know certainly that God is, knowledge is a connection between myself and this content; as certainly as I exist, so certainly does God exist. My being and the being of God are thus connected together in one, and the relation is Being. This Being is simple, and at the same time double, or twofold.

In immediate knowledge this connection is entirely simple; all modes involving relation are obliterated. To begin with, let us also conceive of it in an empirical manner, that is, let us place ourselves at the same standpoint as that occupied by immediate knowledge. What speaking generally we call empirical knowledge, amounts just to this: I simply know it, this is a fact of consciousness; I find in myself the idea of God and that He is.

This standpoint is, that what is empirical only is to be regarded as valid, that man is not to go beyond what he