Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/178

 finds in consciousness. It is not asked why it is found, or how it is necessary. This would lead to cognition or philosophical knowledge, and that is just the evil which is to be guarded against. The empirical question then is, “Is there an immediate knowledge?”

To mediated knowledge belongs knowledge of necessity. What is necessary has a cause, it must be. The existence of something else or an Other, through which or through the existence of which it itself exists, is essential to such knowledge. In it there is a connection of what is differentiated. The mediation can only be merely finite mediation. The effect, for example, is taken as something standing on the one side, the cause as something on the other.

It is the very nature of the finite to be dependent on an Other; it does not exist independently, in and for itself, or through itself; something else is necessary to its existence. Man is physically dependent; he needs external nature, external things. These are not produced by his act; they appear as self-existent in relation to him; he can only prolong his life in so far as they exist and are of use to him.

The higher mediation of the Notion, of reason, is a mediation with itself. To mediation belongs this differentiation, and essential connection of Two; such connection, namely, that the One only is, in so far as the Other is. Now in immediacy this mediation is excluded.

($$\beta$$.) But even if we take up an empirical, an external attitude, it will be found that there is nothing at all that is immediate, that there is nothing to which only the quality of immediacy belongs to the exclusion of that of mediation, but that what is immediate is likewise mediated, and that immediacy itself is essentially mediated.

It is the nature of finite things to be mediated; finite things are created, begotten, as a star, or an animal. The man who is a father, is as much begotten,