Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/181

 mediated character, we are then in a position to consider it as independent. It is just here for the most part that the assertion of immediate knowledge comes in; we have immediate knowledge of God it is said; this is a revelation in us. This is a great principle, which it is essential we should hold fast; it involves the truth that positive revelation cannot supply a religion in such a way that it could have the character of something mechanically produced, of something effected from the outside, and set up within man by an external agency.

Here the old saying of Plato is in place, that man learns nothing, he only remembers; the truth is something which man originally carries within himself; expressed in an outward, and not in a philosophical way, it is his remembering a content which was known in a preceding state. Here it is represented mythically, but it involves the thought that religion, justice, morality, all that is spiritual, is only aroused in man; he is potentially Spirit, the truth lies in him, and what has to be done is merely to bring it into consciousness.

Spirit bears witness to Spirit; this witness is the peculiar inner nature of Spirit. In this the weighty idea is involved that religion is not brought into man from the outside, but lies hidden in himself, in his reason, in his freedom, in fact. If we abstract from this relation, and consider what this knowledge is, how this religious feeling, this self-revelation in the Spirit is constituted, it is seen to be immediacy indeed, like all knowledge, but immediacy which likewise contains mediation in itself. For if I form an idea of God, this directly involves mediation, although the reference to God is quite direct and immediate. I exist as knowledge, and then there is an Object, namely, God, and therefore a relation, and knowledge as representing this relation is mediation. I as one having knowledge in a religious way have this character only by means of this content which is in my knowledge.