Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/185

 are inherent in the object, in the content itself. This is the case, for example, as regards geometrical axioms. Given a right-angled triangle, you have at once given a certain relation between the square of the hypothenuse and the squares of the containing sides. That is essential necessity; here the relation is not one of those in which the connection is external; on the contrary, here the one cannot be without the other; along with the one the other is given too.

But in this necessity, the mode in which we perceive the necessity is different from the connection of the determinations in the actual thing itself. The course which we follow in the process of proof is not the course of the object or actual thing itself; it is one different from that which is involved in the nature of the object. It is we who draw auxiliary lines; it would not occur to any one to say, that a triangle in order to have its three angles equal to two right angles takes the plan of extending one of its angles, and only thereby acquires the property in question. Here our perception of what is necessary, the intermediary process which we go through, and the process in the object itself, are different from one another.

The construction and the demonstration are only undertaken on behalf of our subjective apprehension. It is not objectively the case that the triangle attains by this process to the relation or property in question; it is only we who get to see the truth through this process, and that is merely subjective necessity, not a connection, not a process in the object itself.

This kind of demonstration, these connections, are at once seen to be unsatisfactory as regards the knowledge of God, the inherent connection of the attributes of God, and the connection of our knowledge of God and of His attributes.

The unsatisfactoriness takes, more strictly speaking, the following form:—In the course followed by subjective necessity, just referred to, we set out from primary,