Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/191

 the other, I am not annihilated in the relation, I relate myself to myself. I am, I subsist; I am also the Affirmative. On the one side I know myself as having no real existence; on the other, as affirmative, as having a valid existence, so that the infinite leaves me my own life. This may be called the goodness of the infinite, as the abrogation of the finite may be called its justice, in accordance with which the finite must be manifested as finite.

Such is consciousness in this specific form, beyond and above which observation does not go. It is accordingly maintained that if we go thus far, the whole of religion is contained in what we have here. We can, however, go further; we can know that man can know God, but here we are arbitrarily, as it were, brought to a halt; or, since we wish to observe and nothing more, it is supposed that we must continue to remain in this particular phase of consciousness. Observation can only exercise itself on the subject, and cannot go further, since it purposes to go to work only empirically, to adhere to what is immediately present, to what is given, and God is not anything that permits of being made the subject of observation. Here, therefore, the object can only be what is in us as such, and what we are as finite beings. From this point of view God determines himself as the Infinite only, as the Other of the finite, as what is beyond it. In so far as He is, I am not. In so far as He touches me, the finite shrinks into nothing. God is thus characterised as involving an antithesis which seems absolute. The finite, it is said, cannot grasp, attain to, or understand the Infinite. Beyond this standpoint, it is said, we cannot go. We are told that in it we have everything that we need to know concerning God and religion, and what is beyond that, is “of evil.” It might, indeed, be stated in reply, as matter of observation, that we can know God, that we have some knowledge of a rich manifestation of His life and spiritual