Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/200

 life to plan to reach a universality of satisfaction, completeness of impulse and of enjoyment, and then to name this felicity. The one totality is called universality of knowledge, the other totality that of possession, of satisfaction, of desire, of enjoyment. But here the totality is thought of as multiplicity and allness only, and it, therefore, remains in contrast with the finiteness, which cannot possess all. Thus the Ego is still something exclusive over against something exclusive, and, therefore, the many is absolutely exclusive in relation to another many; and all is merely an abstraction which we apply to much or the many, but which remains external to it. Thus it is found that the range of knowledge has no limits, and that the flight from star to star is limitless. It may indeed be supposed that natural science may get to know all animals, yet not so as to be able to penetrate into their most subtle characteristics. It is the same with the satisfaction of impulses: man may attain to many interests and ends, but not to all or not to happiness itself; allness is an ideal which cannot be reached. This finiteness remains, just because it is a something that is true. The untrue is the unity or universality; the multiplicity would have to yield up its character, in order to be posited under unity. The ideal is, therefore, unattainable, just because it is untrue in itself, a unity of many, which are at the same time to remain manifold and separate. Further, the end, the ideal, on this side of which a man stops short, is itself something essentially finite, and for this very reason I must stop short on this side of it, for in reaching it I should still only reach what is finite.

($$\beta$$.$$\beta$$.) The antithesis of the finite and the infinite.

We have now to consider the form of the antithesis of the finite and infinite, as it is seen in Reflection as such. This is finitude in contrast to infinitude, each being posited for itself, posited independently, not merely as predicate, but as an essential antithesis, and in such