Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/216

 is movement towards the finite, and owing to this He is, as it were, the lifting up of the finite to Himself. In the Ego, as in that which is annulling itself as finite, God returns to Himself, and only as this return is He God. Without the world God is not God.

We meet with these abstractions especially among the ancients; they are products of the beginnings of reflecting abstract thought. Plato, however, already recognises the infinite as the bad, and the determinate as what is higher—he looks on the limit limiting itself in itself as higher than the Unlimited. What is true is the unity of the infinite, in which the finite is contained.

The result of all this is, that we must get rid of this bugbear of the opposition of finite and infinite. It is customary to frighten us out of the wish to know God and to have a positive relation to Him, with the bugbear that to seek to take up any such attitude towards God is presumption, while the objections are brought forward with much unction and edifying language, and with vexatious humility. This presumption, however, is undoubtedly an essential part of philosophy as well as of religion. From this point of view it is a matter of indifference whether I know through thought the content, namely God, or accept it as true on authority, or with the heart, by inner enlightenment, or in any other way. If you take any of these ways, you are met by this bugbear that it is presumptuous to wish to know God, and to comprehend the infinite by means of the finite. We must rid ourselves completely of this opposition of finite and infinite, and do it by getting an insight into the real state of the case.

The man who does not rid himself of this phantom steeps himself in vanity, for he posits the Divine as something which is powerless to come to itself, while he clings to his own subjectivity, and, taking his stand on this, asserts the impotence of his knowledge. This is surely subjective untruth in its real form, the hypocrisy