Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/218

 particular perceiving consciousness, which gives the standard of possibility, and that from this we get the conception of possibility or impossibility. What contradicts experience is impossible.

In regard to this it is to be remarked that this observation limits itself arbitrarily to the sphere of the finite consciousness. There are, however, other spheres besides which may be observed; not merely those whose content is only finite in relation to what is finite, but those too where the Divine is in consciousness as something existing in and for itself. The affirmative consciousness of the Absolute in the form of simple, natural religious life, of devotion, or in the form of philosophical knowledge, may also be observed, and yield a quite different result from that supplied by the position of finite consciousness, whether the observing subject observe these higher forms of consciousness in others or in himself. For wrong as this point of view is, it may well be that religious experience is more affirmative and more full of content than consciousness; there may be more in the heart than in the consciousness, in so far as it is definite, rational, observing consciousness; the two may be distinct. All depends on the adjustment of the rational or cognitive element in consciousness to what I am in my true essential nature as Spirit.

But the conviction that the spirit has only a negative relation to God, ruins and destroys feeling, devotion, the religious attitude, in fact. For thought is the source of the Universal, the region in which the Universal generally—in which God—is; the Universal is in thought and for thought. Spirit in its freedom only, that is, as thinking, has the content of Divine truth, and supplies it to experience; its content constitutes the worth of experience in respect of all true devotion and piety. If a man in the exercise of conscious thought holds fast to the position that no affirmative relation to God exists, then all content at once goes out of experience; as that sphere