Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/299

, the True. This is not action of an immediate kind, but is the work of mediation; it is the going out of finitude. It is of no avail to contemplate the heavens, however piously, innocently, and believingly we may do it; it is by thinking alone that the essential element can be reached. Accordingly, that assertion of the existence of a direct sight or vision of things, of an immediate consciousness, proves itself to be worthless whenever we make inquiries regarding what ought to be seen. The knowing of nature in its truth is a mediated knowledge, and not immediate. It is the same with the will. The will is good in so far as it wills that which is good, right, and moral; but this is something quite other than the immediate will. This latter is the will which confines itself to the sphere of particularity and finitude, which wills individual things as such. The Good is, on the contrary, the Universal. In order that the will may attain to the willing of good, a process of mediation by which it shall have purified itself from such finite willing must necessarily have taken place. Such purification is the education and work of mediation, and this cannot be something immediate and primary. For the rational knowledge of God this is equally essential. God being the centre of all truth—the pure truth without any kind of limitation—in order to arrive at Him, it is still more imperative that man should have laboured to free himself from his natural particularity of knowing and of willing.

Moreover, what has been asserted all along applies specially to the idea that the true consciousness of God lay in this natural unity of man, in this unity as yet unbroken by reflection. Spirit exists only for Spirit; Spirit in its truth exists for the free Spirit only, and it is this latter which has learnt to disregard immediate perception, which abstracts from understanding, from this reflection, and the like. In theological language, this is spirit which has come to the knowledge of sin; in other words, to the consciousness of the infinite separation of