Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/341

. Such is the nature of thought generally. We think of an object; in doing so, we come to have its law, its essence, its universal element before us. It is thinking man and he alone who has religion; an animal has none, because it does not think. Accordingly we should have to show in reference to such a determination of the finite, the particular, the accidental, that it is the finite, &c., which translates itself into the Infinite, &c., which cannot remain as finite, which makes itself infinite, and must in accordance with its Substance return into the Infinite. This determination belongs entirely to the logical consideration of the problem.

The exaltation or rising up of Spirit is not tied down to making the contingency of the world its point of departure in order to arrive at the necessity of the Essence which exists in its own right: we may, on the contrary, determine the world in yet another way. Necessity is the final category of Being and Essence, therefore many categories precede it. The world may be a Many, a manifold. The truth of it is then the One. Just as we pass from the many to the One, from the finite to the Infinite, so too the transition may be made from Being in general to Essence.

The process of transition from the finite to the Infinite, from the accidental to the substantial, and so on, belongs to the active operation of thought in consciousness, and is the inherent nature of these characteristics themselves,—that precisely which they truly are. The finite is not the Absolute; on the contrary, it belongs to its very nature to pass away and become infinite; it belongs to the very nature of the particular to return into the universal, and to that of the accidental simply to return into Substance. This transition is in so far mediation as it is movement from the initial immediate definite state into its Other, into the Infinite, the Universal; and Substance is clearly not something immediate, but something which comes into being by means of this transition,