Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/74

 thought what is due, and shall not seek merely to carry our point as against the other. And indeed to convince that “other,” to exert this personal influence upon him, is impossible, since he remains wedded to his limited categories.

The thinking spirit must have got beyond all these forms of Reflection; it must know their nature, the true relation involved in them, the infinite relation, that is to say, that in which their finiteness is done away with. Then it will become apparent, too, that immediate knowledge, like mediated knowledge, is entirely one-sided. What is true is their unity, an immediate knowledge which is likewise mediated, something mediated which is likewise simple in itself, which is immediate reference to itself. Inasmuch as the one-sidedness is done away with by means of such combination, it is a condition of infiniteness. Here is union, in which the difference of those characteristics is done away with, while they at the same time being preserved ideally have the higher destiny of serving as the pulse of vitality, the impulse, movement, unrest of the spiritual, as of the natural life.

Since it is with religion, with what is supreme and ultimate, that we are to be occupied in the following dissertation, we ought now to be in a position to assume that the futility of those relations has long ago been overcome. But at the same time, since we do not begin at the very beginning of the science, but are considering religion per se, regard must be also had when dealing with it to such relations of understanding as are wont to come principally under consideration in connection with it.

With this reference to the following dissertation itself, we shall now proceed to give the general survey, the synopsis or division of our science.