Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/146

 the One is only implicitly. It is the process, and it is the process of contingent things, for it is contingent things which are thus posited and negated. In necessity, however, it is only the transition, the coming and going of things, which is posited. But now it must be further posited that these things exist and appear as distinguished from this unity of theirs, from this process of necessity which belongs to them. They must appear, at all events, momentarily as existing, and at the same time as belonging to the power out of which they do not pass. They are thus means in general, and the unity consists in this, that it maintains itself within this process which belongs to it, and produces itself in these means. This is the unity of necessity itself, but thought of as distinguished from what moves itself, and within which it maintains itself, so that it has the element of Being only as something negative. Unity is thus End in general.

These three points stand in the following relation to each other. Since the Essence is absolute negativity, it is pure identity with itself, the One; it is at the same time the negativity of the unity, which, however, is in a relation to the unity, and owing to this interpenetration of both shows itself as necessity. In the third place, the One returns into itself out of the isolation of its difference, a unity, nevertheless, which, as being this self-absorption of the Form into itself, has a finite content, and in this way, by developing into the difference of the Form as totality, gives us the conception of conformability to an end, a conformability which is, however, finite.

When it is said that in this are contained the three metaphysical notions or conceptions of the three religions, it is not to be supposed that each of these conceptions belongs to one religion only. On the contrary, each of these three determinations or characteristics belongs to all three. Where One is the Essence, there too is necessity though only implicit, not in its determinate quality; and so, too, if the One determines Himself in