Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/151

 But as a matter of fact, the true meaning of this notion is not contained in the proposition that God is One, but rather in the statement that the One is God, so that the One exhausts the meaning of this Divine Essence, and is not a predicate. Nor is it a characteristic along with other characteristics, but, on the contrary, it is one which fully expresses the Essence in the sense of absolute Power as subjectivity, as reflected into itself. God is thus just this movement of the subject from itself and back to itself, the self-determination of itself as the One in such a way that subject and predicate are the same, are this movement within each other, so that there is nothing left which comes between them. This notion is not adapted to be expressed in the form of a mediation in which the notion will appear as a proof of the existence of God, for it is the Infinite, the absolute negativity from which we start in order to reach the determination of the One. The One is merely the determination which is attached to it, and which expresses the thought that this is subjectivity reflected into itself. The movement proceeds, so to speak, only within the potential Being of the Infinite. It is, therefore, not in the form of mediation that we have to consider it here. We certainly might say there is an advance from the Infinite to subjectivity determined within itself, but the beginning is the Infinite, and this Infinite, moreover, as the absolute negativity, is the Subject reflected into itself, in which all that is manifold is done away with and absorbed. If we wished to look at the mediation more closely, we would start from one thought and conceive of the Notion in and for itself as Thought, and from this we would go on to the Other, to Being. But here we cannot start from the Notion, for a beginning in this form gives a different proof of the existence of God, and one which belongs to the Christian religion, and not to the religion under consideration. The One is not yet thought of as Notion, not yet thought of as Notion for us; what is