Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/168

 opposed to it and through it. Necessity is there on behalf of the end, its process is the maintenance and the realisation of the end; the end stands above it, and necessity is thus posited as one side only of the process, so that one part only of what is created is subjected to this Power, and appears accordingly as contingent. It is from the notion or conception of a wise Power that the act of positing, along with the difference referred to, proceeds.

2. By means of the conception alluded to we get two aspects of this truth; on the one hand we have ends, and on the other what is contingent. The second step accordingly is the mediation between the ends and what is contingent. They are, as a matter of fact, different; life and what has not life, each exists immediately for itself, they have an equal right to be—they are; the Being of the one has no more justification than that of the other. The ends are living; they are thus individuals existing as so many immediate single points which stand off from each other, and in reference to which the other exists for itself and to which it can offer resistance. The mediation or reconciliation between these two consists in this, that the two do not exist for themselves in a similar way. The one class consists of ends, the other of what has merely material independent Being, and has no higher signification even when it is living.

It is this second characteristic or mediation which has been put into the special form of the Proof of the existence of God known as the Physico-Theological.

What has life is in fact Power, though at first it is this only implicitly; in its organs it is the living Soul which is the Power, though this power does not yet hold sway over the inorganic, which also exists and is infinitely manifold. We thus have, on the one hand, what is as yet Quality, what is, to begin with, immediate Being, and the living things in a condition of indifference to each other. They use the material which also exists in this definite particular form which they themselves come to