Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/132

 he has been removed from the temporal sphere when the process through which the manifestation passes has itself reached the form of spiritual totality, i.e., the very fact of believing in Jesus implies that this faith has no longer before it the sensuous manifestation as such, the sensuous perception of which would in that case have constituted the proof of the truth.

What happens here is what happens in connection with all knowledge in so far as it has reference to a Universal. Kepler, as is well known, discovered the laws of the Heavens. They are valid for us in a double way, they are the Universal. A start was made from single instances; certain movements were referred back to laws. But these are only single instances, and we would be free to think that there may be millions more of instances, that there may be bodies which don’t move like those we know of, and thus this is not a universal law even in the case of the heavenly bodies themselves. We have certainly become acquainted with these laws by means of induction; but for Spirit, the interest lies in the fact that such a law is true in-and-for-itself, i.e., in its own nature, that reason finds in it its counterpart, and then recognises it to be true in-and-for-itself. In comparison with this absolute knowledge, the sensuous knowledge referred to accordingly takes a secondary place, it is indeed a starting-point, a point of departure which has to be gratefully recognised, but a law such as that just mentioned holds good for itself—and thus accordingly the proof of its truth is of a different kind from that supplied by the senses, it is the Notion, and sensuous existence is now lowered to the condition of a dream-like vision of the earthly-life, above which exists a higher region with a fixed content of its own.

The same kind of thing is seen in connection with the proofs of the existence of God which start from the finite. The defect in them is that the finite is conceived of in an affirmative way only; but the transition from the finite to the Infinite