Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/181

 body occupies that place, and just by this continual abstraction shows itself to be a law. If we thus look on abstraction as objective activity, which it so far is, it is yet very different from subjective activity and its products. The former leaves the heavenly body to fall back again after abstraction from this particular place and this particular moment into the particular changing place and moment of time, just as the species may appear in the kind in other contingent or unessential forms and in the external particularity of individuals. On the other hand, subjective abstraction raises the law like the species into its universality as such, and makes it exist and preserves it in this form, in the mind.

In these forms of the knowledge which progresses from mere indication to proof, from immediate objectivity to special products, the necessity may be felt of considering explicitly the method, the nature, and fashion of the subjective activity, in order to test its claims and procedure; for this method has its own characteristics and kind of progress which are quite different from the characteristics and process of the object in itself. And without entering more particularly into the nature of this method of knowledge, it becomes immediately apparent, from a single characteristic which we observe in it, that inasmuch as it is represented as being concerned with the object in accordance with subjective forms, it is only capable of apprehending relations of the object. It is therefore idle to start the question whether these relations are objective and real or only subjective and ideal, not to mention the fact that such expressions as subjectivity and objectivity, reality and ideality, are simply vague abstractions. The content, be it objective or merely subjective, real or ideal, remains always the same, an aggregate of relations, not something that is in-and-for-itself, the notion of the thing, or the infinite, with which knowledge must have to do. If that content of knowledge is taken by perverted sense as containing relations only,