Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/187

 and consequently the untruth of the fashion in which they are asserted to be ultimate and fundamental determinations, becomes apparent. Faith, to begin with it, starts from this, that the nullity of knowledge, so far as absolute truth is concerned, has been demonstrated. We wish so to proceed as to leave faith in possession of this assumption, and to see accordingly what it is in itself.

To begin with, if the opposition is conceived of as being of such an absolutely general kind as that between faith and knowledge, as we often hear it put, this abstraction must be directly found fault with. For faith belongs to consciousness; we know about what we believe; nay, we know about it with certainty. It is thus at once apparent that it is absurd to wish to separate faith and knowledge in such a general fashion.

But faith is now called immediate knowledge, and is accordingly to be distinguished radically from mediate and mediating knowledge. Since at this stage we leave on one side the speculative examination of these conceptions, in order to keep within the proper sphere of this kind of assertion, we will oppose to this separation, which is asserted to be absolute, the fact that there is no act of knowledge, any more than there is any act of sensation, conception, or volition, no activity, property, or condition pertaining to Spirit, which is not mediated and mediating; just as there is no other object in Nature or Spirit, be it what it may, in heaven or the earth, or under the earth, which does not include within itself the quality of mediation as well as that of immediacy. It is thus as a universal fact that logical philosophy presents it—we might add, along with the exhibition of its necessity, to which we need not here appeal—in the completed circle of the forms of thought. As regards the matter of sense, whether it belongs to outer or inner perception, it is admitted that it is finite, that is, that it exists only as mediated through what is other than sense. But of this matter itself, and still more of the higher content of