Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/189

 Creator of the world, and is so sufficiently defined. But God is more than this; He is the true God in that He is the mediation of Himself with Himself, and is this love.

Faith, then, inasmuch as it has God as the object of its consciousness, has this mediation for its object; just as faith, as existing in the individual, only exists through teaching and training, the teaching and training of men, but still more through the teaching and training of the Spirit of God, and exists only through this process of mediation. But faith, like consciousness in general, this relation of the subject to an object, is quite abstract, whether God is its object, or whatever thing or content may be the object, and so faith or knowledge only exists through the medium of an object. Otherwise we have empty identity, a faith in or knowledge of nothing.

But conversely there is to be found here the other fact that, in like manner, there can be nothing which is only and exclusively the product of mediation. If we examine into what we understand by immediacy, it will be seen that it must exist in itself without any difference, such as that through which mediation is at once posited. It is simple reference to self, and is thus in its immediate form merely Being. Now all knowledge, mediate and immediate, and indeed everything else, at all events is; and that it is, is itself the least and most abstract thing that one can say of anything. If it is even only subjective, as faith or knowledge is, at all events it is, the predicate of Being belongs to it, just as such Being appertains to the object which exists only in faith or knowledge. The insight involved in this view is of a very simple kind. Yet we may be impatient with philosophy just because of this simplicity, in so far as we pass from the fulness and warmth which belong to faith, over to such abstractions as Being and immediacy. But, in point of fact, this is not the fault of philosophy; on the contrary, it is that assertion of faith and immediate knowledge which takes its stand on these abstractions. In this fact, that faith is