Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/216

 meaning determined afterwards. Thus in the Metaphysic of God, or what is known as natural theology, we start by unfolding the meaning of the notion or conception of God. This is in accordance with the ordinary mode of dealing with the subject, since we consider what our previously formed idea of God contains, and in so doing further presuppose that we all have this idea which we express by the term God. The notion, accordingly, for itself, and apart altogether from the question of its reality, brings with it the demand that it should be true in itself as well, and consequently, as being the notion, that it should be logically true. Since logical truth, in so far as thought takes the form of Understanding merely, is reduced to identity, to what does not contradict itself, nothing more is demanded than that the notion should not contradict itself, or, as it is otherwise expressed, that it be possible, since possibility is itself nothing more than the identity of an idea with itself. The second thing, accordingly, is to show that this notion exists, and this is the proof of the existence of God. But because that possible notion is, in this very matter of identity, of bare possibility, reduced to this the most abstract of categories, and becomes no richer by means of existence, the product thus reached does not answer to the fulness of the idea of God, and we have accordingly a third division of the subject, in which we treat still further of the attributes of God and of His relations to the world.

These are the distinctions which meet us when we begin to examine the proofs of the existence of God. It is the work of the Understanding to analyse what is concrete, to distinguish and to define the elements belonging to it, then to hold firmly to them and abide by them. If at a later stage it once more frees them from their isolation, and recognises that it is their union which constitutes the truth, still they are from this standpoint to be regarded as being true before their union as well, and consequently when outside of this condition of unity. It is accordingly