Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/217

 the interest of the Understanding to show that Being essentially belongs to the notion or conception of God, and that this notion must necessarily be thought of as being or existing. If this is the case, then the notion must not be thought of as separate from Being; it has no real truth apart from Being. The result thus reached is opposed to the idea that the notion should be regarded as true in itself, and as something the existence of which must be assumed, to begin with, and then established. If the Understanding here declares that this first separation made by it and what arises from the separation have no truth, then the comparison, the other separation which further arises in connection with this, is proved to be without any foundation. The notion, that is to say, is to be first considered, and then afterwards the attributes of God are to be dealt with. It is the notion or conception of God which constitutes the content of Being; it can be, and ought also to be, nothing else than the “substance of its realities.” But how then should the attributes of God be anything but realities and His realities. If the attributes of God are supposed to express rather His relations to the world, the mode of His action in and towards an Other different from Himself, then the idea of God involves this much at least, that God’s absolute independence does not permit Him to come out of Himself, and shows us what happens to be the condition of the world, which is supposed to be outside of Him and to be contrasted with Him, and which we have no right to suppose is already separate from Him. Thus His attributes, His action and mode of existence, remain shut up within His notion, find their determination in it alone, and are essentially nothing more than its relation to itself; the attributes are merely the determinations of the notion itself. But, again, if we start from the world looked at in itself as something which is external so far as God is concerned, so that the attributes of God describe His relations to it, then the world, as a product of His creative power, gets a definite character