Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/226

 hence the infinite number of such essential transitions which must have the force of proofs. So, too, the verification and confirmation of conviction by means of the repetition of the experiences gained of the way to truth, must appear to be necessary in order to counteract the infinite possibility of deception and error which, on the other hand, lurks in the way to truth. The individual’s trust and the intensity of his belief in God are strengthened by the repetition of the essential elevation of his spirit to God, and by the experience and knowledge he gains of God’s wisdom and providence as shown in countless objects, events, and occurrences. In proportion to the inexhaustible number of the relations in which things stand to the one object is the inexhaustible need felt by Man as he enters more and more deeply into the infinitely manifold finitude of his outward surroundings and his inner states, to continuously repeat his experience of God, that is, to bring before his eyes by new proofs the fact of God’s working in the world.

When we are in presence of this species of proof we at once feel that it belongs to a different sphere from that of the scientific proof. The empirical life of the individual, composed as it is of the most varied changes of mood and of conditions of feeling consequent on its entrance into different external states, takes occasion both from these states and when it is in them to multiply the result it has arrived at that there is a God, and seeks more and more anew to make this belief its own, and to make it a living belief for itself as being an individual existence subject to change. The scientific field, however, is the sphere of thought. Here the “many times” of the repetition, and the “at all times” which really represents the result, are united together in what is “once.” We have to deal with the one thought-determination, which, being one, comprises in itself all those special forms of the empirical life split up as it is into the infinite particularities of existence.