Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/229

 the variety of syllogisms which are constructed by means of these, will also yield several results differing in content. If, accordingly, the starting-points seem to permit us to take the fact of their being distinct from one another as implying a relation of equality or indifference between them, this indifference is of a limited character in view of the results which a multiplicity of characteristics of the conception of God yields; and indeed the primary question regarding their mutual relations crops up of itself in this connection, since God is one. The relation most readily thought of here is that according to which God is defined as being in His several characteristics one subject consisting of several predicates, as, for instance, when we are in the habit of speaking not only of finite objects which are described by a variety of predicates, but also when we attribute to God a variety of attributes, and speak of Him as being all-powerful, all-wise, as righteousness, goodness, and so forth. The Orientals speak of God as the many-named, or rather as the infinite-all-named, and imagine that the demand to declare what He is can be exhausted only by the inexhaustible statement of His names, that is, of His characteristics or specific qualities. We have already said of the infinite number of starting-points that they are comprised by means of thought in simple categories, and so here the necessity is still greater for reducing the multiplicity of attributes to a smaller number, or rather to one notion, all the more that God is one notion which has in it several inseparable notions; and while we allow with regard to finite objects that each in itself is certainly only one subject, an individual, that is, something indivisible, a notion or conception, we still regard this unity as being in itself manifold, made up of many things external to one another and separable, a unity which is in conflict with itself by the very fact of its existence. The finitude of living beings consists in this, that in them body and soul are separable, and, still more, that the members, nerves, muscles, and so on, the colouring