Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/230

 matter, oil, sweat, &c., &c., are also separable; in fact, that what we regard as predicates existing in an actual subject or individual, such as colour, smell, taste, and so on, can separate from each other as independent materials, and that it belongs to the very nature of the unity that it should thus break up into parts. Spirit reveals its finitude in its variety, and in general in the want of correspondence between its Being and its notion. It becomes manifest that the intelligence does not adequately correspond to the truth, the will to the Good, the Moral, and the Right, the imagination to the understanding, and both these to the reason, and so on, and, besides, that the sense-consciousness with which the whole of existence is always kept supplied, or at any rate nearly so, consists of a quantity of momentary, transitory, and so far untrue elements. This very thorough separability and separateness of the activities, tendencies, aims, and actions of Spirit, which we meet with in empirical reality, may in some degree serve as an excuse for conceiving of the Idea of Spirit as something which breaks up into faculties, capacities, activities, and the like; for it is as an individual form of existence, a definite single being, that it is this particular finite existence which is thus found in a separate form of existence external to itself. But it is God only who is this particular One, and only as He is this One is He God; thus subjective reality is inseparable from the Idea, and consequently cannot be separated in itself. It is here that we see the variety, the separation, the multiplicity of the predicates which are knit into a unity by the subject only, but which in themselves would be in a condition of difference which would result in their coming into opposition and consequently into antagonism with each other, and which would show in the most decided way that they were something untrue, and that multiplicity of characteristics was an unsuitable category.

The next shape taken by the reduction of the several