Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/238

 and from Him back to Being, both of which equally and necessarily belong to one conception, and this quite as much in the course of the subjective procedure of knowledge as when they have an absolutely objective concrete sense, and, regarded each for itself, present a one-sidedness of a most important kind. So far as knowledge is concerned, their integration is found in the totality which the Notion in general represents, and, more strictly speaking, in what was said about it, namely, that its unity as a unity of the two moments is a result representing the most absolute basis and result of the two moments. Without, however, presupposing this totality and its necessity, it will follow from the result of the one movement—and since we are beginning we can begin only in a one-sided way from the one—that by its own dialectic nature it forces itself to go over into the other, and passes from itself over into this complete integration. The objective signification of what is, to begin with, a merely subjective conclusion will, however, at once make it evident that the inadequate, finite form of that proof is done away with. Its finitude consists, above all, in this one-sidedness which attaches to its indifference and its separation from the content. When this one-sidedness has been done away with and absorbed, it comes to have the content also in itself in its true form. The process of elevation to God is in itself the abolition of the one-sidedness of subjectivity in general, and, above all, of knowledge.

To the distinction which, regarded from the formal side, appears as a difference in the kinds of the proofs of the existence of God, there has yet to be added the fact that if we look at the proof from the one side according to which we pass from the Being of God to the conception of God, it presents itself under two forms.

The first proof starts from the Being which as something contingent does not support itself, and from this reasons to a true necessary Being in-and-for-itself—this is the proof ex contingentia mundi.