Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/241

 escapes into the region of another, unlimited Being, which represents the Essence as opposed to that unessential, external Being. The world of finitude, of things temporal, of change, of transitoriness, is not the true form of existence, but the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable. And even if what we have called limitless Being, the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, does not succeed in expressing the absolute fulness of meaning contained in the word God, still God is limitless Being, He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, and thus the spirit rises at least to those divine predicates or to those fundamental qualities of His nature which, though abstract, are yet universal, or at least to that universal region, to the pure æther in which God dwells.

This elevation of the soul to God is, speaking generally, that fact in the history of the human spirit which we call religion, but religion in a general sense, that is, in a purely abstract sense, and thus this elevation is the general, but merely the general, basis of religion.

The principle of immediate knowledge does not get beyond this elevation as a fact. It appeals to it, and rests in it as a fact, and asserts that it represents that universal fact in men, and even in all men, which is called the inner revelation of God in the human spirit, or reason. We have already sufficiently examined this principle, and I accordingly refer to it once more only in so far as we here confine our attention to the fact in question. This very fact, the act of elevation to God namely, is as such rather something which is directly of the nature of mediation. It has its beginning and starting-point in finite, contingent existence, in material things, and represents an advance from these to something else. It is consequently mediated by that beginning, and is an elevation to what is infinite and in itself necessary, only inasmuch as it does not stop short at that beginning which is here alone the Immediate (and this an Immediate which afterwards exhibits a merely relative character), but rises to the Infinite by the mediate