Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/242

 step of the abandonment and renunciation of such a standpoint. This elevation which is represented by consciousness, is consequently in itself mediated knowledge.

With regard to the point from which this elevation starts, we may here further remark that the content is not of a sensuous kind, not an empirical concrete content composed of sensation or perception, nor a concrete content of imagination—the truth rather being that the abstract thought-determinations implied in the ideas of the finitude and contingency of the world form the starting-point. The goal at which the elevation arrives is of a similar kind, namely, the infinitude or absolute necessity of God, conceived of not as having a more developed and richer determination, but as being wholly within the limits of these general categories. With regard to this aspect of the question it is necessary to point out that the universality of the fact of this elevation is false so far as its form is concerned. For instance, it can be maintained that even amongst the Greeks the thought of infinity, of inherently existing necessity as representing the ultimate principle of all things, was the possession of the philosophers only. Material things did not appear in this general way to the popular conception in the abstract form of material things and as contingent and finite things, but rather in their empirical and concrete shape. So in the same way God was not conceived of under the category of the Infinite, the Eternal, the inherently Necessary, but, on the contrary, in accordance with the definite shapes created by the imagination. Still less is it the case that those nations who occupied a lower stage of culture put their conceptions in any such actually universal forms. These general forms of thought do certainly pass through men’s minds, as we say, because men are thinking beings, and when they have received a fixed form in language they are still further developed into the conscious thought upon which the proof proper is based, but even in that case they take, to begin with, the form of characteristics of