Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/243

 concrete objects; they don’t require to get a fixed place in consciousness as independent in their own right. It was to the culture of our time that these categories of thought first became familiar, and they are now universal, or at least universally diffused. But those very people who have shared in this culture, and no less those who have been referred to as unpractised in the independent exercise of thought based on general conceptions, have not reached this idea in any immediate way, but, on the contrary, by following the varied course of thought, and by the study of the sense in which words are used. People have essentially learned to think, and have given currency to their thoughts. The culture which is capable of abstract conception is something which has been reached through mediation of an infinitely manifold character. The one fact in this fact of the elevation of Man to God is that it is a mediation.

It is this circumstance, namely, that the elevation of the spirit to God has mediation in itself, which invites to proof, that is, to the explication of the separate moments of this process of the spirit, and to their explication in the form of thought. It is the spirit in its most inward character, that is, in its thought, which produces this elevation, which in its turn represents the course followed by the thought-determinations or characteristic qualities of thought. What is intended to be effected by this process of proof is that this activity of thought should be brought into consciousness, that consciousness should recognise it as representing those moments of thought in a connected form. Against this unfolding of these moments which shows itself in the region of mediation through thought, faith, which wishes to continue to be immediate certainty, protests, and so, too, does the criticism of the Understanding, which is at home in the intricacies of that mediation, and is at home in the latter in order that it may introduce confusion into the elevation itself. So far as faith is concerned, we may say that however many faults Understanding may find with