Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/245

 If, accordingly, we look more narrowly at the inner course followed by Spirit in thought and its moments, it will be seen, as has been already observed, that the first starting-point represents a category of thought, namely, that of the contingency of natural things. The first form of the elevation of the spirit to God is represented historically by the so-called Cosmological Proof of the existence of God. It has also been pointed out that on the definiteness of the starting-point depends also the definiteness of the goal which we wish to reach. Natural things might be defined in another way, and in that case the result or the truth would also be differently defined. We might have differences which would appear unimportant to very imperfectly developed thought, but which from that standpoint of thought which we at present occupy would be seen to be the very thing with which we were really concerned and which has to be reckoned with. If things were thus defined in a general way as existing, it might be shown that the truth of existence as determinate Being, was Being itself, indeterminate, limitless Being. God would thus be defined as Being—the most abstract of all definitions, and the one with which, as is well known, the Eleatics started. We recall this abstraction most vividly in connection with the distinction already made between thought in its inner and implicit form and the bringing forward of thoughts into consciousness. Who is there who does not use the word Being? (The weather is fine. Where are you? and so on, ad infinitum.) And who, in forming conceptions, does not make use of this pure category of thought, though it is concealed in the concrete content (the weather, and so on, ad infinitum), of which consciousness in forming any such conceptions is composed, and of which alone, therefore, it has any knowledge? There is an infinite difference between the possession and employment of the category of thought called Being in this way, and its employment by the Eleatics, who gave it a fixed meaning in itself, and conceived of it as the ultimate principle, as the Absolute,