Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/248

 thought, and thus concerns itself peculiarly with this Idea, which is perfectly independent in-and-for-itself.

Such detailed treatment is not the object of these lectures. We wish to confine ourselves here to the historical discussion of those characteristics of the Notion the rising from which to the characteristics of the Notion which are its truth, and which may be held to be the characteristics of the Notion of God, is the point to be considered. The reason of the general incompleteness which marks that method of taking up the characteristics of the Notion can only be found in the defective ideas prevalent with regard to the nature of the characteristics of the Notion itself, and of their mutual connection, as well as of the nature of the act of rising from them as finite to the Infinite. The more immediate reason why the characteristic of the contingency of the world and that of the absolutely necessary Essence which corresponds to it appear as the starting-point and as the result of the proof respectively—and this reason is at the same time a relative justification of the preference given to them—is to be looked for in the fact that the category of the relation between contingency and necessity is that in which all the relations of the finitude and the infinitude of Being are resumed and comprised. The most concrete determination of the finitude of Being is contingency, and in the same way the infinitude of Being in its most completely determined form is necessity. Being in its own essentiality is reality, and reality is in itself the general relation between contingency and necessity which finds its complete determination in absolute necessity. Finitude, by being taken up into this thought-determination, has the advantage, so to speak, of being so far prepared by this means as to point in itself to the transition to its truth or necessity. The term contingency, or accident, already suggests a kind of existence whose special character it is to pass away.

Necessity itself, however, has its truth in freedom; with