Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/255

 living outside the pale of Christianity and of our civilisation, might have no more profound idea of God than this. For all such, this proof would consequently be sufficient enough. We may, in any case, allow that God and God only is the absolutely necessary Essence, even if this characteristic does not exhaust the Christian idea, which, as a matter of fact, includes in it something more profound than the metaphysical characteristic of so-called natural theology—something more profound, too, than what is found in the conception of God which belongs to immediate knowledge and faith. It is itself questionable if immediate knowledge can even say this much of God, that He is the absolutely necessary Essence; at any rate, if one person can know this much of God immediately, another may equally well not know so much of Him immediately in the absence of any right on the part of any one to expect more of him, for a right implies reasons and proofs, that is, mediations of knowledge, and mediations are excluded from and forbidden to immediate knowledge of this kind.

But if the development of what is contained in the characteristic of absolutely necessary Essence gives us still further characteristics as duly following from it, what objection can there be to accepting these, and to being convinced of their validity? The ground of proof may be empirical; but if the proof is in itself a properly deduced consequence, and if the existence of a necessary Essence is once for all established by this consequence, reason starting from this basis pursues its investigations by the aid of what are purely conceptions; but this can be reckoned an unjustifiable act only when the employment of reason in general is considered wrong, and, as a matter of fact, Kant carries the degradation of reason as far as those do who limit all truth to immediate knowledge.

However, the characteristic of the so-called most real Essence is easily deducible from the characteristic of the