Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/266

 The relation here implied ought more strictly, however, to be referred back to the form of the judgment in general. In every judgment the subject is an idea which has been presupposed, and which is defined in the predicate, that is, an idea which is defined or determined in a general way by thought, which means, again, that the determinations or specific qualities of the content of the subject have to be indicated, even if, as in the case of the material predicates, red, hard, and so on, this general mode of determination, which is, so to speak, the share thought has in the matter, is really nothing more than the empty form of universality. Thus, when it is said that God is infinite, eternal, and so on, God is, to begin with, as a subject simply something hypothetical, existing in idea, and it is only in the predicate that it is first asserted what He is. So far as the subject is concerned, we do not know what He is, that is, what content He has, or what is the determinate character of the content, as otherwise it would be superfluous to have the copula “is” and to attach the predicate to it. Then further, since the subject represents the hypothetical element which exists in idea, this presupposition can be taken as signifying what has Being, and as implying that the subject is, or, on the other hand, that it is at first only an idea, that instead of being posited by sense-intuition, or sense-perception, it is posited in the sphere of ideas by imagination, by conception, by reason, and that it, in fact, gets such content as it has in the sphere of general ideas.

If we express these two moments in accordance with this more definite form, we shall at once get a more definite idea of the demands which are made upon them. Those moments give rise to the two following propositions—

Being defined, to begin with, as finite, is infinite; and The Infinite is.

For, so far as the first proposition is concerned, it is