Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/275

 though certainly in objective thought. Still we might remember the common idea that Being itself is only a thought, chiefly in so far as it is regarded in this abstract and logical way, and all the more if the Infinite, too, is only a thought, for in this case its predicate also could not possibly be anything else but a subjective thought. In any case, the predicate regarded from the point of view of its form in the judgment is the Universal and is thought, while considered according to its content or determinateness it is Being, and taken in a more definite sense it is immediate and also finite or particular Being. If, however, it is meant by this, that Being, because it has been thought, is therefore no longer Being as such, then this is simply an absurd idealism which maintains that if anything is thought it therefore ceases to be, or even that what is cannot be thought, and that therefore only nothing is thinkable. Still the idealism which enters into that aspect of the entire conception or notion to be considered here will be discussed later on when we enter on the explanation already indicated. The point, however, to which attention should really be directed is, that it is just the judgment indicated which, owing to the antithesis of its content and its form, contains in it that counter-stroke which expresses the nature of the absolute union in one of the two previously separated sides, and which is the nature of the Notion itself.

Put shortly, what we have so far learned regarding the Infinite is, that it is the affirmation of the self-annulling finite, the negation of the negation, what is mediated, but mediated by the annulling of the mediation. This already means that the Infinite is simple reference to self, that abstract equality with self which is called Being. Or, it is the self-annulling mediation, while the Immediate is just the mediation absorbed and annulled, in other words, that into which the self-annulling mediation passes, that which it becomes by annulling itself.

It is just in consequence of this that this affirmation,