Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/281

 isolation of things, which are just for this reason called contingent; but the indefinite abstraction which attaches to the expression “things,” the element of variableness in them, disappears in this relation of necessity in which things become causes, original facts, substances that are active and indeterminate. But in the connections which hold good in this sphere the causes are themselves finite; beginning as causes, their Being is isolated, and therefore contingent; or it is not isolated, and in that case they are effects, and are consequently not independent, but posited through an Other. The various series of causes and effects are partly contingent relatively to each other, and are partly themselves continued into the so-called Infinite, and thus contain in their content nothing but those situations and forms of existence of which each is finite in itself; and what ought to give stability to the connection of the series, the Infinite namely, is not only something above and beyond this world, but is a mere negative, the very meaning of which is relative merely, and is conditioned by what is to be negated by it, and is consequently for this very reason not negated.

Spirit, however, raises itself above this crowd of things contingent, above the merely outward and relative necessity involved in them, above the Infinite, which is a mere negative, and reaches a necessity which does not any longer go beyond itself, but is in-and-for-itself, included within itself, and is determined as complete in itself, while all other determinations are posited by it and are dependent upon it.

These may be in the form of ideas of an accidental or of a more concentrated kind, the essential moments of thought belonging to the inner life of the human spirit, to the reason which does not fully attain in a methodical and formal way the consciousness of its inner process, and still less gets so far as to be able to investigate those thought-determinations through which it passes, or the