Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/282

 connections they involve. We have now got to see, however, if thought, which in the process of reasoning proceeds in a formal and methodical way, rightly conceives of and expresses the course followed in the elevation of the soul to God, which, so far, we have assumed to be a fact, and which we have been accustomed to deal with only in connection with the few fundamental characteristics belonging to it. Conversely, again, we have to find out whether those thoughts and the connection between them can be shown to be justified, and have their reality proved, by an examination of the thoughts in themselves, for it is only in this way that the elevation of the soul to God really ceases to be a supposition, and that the unstable element in any right conception of it disappears. We must, however, decline to enter upon this examination here, seeing that if it were demanded on its own account we should have to go on to the ultimate analysis of thought. It has to be carried out in a thorough way in logic, the science of thought; for I identify logic with metaphysic, since the latter, too, is really nothing but an attempt to deal with some concrete content, such as God, the world, the soul, but in such a way that these objects have to be conceived of as noumena, that is, we have to deal with the element of thought in them. At this point it will be preferable to take up the logical results merely, rather than the formal development. An investigation of the proofs of the existence of God cannot be undertaken independently at all, if it is required to have philosophical and scientific completeness. Science is the developed connection of the Idea in its totality. In so far as any individual object is lifted out of that totality, which must be the goal of the scientific development of the Idea, as representing the only method of exhibiting its truth, limits must be set to the investigation undertaken, and these it must presuppose to be definitely fixed, as is the case in other instances of scientific inquiry. Still the investigation may come to have an appearance of independence, owing