Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/29

 with this form of abstract universality, of immediacy, and in this way difference is posited; but it is just His very nature to abolish this difference. It is consequently then only that He is truly reality, truth, infinitude.

This Idea is the speculative or philosophical Idea, i.e., the rational element, and inasmuch as it is reached by thinking, it is the act of thinking upon what is rational. Thought which is not speculative, thought which is the product of the Understanding, is the thought which does not get beyond difference as difference, nor beyond the finite and the infinite. Both have an absoluteness attributed to them, and yet they are thought of as being in relation to each other, and as so far constituting a unity, and consequently as having in them the element of contradiction.

(c.) This speculative Idea stands opposed to the sense element in thought and also to the Understanding. It is consequently a secret or mystery to the senses and their way of looking at things, and to the Understanding also. For both it is a μυστήριον, i.e., so far as regards what is rational in it. The nature of God is indeed not a mystery in the ordinary sense of the term, and least of all in the Christian religion, for in it God has communicated the knowledge of Himself, He has shown what He is, He has revealed Himself; but it is a mystery for sense-perception, for idea or ordinary thought, for the senses and their way of looking at things, and for the Understanding.

Speaking generally, the fundamental characteristic of the sensuous is externality, the idea of things as being outside of one another. In space the differences are contiguous, in time they are successive. Space and Time represent the externality in which they exist. Thus it is characteristic of the mode of regarding things which belongs to the senses, that differences should present themselves as lying outside of one another.