Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/296

 the antithesis whose affirmative and subsidiary help given by what was more of the nature of immediate knowledge, faith, feeling, and such like, we dealt with in the first Lectures. We must for the present leave the Form in this shape alone, but later on we shall have some reflections to make on the categories belonging to it. We have in the meantime to deal with the Form in the more definite shape in which it appears in the proof which forms the subject of discussion.

If we call to mind the formal syllogism previously dealt with, it will be seen that one part of the first proposition, the major proposition that is, runs thus—If the contingent exists; and this is expressed in a more direct way in the other proposition—There is a contingent world. While in the former of these propositions the characteristic of contingency is posited essentially in its connection with the Absolutely-necessary, it is nevertheless stated to be at the same time something contingent which has Being. It is in the second proposition, or in this characteristic of the existent as it appears in the first, that the defect lies, and this in fact means that it is directly self-contradictory, and shows itself to be in its very nature an untrue one-sidedness. The contingent, the finite is expressed in terms of what has Being; but it is, on the contrary, characteristic of the finite that it should have an end and drop away, that it should be a kind of Being which has the value of what is merely a possibility and which may either be or not be.

This fundamental error is found in the form of the connection, which is that of an ordinary syllogism. A syllogism of this kind has a permanent immediate element in its premisses, it is based on presuppositions which are stated to be not only what is primary, but to be the permanent primary existent element with which the Other is in general so closely connected as some kind of consequence, something conditioned, and so on, that the two characteristics thus linked together constitute a relation