Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/301

 we are accustomed to call a notion or conception, to another conception, and to what is more homogeneous, therefore, than the transition from the notion to Being is apt to appear.

The idea which lies at the basis of this is that Being is not itself a conception or thought. The proper place to consider it, in this antithesis in which it is exhibited as independent and isolated, will be when we come to deal with the proof referred to. Here, however, we have not, to begin with, to take it abstractly and independently. The fact that it is the element common to the two characteristics, the contingent and the Absolutely-necessary, suggests a comparison and an external separation between it and them, while at first it is in inseparable union with each, with contingent Being and absolutely necessary Being. In this way we shall once more take up the form of the proof already referred to, and bring out still more definitely the difference in the contradiction which it undergoes, regarded from the two opposite sides, the philosophical side, and that of the abstract understanding.

The proposition indicated expresses the following connection—

Because contingent Being exists, therefore absolutely necessary Being exists.

If we take this connection in its simple sense without characterising it more definitely by means of the category of a ground, or reason, or the like, its meaning is merely this—

Contingent Being is at the same time the Being of an Other, that of the absolutely necessary Being.

This phrase “at the same time” seems to imply a contradiction, over against which the two contrasted propositions are placed as solutions, of which the one is—

The Being of the contingent is not its own Being, but merely the Being of an Other, and in a definite sense it is the Being of its own Other, the Absolutely-necessary. And the other—