Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/305

 FOURTEENTH LECTURE

dogmatic view of the absolute separation between the finite and the Infinite has to do with Logic. It involves an opinion regarding the nature of the conceptions of the finite and the Infinite which is treated of in Logic. Here we shall confine ourselves chiefly to those characteristics which we have partly dealt with in the preceding Lectures, but which are also found in our own consciousness. The characteristics which belong to the nature of the conceptions themselves, and which have been exhibited in the Logic in their own pure determinateness and in that of their connection, must show themselves and be present in our ordinary consciousness as well.

When, therefore, it is said that the Being of the finite is only its own Being, and is in no sense the Being of an Other, it is thereby declared that there is no possible way of passing from the finite to the Infinite, and therefore no mediation between them, neither in themselves nor in and for knowledge, so that, although the finite is mediated through the Infinite, still the converse is not true, which is just the real point of interest. Appeal is thus already made to the fact that the Spirit of Man rises out of the contingent, the temporal, the finite, to God as representing the Absolutely-necessary, the Eternal, the Infinite, to the fact that the so-called gulf does not exist for Spirit, and that it really accomplishes the transition, and that the heart of Man, spite of the Understanding which asserts the existence of this absolute separation, will not admit that there is any such gulf, but, on the contrary, actually makes the transition from the finite to the Infinite in the act of rising to God.