Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/307

 as a matter of fact it is in the region of pure thought that all these interests of Spirit have free play, in order that they may there have their real nature decided, for thoughts constitute the really inner substantiality of the concrete reality of Spirit.

But suppose we leave this conception of the Understanding, and its assertion that the Being of the finite is only its own Being, and not the Being of an Other, not transition itself, and take up the further idea which emphasises the element of knowledge. If it is agreed that Spirit does actually make this transition, then the fact of this transition is not a fact of knowledge, but of Spirit in general, and in a definite sense of faith. It has been sufficiently proved that this act of elevation to God, whether seen in feeling or in faith, or however you choose to define the mode of its spiritual existence, takes place in the inmost part of Spirit, in the region of thought. Religion as representing what concerns the innermost part of Man’s nature has its centre and the root of its movement in thought. God in His Essence is thought, the act of thought itself, just as the ordinary representation of Him and the shape given to Him in the mind, as well as the form and mode in which religion appears, are defined as feeling, intuition, faith, and so on. Knowledge, however, does nothing beyond bringing this inward element into consciousness on its own account, beyond forming a conception of that pulsation of thought in terms of thought. In this, knowledge may appear one-sided, and it may appear all the more as if feeling, intuition, and faith essentially belonged to religion, and were more closely connected with God than His thinking notion and His notion as expressed in thought; but this inner element is present here, and thought just consists in getting a knowledge of it, and rational knowledge in general just means that we know a thing in its essential determinateness.

To have rational knowledge or cognition, to