Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/314

 different. It lasts, it is true, but not as this particular Now, and Now can only mean this actual Now, in this particular moment, something without length, a mere point. It continues, in fact, only as being the negation of this particular Now, as the negation of the finite, and consequently as the Infinite, the Universal. The Universal is already infinite. That respect for the Infinite which keeps the Understanding from finding the Infinite in every Universal ought to be called a silly respect. The Infinite is lofty and majestic, but to place its grandeur and majesty in that countless swarm of midges, and to find the infinitude of knowledge in the knowledge of those countless midges, that is, of the individual midges, is a proof of the impotence, not of faith, of Spirit, or of reason, but of the Understanding to conceive of the finite as a nullity, and of its Being as something which has equally the value and signification which belong to Not-Being.

Spirit is immortal; it is eternal; and it is immortal and eternal in virtue of the fact that it is infinite, that it has no such spatial finitude as we associate with the body when we speak of it being five feet in height, two feet in breadth and thickness, that it is not the Now of time, that the content of its knowledge does not consist of these countless midges, that its volition and freedom have not to do with the infinite mass of existing obstacles, nor of the aims and activities which such resisting obstacles and hindrances have to encounter. The infinitude of Spirit is its inwardness, in an abstract sense its pure inwardness, and this is its thought, and this abstract thought is a real, present infinitude, while its concrete inwardness consists in the fact that this thought is Spirit.

Thus, after starting with the absolute separation of the two sides, we have come back to their connection, and it makes no difference whether this connection is represented as existing in the subjective or objective sphere. The only question is as to whether it has been correctly