Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/322

 moments which constitute the contingent, to its Other. This would bring us back to the analysis of the first abstract, logical moments, and it is sufficient here to regard contingency as the act of transition in itself, as its cancelling of itself or annulling of itself, as this is ordinarily conceived of.

In the resolution of contingency just described, there is at the same time indicated the second moment, that of absolute necessity, that is, the moment of mediation with self. The moments of contingency are, to begin with, in a relation of antithesis to each other, and each is posited as mediated by its antithesis or Other. In the unity of the two, however, each is something negated, and their difference is consequently done away with, and although we still speak of one of the two, it is no longer related to something different from it, but to itself; we have thus mediation with self.

The speculative way of looking at this accordingly implies that the contingent is known in itself in so far as it is resolved into its parts, and this resolution at first takes the form of an external analysis of this characteristic. It is, however, not merely this, but is really the resolution of that characteristic in itself. The contingent is by its very nature that which resolves itself, disintegrates itself, it is transition in itself. But, in the second place, this resolution is not the abstraction of Nothing, but is rather affirmation within the resolution, that affirmation which we call absolute necessity. It is thus that we form a philosophical conception of this transition. The result is shown to be immanent in the contingent, i.e., it is the very nature of the contingent to revert back to its truth, and the elevation of our spirit to God—in so far as we have provisionally no further definition of God than the description of Him as Absolute Being, or because we for the present rest satisfied with it—is the course of development followed by this movement of the Thing or true fact. It is this Thing or true fact in-and-for-itself which