Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/338

 hereby posited as something which thinks, that is, as activity which determines itself in itself. On the contrary, the unity of Being and thought continues to be conceived of as the One, the Unmoved, the Stolid. There is an outward distinction into attributes and modes, movement and will, a distinction effected by the Understanding. The One is not unfolded as self-developing necessity, not, in accordance with what is indicated by its notion, as the process which mediates the necessity with itself and within itself. If the principle of movement is here wanting, it is certainly found in more concrete principles in the flux of Heraclitus, in number too, and so on; but, on the one hand, the unity of Being, the divine self-equality, is not preserved, and, on the other, a principle of this kind stands in exactly the same relation to the ordinary existing world as the Being, the One, or the Substance referred to.

(c.) Besides this One there is, however, the actual contingent world, Being with the quality of the Negative, the realm of limitations and things finite, and in this connection it makes no difference whether this realm is conceived of as a realm of external existence, of semblance or illusion, or, according to the definition of superficial Idealism, as a merely subjective world, a world of consciousness. This manifoldness with its infinite developments is, to begin with, separated from that Substance, and we have to find out in what relation it stands to this One. On the one hand, this definite existence of the world is merely taken for granted. Spinoza, whose system is the most fully developed, starts from definitions, that is, from the actual characteristics of thought and of ordinary ideas in general. The starting-points of consciousness are presupposed. On the other hand, the Understanding forms this accidental world into a system in accordance with the relations or categories of external necessity. Parmenides gives the beginnings of a system of the phenomenal world at the head of which