Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/34

 in the form of the Notion, of thought, or as the Notion in a speculative form. However happily expressed those naive forms, such as begetting, son, &c., given to faith, may be, whenever the Understanding takes them in hand and applies its categories to them, they are at once perverted, and whenever it is in the mood it does not cease to point out the contradictions involved in them. It gets the power and the right to do this from the differentiation and reflection into themselves which exist in these forms. But it is just God or Spirit who Himself abolishes these contradictions. He does not require to wait for the Understanding to remove those characteristics which contain contradiction. It is just the very nature of Spirit to remove them; and so, too, it belongs essentially to Spirit to posit these characteristics, to make distinctions within itself, to bring about this separation or diremption.

When, again, we say that the idea of God in His eternal universality implies that He differentiates Himself, determines Himself, posits something that is His Other or object, and at the same time abolishes the difference, is not outside of Himself in the difference, and is Spirit only through what He thus accomplishes, then we get another example of how the Understanding treats the question. It takes up this thought, brings its categories of finitude to bear upon it, counts one, two, three, and introduces into it the unfortunate category of number. Here, however, we have nothing to do with number; numeration is something which implies utter absence of thought, and if we introduce this category here we introduce the element of incomprehensibility.

It is possible in the exercise of Reason to make use of all the categories of the Understanding which imply relation. Reason, however, does not only use them, it destroys them, and so, too, here. This is indeed hard for the Understanding, since it imagines that because they have been made use of they have won some kind of right