Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/346

 with an end is the condition, and the existence of God is apparently asserted to be something mediated or conditioned. This is an objection upon which Jacobi laid special stress. We try, he says, to reach the unconditioned through the conditions. But, as we have already seen, this merely seems to be the case, and this false impression disappears of itself when we reach the real meaning of the result. So far as this meaning is concerned, it will be allowed that the process is merely the course followed by subjective knowledge. This mediation does not attach to God Himself. He is certainly the Unconditioned, infinite activity which determines itself in accordance with ends, and which has arranged the world on a teleological plan. We do not imagine, when we speak of that process of knowledge, that these conditions from which we start precede that infinite activity. On the contrary, this represents the process of subjective knowledge only, and the result we reach is that it is God who has established these teleological arrangements, and that therefore they represent something established in the first instance by Him, and are not to be regarded as something fundamental. The ground or principle from which we start disappears in what is characterised as the true principle. This is the meaning of the conclusion, that what conditions is itself in turn explained to be the conditioned. The result declares that to posit as the foundation what is itself conditioned would be to introduce a defective element. This procedure accordingly, both actually and as regards its end, is not merely subjective, not something which goes on merely in thought; on the contrary, this defective side is itself removed by means of the result. The objective thus asserts its presence in this form of knowledge. There is not only an affirmative transition here, but there is also a negative moment in it, which is not, however, posited in the form of the syllogism. There is therefore a mediation which is the negation of the first immediacy. The course followed by