Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/354

 which is not posited as existing in the organic itself. The living being develops out of the germ, and the development is the action of the limbs, the internal organs, and so on; the soul is the unity which brings this about. The truth, however, of organic and inorganic Nature here also is simply the essential relation between the two, their unity and inseparability. This unity is a third something which is neither the one nor the other. It is not found in immediate existence. The absolute determination which brings both, the organic as well as the inorganic, into unity, namely, the subject, is the organic; while the other appears as object, but changes itself into the predicate of the organic, into something which is held to belong to it. This is the reciprocal element in this relation. Both are put into one, and in this one each is something dependent and conditioned. We might call this third something, the thought to which consciousness raises itself, God, using the word in a general sense. It falls, however, very far short of the Notion of God. Taken in this sense, it represents the activity of production, which is a judgment whereby both sides are produced together. In the one Notion they harmonise and exist for one another. The thought to which we rise, namely, that the truth of the relation of ends is this third something, is thus absolutely correct, taking that third thing in the sense in which it has just been defined. Taken thus, however, it is defined in a formal way, and the definition rests, in fact, on something whose truth it is. It is itself living activity; but this is not yet Spirit, rational action. The correspondence between the Notion as representing the organic, and reality as representing the inorganic, simply expresses the essence of life itself. It is involved in a more definite form in what the ancients called the νοῦς. The world is a harmonious whole, an organic life which is determined in accordance with ends. It was this which the ancients held to be νοῦς, and, taken in a more