Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/360

. Negation is determination or specification, negation of determination is itself an act of determination. To posit a difference, is just to posit a determination. Where there is no negation, there is no difference, no determination.

In this unity, in this absolute Being, there is thus involved determination in general, and it is indeed in it since it is self-determination. It is thus defined as determination which is in itself and does not come from without. This unrest is involved in its very nature as the negation of the negation, and this unrest determines itself more definitely as activity. This determination of Essence in itself is Necessity in itself, the positing of determination, of difference, and the cancelling and absorption of it in such a way that the one is action, and this self-determination thus reached remains in simple relation to itself.

Finite Being does not continue to be an Other; there is no gulf between the Infinite and the finite. The finite is something which cancels itself, loses itself in something higher, so that its truth is the Infinite, what has Being in-and-for-itself. Finite, contingent Being is something which implicitly negates itself, but this negation which it undergoes is just the Affirmative, a transition to affirmation, and this affirmation is the absolutely necessary Essence.

Another form of the argument, the basis of which is constituted by the same characteristic, and which is the same in respect of the characteristic of the form, though the content is greater, is seen in the Physico-theological or Teleological Proof. Here, too, we have finite Being on one side; but it is not determined merely abstractly as Being only, but as something which has in it a determination with a richer content, that of something living. Life taken in its more specific sense implies that there are ends in Nature, and that there is an arrangement in conformity with these ends, which is, at the same time,