Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/377

 only. It is not seen to be there merely by us; but, on the contrary, the Notion is actual Being, Being for itself also. It abolishes its subjectivity, and objectifies itself. Man realises his ends; that is, what was, to begin with, merely ideal loses its one-sidedness, and is consequently made into something which has Being. The Notion shows itself eternally in that activity whereby Being is posited as identical with itself. In perception, feeling, &c., we have outward objects before us; but we take them up into ourselves, and thus the objects are ideal in us. The Notion is thus the continuous act whereby it abolishes its difference. When we regard closely the nature of the Notion, we see that this identity with Being is no longer a presupposition, but a result. The course of procedure is as follows: the Notion makes itself objective, turns itself into reality, and is thus the truth, the unity of subject and object. God is an immortal living Being, says Plato, whose body and soul are united in one. Those who separate the two sides do not get beyond what is finite and untrue.

The standpoint which we here occupy is the Christian one. We have here the Notion of God in its entire freedom. This Notion is identical with Being. Being is the poorest of all abstractions; but the Notion is not so poor as not to contain this determination in it. We have not to deal with Being in the poverty of abstraction, in immediacy in its bad form, but with Being as the Being of God, as absolutely concrete Being, distinguished from God. The consciousness of finite Spirit is concrete Being, the material for the realisation of the Notion of God. Here it is not a question of any addition of Being to the Notion, or merely of a unity of the Notion and Being—such expressions are awkward and misleading. The unity is rather to be conceived of as an absolute process, as the living movement of God, and this means that the two sides are distinguished from each other, while the process is thought of as that absolute,