tion. The psychological truth and necessity which lies at the foundation of all these theogonies and cosmogonies, is the truth and necessity of the imagination as a middle term between the abstract and concrete. And the task of philosophy, in investigating this subject, is to comprehend the relation of the imagination to the reason—the genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling.
But the nature of the imagination is the complete, exhaustive truth of the cosmogonic principle, only where the antithesis of God and the world expresses nothing but the indefinite antithesis of the noumenal, invisible, incomprehensible Being, God, and the visible, tangible existence of the world. If, on the other hand, the cosmogonic being is conceived and expressed abstractly, as is the case in religious speculation, we have also to recognise a more abstract psychological truth as its foundation.
The world is not God; it is other than God, the opposite of God, or at least that which is different from God. But that which is different from God, cannot have come immediately from God, but only from a distinction of God in God. The second Person is God distinguishing himself from himself in himself, setting himself opposite to himself, hence being an object to himself. The self-distinguishing of God from himself is the ground of that which is different from himself, and thus self-consciousness is the origin of the world. God first thinks the world in thinking himself: to think oneself is to beget oneself, to think the world is to create the world. Begetting precedes creating. The idea of the production of the world, of another being who is not God, is attained through the idea of the production of another being who is like God.
This cosmogonical process is nothing else than the mystic paraphrase of a psychological process, nothing else than the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, made objective. God thinks himself:—thus he is self-conscious. God is self-consciousness posited as an object, as a being; but inasmuch as he knows himself, thinks himself, he also thinks another than himself; for to know oneself is to distinguish oneself from another, whether this be a possible, merely conceptional, or a real being. Thus the world—at least the possibility, the idea of the world—is posited with consciousness, or rather conveyed in it. The Son, i.e., God thought by himself,
