would lose its most essential significance, its true value, its beatifying charm. The divine being is the pure subjectivity of man, freed from all else, from everything objective, having relation only to itself, enjoying only itself, reverencing only itself—his most subjective, his inmost self. The process of discrimination, the separating of the intelligent from the non-intelligent, of personality from nature, of the perfect from the imperfect, necessarily therefore takes place in the subject, not in the object, and the idea of God lies not at the beginning but at the end of sensible existence, of the world, of Nature. “Where Nature ceases, God begins,” because God is the ne plus ultra, the last limit of abstraction. That from which I can no longer abstract is God, the last thought which I am capable of grasping—the last, i.e., the highest. Id quo nihil majus cogitari potest, Deus est. That this Omega of sensible existence becomes an Alpha also, is easily comprehensible; but the essential point is, that he is the Omega. The Alpha is primarily a consequence; because God is the last or highest, he is also the first. And this predicate—the first Being, has by no means immediately a cosmogonic significance, but only implies the highest rank. The creation in the Mosaic religion has for its end to secure to Jehovah the predicate of the highest and first, the true and exclusive God in opposition to idols.
The effort to establish the personality of God through Nature, has therefore at its foundation an illegitimate, profane mingling of philosophy and religion, a complete absence of criticism and knowledge concerning the genesis of the personal God. Where personality is held the essential attribute of God, where it is said—an impersonal God is no God; there personality is held to be in and by itself the highest and most real thing, there it is presupposed that everything which is not a person is dead, is nothing, that only personal existence is real, absolute existence, is life and truth:—but Nature is impersonal, and is therefore a trivial thing. The truth of personality rests only on the untruth of Nature. To predicate personality of God is nothing else than to declare personality as the absolute essence; but personality is only conceived in distinction, in abstraction from Nature. Certainly a merely personal God is an abstract God; but so he ought to be—that is involved in the idea of him; for he is nothing else than the personal nature of man positing itself out of all connexion with the world, making itself free from all depend-
