conceived without limits, but the nature of the understanding releasing, abstracting itself from all limits? As thou thinkest God, such is thy thought;—the measure of thy God is the measure of thy understanding. If thou conceivest God as limited, thy understanding is limited; if thou conceivest God as unlimited, thy understanding is unlimited. If, for example, thou conceivest God as a corporeal being, corporeality is the boundary, the limit of thy understanding, thou canst conceive nothing without a body; if on the contrary thou deniest corporeality of God, this is a corroboration and proof of the freedom of thy understanding from the limitation of corporeality. In the unlimited divine nature thou representest only thy unlimited understanding. And when thou declarest this unlimited being the ultimate essence, the highest being, thou sayest in reality nothing else than this: the être supréme, the highest being, is the understanding.
The understanding is further the self-subsistent and independent being. That which has no understanding is not self-subsistent, is dependent. A man without understanding is a man without will. He who has no understanding allows himself to be deceived, imposed upon, used as an instrument by others. How shall he whose understanding is the tool of another, have an independent will? Only he who thinks, is free and independent. It is only by the understanding that man reduces the things around and beneath him to mere means of his own existence. In general: that only is self-subsistent and independent which is an end to itself, an object to itself. That which is an end and object to itself, is for that very reason—in so far as it is an object to itself—no longer a means and object for another being. To be without understanding is, in one word, to exist for another,—to be an object: to have understanding is to exist for oneself,—to be a subject. But that which no longer exists for another, but for itself, rejects all dependence on another being. It is true, we, as physical beings, depend on the beings external to us, even as to the modifications of thought; but in so far as we think, in the activity of the understanding as such, we are dependent on no other being. Activity of thought is spontaneous activity. “When I think, I am conscious that my ego in me thinks, and not some other thing. I conclude, therefore, that this thinking in me does not inhere in another thing outside of me, but in myself, consequently that I am a substance, i.e.
