Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/246

along with God at least, or apart from any God at all. Further, when things are defined as finite, Spirit has risen from them to what is infinite; and when they are defined at the same time as real Being, then Spirit has risen to the Infinite as representing what is ideal or ideal Being. Or if they are expressly defined as having Being in a merely immediate way, then Spirit rises from this pure immediacy, which is a mere semblance of Being, to the Essence, and regards this as representing the ground or basis of Being. It may again rise from them as representing parts, to God as representing the Whole; or from them as external and selfless things, to God as representing the force behind them; or from them as effects, to their cause. All these characteristics are applied to things by thought, and in the same way the categories of Being, the Infinite, the Ideal, Essence and Ground, the Whole, Force, Cause, are used to describe God. It is implied that they may be employed to describe Him, yet still as suggesting that though they may be validly applied to Him, and though God is really Being, the Infinite, Essence, the Whole, Force, and so on, they do not, all the same, exhaust His nature, which is deeper and richer than anything such determinations can express. The advance from any such determination of existence taken as a starting-point and as representing the finite in general, to its final determination, that is, to the Infinite in thought, deserves the name Proof exactly in the same way as those proofs to which the name has been formally given. In this way the number of proofs goes far beyond that of those already mentioned. From what standpoint are we to regard this further increase in the number of the proofs which have thus grown up in what is perhaps for us an unpleasant way? We cannot exactly reject this multiplicity of arguments. On the contrary, when we have once placed ourselves at the standpoint of those mediations of thought which are recognised as proofs, we find we have to explain why in thus adducing them we have confined, and can