G. W. F. Hegel

“ If we go by what our senses show us, we find much that is good in the world, but also an infinite quantity of evil, and we would just have to reckon up the amount of evil, and the amount of good which does not attain realisation, in order to discover which preponderates. The Good, however, is something absolutely substantial; it belongs to the very essence of its nature that it should be realised. But it is something which merely ought to be real, for it cannot reveal itself in experience. It stops short with being something which ought to exist, something which is a postulate. ”

“ When, accordingly, we start with the ordinary conception of God, the Philosophy of Religion has to consider its signification—this, namely, that God is the Idea, the Absolute, the Essential Reality which is grasped in thought and in the Notion, and this it has in common with logical philosophy; the logical Idea is God as He is in Himself. But it is just the nature of God that He should not be implicit or in Himself only. He is as essentially for Himself, the Absolute Spirit, not only the Being who keeps Himself within thought, but who also manifests Himself, and gives Himself objectivity. ”

“ The knowledge that all men have imagined, believed, known this, carries with it a tremendous authority. How could any man resist it and say, I alone contradict all that all men picture to themselves as true, what many of them have perceived to be the truth by means of thought, and what all feel and believe to be the truth. If, to start with, we leave out of account the force of such a proof, and look at the dry substance of it which is supposed to rest on an empirical and historical basis, it will be seen to be both uncertain and vague. ”

“ But when once we have become conscious of the difference of these two spheres, we must pronounce the relation of equality in which faith and reason are to be regarded as standing each alongside of the other, to be unintelligible, or else to be a misleading pretence. The tendency of thought to seek unity leads of necessity to the comparison of these spheres first of all, and then when they once pass for different, to the agreement of faith with itself alone, and of thought with itself alone, so that each sphere refuses to recognise the other and rejects it. ”

“ In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where its appearance becomes identified with its essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will indicate the nature of absolute knowledge itself. ”

“ Religion as representing what concerns the innermost part of Man’s nature has its centre and the root of its movement in thought. God in His Essence is thought, the act of thought itself, just as the ordinary representation of Him and the shape given to Him in the mind, as well as the form and mode in which religion appears, are defined as feeling, intuition, faith, and so on. Knowledge, however, does nothing beyond bringing this inward element into consciousness on its own account, beyond forming a conception of that pulsation of thought in terms of thought. ”

“ It is as absurd to give such ideas a place in our thoughts as it is absurd to say of the Christian religion that by it God has been revealed to Man, and to maintain at the same time that what has been revealed is that He is not now revealed and has not been revealed.
On God’s part there can be no obstacle to a knowledge of Him through men. The idea that they are not able to know God must be abandoned when it is admitted that God has a relation to us, and since our spirit has a relation to Him, God exists for us, or, as it has been expressed, He communicates Himself and has revealed Himself. ”

“ Thus the moments of the notion or conception of religion appear on lower stages of development, though as yet in the shape of anticipations or presentiments, as natural flowers and creations of fancy which have, so to speak, blossomed forth by chance. What determines the characteristics of these stages, however, through their entire history, is the determinateness of the notion itself, which can at no stage be absent. The thought of the Incarnation, for example, pervades every religion. Such general conceptions make their presence felt too in other spheres of Spirit. ”

“ It is entirely out of place, it is indeed preposterous, to bring forward these categories, such as immediacy, fact of consciousness, in opposition to philosophy, and to meet philosophy with the reply that the finite is different from the infinite, and the object from the subject, as if there were any one, any philosopher whatever, who did not know this, or had still to learn such trivialities. Yet people are not ashamed to parade triumphantly cleverness of this sort, as if they had made a new discovery. ”

“ What is determined as insufficient for the aim of the Spirit, which is the absorption into its very nature of what is infinite, eternal, divine, is the activity of the Spirit which in thinking proceeds by means of abstraction, inference, and proof. This view, itself the product of the mode of thought characteristic of the period, has jumped straight over to the other extreme in giving out a proofless, immediate knowledge, an unreasoning faith, a feeling devoid of thought, as the only way of grasping and having within oneself divine truth. ”

“ Knowledge demands, in short, that it should have the content in itself and should follow it. The knowledge which has an absolutely necessary, infinite content must itself be absolutely necessary and infinite. ”

“ Not only is it very difficult to have a clear and definite consciousness of what abstraction is and what is the nature of its inner connection, but this power of abstraction is itself the real danger, and this is a danger which is unavoidable when abstraction has once appeared, when the believing human spirit has once tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, and thought has begun to spring up within it in the free and independent form which peculiarly belongs to it. ”

“ Criticism which leads to a negative result is not merely a sorry business, but, in confining itself to the task of showing that a certain content is vain, it is itself a vain exercise, an exertion of vanity. In defining those proofs as the grasping in thought of what we have called the elevation of the soul to God, we declared that in criticism we must directly reach an affirmative content. ”

“ If the philosophical knowledge of religion is conceived of as something to be reached historically only, then we should have to regard the theologians who have brought it to this point as clerks in a mercantile house, who have only to keep an account of the wealth of strangers, who only act for others without obtaining any property for themselves. They do, indeed, receive salary, but their reward is only to serve, and to register that which is the property of others. Theology of this kind has no longer a place at all in the domain of thought ”

“ The heart is the ground or basis which contains in itself and preserves the essential nature of feelings, independent of the fleeting nature of their succession in consciousness. In this their unbroken unity—for the heart expresses the simple pulse of the living spirit—religion is able to penetrate the different kinds of feeling, and to become for them the substance which holds, masters, and rules them. ”

“ When in the course of knowledge we advance from Nature to Spirit, and Nature is defined as simply a moment of Spirit, we do not reach a true multiplicity, a substantial two, the one of which would be Nature, and the other Spirit; but, on the contrary, the Idea which is the substance of Nature, having taken on the deeper form of Spirit, retains in itself that content in this infinite intensity of ideality, and is all the richer because of the determination of this ideality itself, which is in-and-for-itself, self-conscious, or Spirit. ”

“ In its character as feeling, this condition of freedom is the sense of satisfaction which we call blessedness, while as activity it has nothing further to do than to manifest the honour of God and to reveal His glory, and in this attitude it is no longer with himself that man is concerned—with his own interests or his empty pride—but with the absolute end. All the various peoples feel that it is in the religious consciousness they possess truth, and they have always regarded religion as constituting their true dignity and the Sabbath of their life. ”

“ Philosophy thinks what otherwise exists only for the ordinary idea and sensuous perception. Man who thus forms general ideas, is in his character as Man a thinking being also, and the substance of religion comes to him as a being who thinks. It is only a thinking being that can have a religion, and to think is also to form ideas, though the former act alone is the free form of truth. The Understanding thinks too, but it does not get beyond identity; for it the Notion is Notion, and Being is Being. ”

“ But this unavoidable admission expresses the truth that this knowledge, knowledge for certain, this abstraction, may have a content of the most diverse and opposite kind, and the proof of the content must lie just in this assurance of being certain, of faith. But what man will come forward and say, Only that which I know and know as certain is true; what I know as certain is true just because I know it as certain. Truth stands eternally over against mere certainty, and neither certainty, nor immediate knowledge, nor faith decides what is truth. ”

“ If the object, God, is in itself capable of producing exaltation of mind by its very name, and of stirring our soul to its innermost depths, our lofty expectation may just as quickly die away when we reflect that it is the proofs of the existence of God with which we are about to concern ourselves. For the proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to the metaphysics of days gone by; a barren desert, out of which we have escaped and brought ourselves back to a living faith ”

“ This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself—on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experience. ”

“ This lofty demand is to the wisdom of our time an empty sound. It has made of God an infinite phantom, which is far from us, and in like manner has made human knowledge a futile phantom of finiteness, or a mirror upon which fall only shadows, only phenomena. ”

“ Regarded in this fashion, the harmony which exists between the organic and the inorganic is held to be accidental. There is here no necessity to begin and ask about a unity. The presence of design is itself affirmed to be accidental. Now, here is what is really involved in this conception. What, speaking generally, we call inorganic Nature as such is thought of as having an independent existence, while the organic is attached to it in an external fashion, so that it is a mere matter of chance whether or not the organic finds the conditions of existence in what confronts it. ”

“ Piety does not weary of lifting up its eyes to God on all and every occasion, although it may do so daily and hourly in the same manner. But as religious feeling, it really rests in singleness or single instances; it is in every moment wholly what it is, and is without reflection and the consciousness which compares experiences. It is here, on the contrary, where knowledge and self-determination are concerned, that this comparison, and the consciousness of that sameness, are essentially present, and then a general proposition is enunciated once for all. ”