G. W. F. Hegel

“ This is just what the Notion of God, the absolute Notion, God, really is. God as Spirit or as love means that God particularises Himself, begets the Son, creates the world, an Other of Himself, and possesses Himself, is identical with Himself, in this Other. ”

“ God is defined, to begin with, as the absolutely necessary Essence; but this definition, as Kant has already observed, falls very far short of expressing the conception of God. God alone is the absolute necessity, but this definition does not exhaust the conception of God; the definition in which He is described as the universal life-force, the one universal life, is both higher and deeper.
Since life is essentially subjectivity, something living, this universal life is subjective, the νοῦς, a soul. ”

“ No man, however, is content with his mere self-hood. The Ego is active, and this activity shows itself in objectifying self, in giving to it reality, definite existence. In its more extended and concrete signification, this activity of the Notion is impulse. All sense of satisfaction arises through this process whereby subjectivity is done away with, and what is inward and subjective is posited as at the same time outward, objective, and real, that process by which the unity of the merely subjective and merely objective is brought about, and the two are stripped of their one-sidedness. ”

“ When we say that every impulse is an example of the Notion which realises itself, we are saying what is formally correct; the impulse which has received satisfaction is undoubtedly infinite so far as the form is concerned. But the impulse has a content, and so far as the determinate character of its content is concerned, it is finite and limited; in this respect it does not correspond to the Notion, to the pure Notion. ”

“ As against the first proposition that Being ought to follow from the Notion in general, it has been urged that Notion and Being are different from each other: the Notion thus exists for itself, while Being is different. Being must come to the Notion from the outside, from elsewhere. Being is not involved in the Notion. This can be put in a very plausible way by the aid of the hundred thalers.
In ordinary life an idea of a hundred thalers is called a notion or conception. That is not a notion at all in which you may have any kind of determination of content. ”

“ Here, too, we have finite Being on one side; but it is not determined merely abstractly as Being only, but as something which has in it a determination with a richer content, that of something living. ”

“ The true form is: There are finite minds, but the finite has no truth, the truth of the finite spirit is the absolute Spirit.
The finitude of finite minds is no true Being; it is by its very nature dialectic, which implies that it abrogates itself, negates itself, and the negation of this finitude is affirmation as infinitude, as something universal in-and-for-itself. This is the highest form of the transition; for the transition is here Spirit itself.
There are in this connection two characteristics, Being and God. ”

“ Life taken in its more specific sense implies that there are ends in Nature, and that there is an arrangement in conformity with these ends, which is, at the same time, not produced by these ends, so that the orderly arrangement is there independently for itself, and though from a different point of view it may be characterised as an end also, still what is thus actually given shows itself to be in conformity with these ends. ”

“ That is the characteristic note of life in general, and at the same time of life as it actually is, life as seen in the world. This, it is true, is life in itself, inner conformity to an end; but it means that each kind or species of life represents a very narrow sphere, and has a very limited nature. ”

“ The physico-theological method of regarding the world can be merely the study of outward teleological arrangement, and so this way of looking at things has fallen into discredit, and justly too; for here we have to do merely with finite ends, which require means, as, for instance, the fact that Man requires this or that for his animal life. ”

“ The later, broader, and more rational form which represents the development of this thought of Anselm asserts that the conception or Notion of God implies that He is the Substance of all realities, the most real Essence. But Being also is reality, therefore Being belongs to Him. ”

“ The main point thus is that a transition is made from finite life to one universal life, to one end which is articulated into particular ends, in such a way that in this particularisation things are in a condition of harmony and of reciprocal essential relation. ”

“ What has not life—inorganic Nature, the sun, the stars—stands in an essential and direct relation to what has life, and to Man in so far as he in a measure belongs to living Nature, and partly because he sets particular ends before himself. This finite conformity to an end is found in Man. ”

“ If we regard these ends as something primary, and hold that there exist means for the satisfaction of these ends, and that it is God who permits these means to exist for the sake of such ends, then we very soon come to see that this method of regarding things is inadequate to express what God is. ”