G. W. F. Hegel

“ He calls the Cosmological Proof, as he does the Ontological, a transcendental proof, because it is independent of empirical principles; that is to say, it is supposed to be established, not by reasoning from any particular quality of experience whatsoever, but from pure principles of reason, and even abandons that method of deduction according to which existence is given through empirical consciousness, in order to base itself on what are simply pure conceptions. What better method indeed could philosophical proof adopt than that of basing itself only on pure conceptions? ”

“ It is almost superfluous to remark that since Being is conceived of as subject and finitude as simply one characteristic, and, in fact, as the subsequent predicate shows, as a purely transitory characteristic, when we are dealing with the proposition taken by itself alone: Being is infinite, or is to be characterised as infinite, we must by the term Being understand Being as such, and not empirical Being, not the moral finite world. ”

“ The most concrete determination of the finitude of Being is contingency, and in the same way the infinitude of Being in its most completely determined form is necessity. Being in its own essentiality is reality, and reality is in itself the general relation between contingency and necessity which finds its complete determination in absolute necessity. Finitude, by being taken up into this thought-determination, has the advantage, so to speak, of being so far prepared by this means as to point in itself to the transition to its truth or necessity. ”

“ By the term world, however, we understand the aggregate of material things, the collection merely of that infinite number of existing things which are actually visible, and each of which is, to begin with, conceived of as existing for itself. The world embraces men equally with natural things. When the world is thus taken as an aggregate, and even as an aggregate merely of natural things, it is not conceived of as Nature, by which we understand something which is in itself a systematic Whole, a system of arrangements and gradations, and particularly of laws. ”

“ If things were thus defined in a general way as existing, it might be shown that the truth of existence as determinate Being, was Being itself, indeterminate, limitless Being. God would thus be defined as Being—the most abstract of all definitions, and the one with which, as is well known, the Eleatics started. We recall this abstraction most vividly in connection with the distinction already made between thought in its inner and implicit form and the bringing forward of thoughts into consciousness. Who is there who does not use the word Being? ”

“ What the study of the finite from a speculative point of view really yields, is not merely the thought, that if the finite exists, the Infinite exists too, not that Being is to be defined as not merely finite, but that it is further to be defined as infinite. If the finite were this affirmative, the major proposition would be the proposition—finite Being as finite is infinite, for it would be its permanent finitude which the Infinite included in itself. ”

“ Only we all the more frequently hear conceptions spoken of simply as abstract specific forms of thought, so that it is no longer necessary to indicate what we mean when we ask information regarding the notion or conception of anything, or when, in fact, we wish to form a conception of any object. It has, however, quite become a generally accepted principle, or rather it has come to form part of the belief of this age, that reason should be reproached with putting its investigations in the form of pure conceptions, and even that this should be reckoned a crime ”

“ If it starts from something which has a transitory character, it loses all support, and cannot, in fact, have any existence at all. If we consider the form of the judgment more closely, it will be seen that what has just been explained is involved in the form itself, and, in fact, the judgment is what it is just owing to its form. It has, that is, for its subject something immediate, something which has Being in general, while as its predicate, which is meant to express what the subject is, it has something universal, namely, thought. ”

“ Thus, when it is said that God is infinite, eternal, and so on, God is, to begin with, as a subject simply something hypothetical, existing in idea, and it is only in the predicate that it is first asserted what He is. ”

“ The consideration of Kant’s criticism of the Cosmological Proof comes to be all the more interesting from the fact that, according to Kant, this proof has concealed in it “a whole nest of dialectic assumptions, which, nevertheless, transcendental criticism is able to lay bare and destroy.” I shall first restate this proof in the form in which it is usually expressed, which is the one employed by Kant, and which runs thus: If anything exists—not merely exists, but exists a contingentia mundi, is defined as contingent—then some absolutely necessary Essence must exist as well. ”

“ In so far as the human heart has been checked in this matter of elevation to God by the Understanding, faith has, on the one hand, appealed to it to hold fast by this elevation, and not to trouble itself with the fault-finding of the Understanding; but it has, on the other hand, told itself not to trouble about proof at all, in order that it may reach what is the surest standing ground, and in the interest of its own simplicity it has ranged itself on the side of the critical Understanding in direct opposition to proof. ”

“ The sole question is as to how we can begin to show that anything starts from itself, or rather how we can combine the two ideas that the Infinite starts from an Other, and yet in doing this starts equally from itself. ”

“ Thus also the transition from the one stage to the higher stage presents itself as a necessary advance in more concrete and deeper determination, and not only as a series of random conceptions, and so as an advance to perfectly concrete truth, to the full and perfect manifestation of the Notion, to the equating or identification of these its manifestations with itself. Logic is, so far, metaphysical theology, which treats of the evolution of the Idea of God in the æther of pure thought, and thus concerns itself peculiarly with this Idea, which is perfectly independent in-and-for-itself. ”

“ If the circumstance that the contradiction such as it is here held to be, and such as it actually is, is not directly solved, implies a defect, then the defect would as a matter of fact have to be transferred to the so-called things— which are partly merely empirical and finite, but are also partly that Thing-in-itself which is incapable of manifesting itself—rather than to reason, which, even as understood by Kant, is the faculty which deals with ideas, with the Unconditioned and the Infinite. ”

“ Only the starting-point is not a matter of indifference, and the whole point just is to find out why it is not. The question is not as to whether or not we are to begin with one or other of the presuppositions, that is, with the immediate characteristic, the ordinary idea; but rather, what we have got to see is that no beginning can be made with any such presupposition, that is, that it cannot be regarded and treated as forming the basis, the permanent foundation of the proof. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Faith will not allow itself to be robbed of its right of rising to God, that is, of its witness to the truth, because this is inherently necessary, and is more than any single chance fact connected with Spirit. ”

“ As is well known, the effect of the criticism directed by Kant against the metaphysical proofs of the existence of God has been that these arguments have been abandoned, and that they are no longer mentioned in any scientific treatise on the subject; in fact, one is almost ashamed to adduce them at all. It is allowed, however, that they may be used in a popular way, and these helps to truth are universally employed in connection with the instruction of youth, and the edification of those who are grown up. ”

“ If, in accordance with the definition previously given, we speak of Being in more definite terms as the subject of the judgment, the proposition will run thus: “Being is to be defined not as finite only but also as infinite.” ”

“ The other assertion is that the intellectual conception of the contingent cannot form the basis of a synthetic proposition such as that of causality. As a matter of fact, it is by means of this intellectual category of contingency that the temporal world as present to perception is conceived of; and by employing this very category which is an intellectual one, thought has already passed beyond the world of sense, and transferred itself to another sphere, without having found it necessary to endeavour to pass beyond the world of sense by using first of all the category of causality. ”

“ The proposition which ought to constitute the major proposition of the syllogism must accordingly take the following form rather: the Being of the finite is not its own Being, but is, on the contrary, the Being of its Other, namely, the Infinite. Or to put it otherwise, Being which is characterised as finite possesses this characteristic only in the sense that it cannot exist independently in relation to the Infinite, but is, on the contrary, ideal merely, a moment of the Infinite. ”

“ This difference disappears, however, when we consider that Being, since it is the Immediate, is directly differentiated from the characteristic of the Infinite, and is, as a direct consequence of this, characterised simply as finite. The logical nature which thus belongs to Being or immediacy in general is, however, presupposed as given by logic. This characteristic of the finitude of Being, however, comes directly into view in the connection in which Being here stands. For the Infinite, in resolving to become Being, determines itself to what is other than itself ”

“ Here everything sinks under us, and floats without support or foothold in the presence merely of speculative reason, while it costs the latter nothing to allow the greatest as well as the smallest perfection to go. ”

“ This is the kind of starting-point from which the spirit raises itself to God. It adjudges limited, finite or contingent Being to be untrue Being, above and beyond which true Being exists. It escapes into the region of another, unlimited Being, which represents the Essence as opposed to that unessential, external Being. The world of finitude, of things temporal, of change, of transitoriness, is not the true form of existence, but the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable. ”

“ But in truth reason can in any case bear the weight of the contradiction, and can certainly solve it too; and things, at all events, know how to bear it, or rather, we should say, they are only contradiction in the form of existence ”

“ The objective side, however, as such is contained in the self-unfolding of the Infinite into Being and finitude, which, just because of this, is merely momentary and transitory—transitory merely, in virtue of the infinitude whose manifestation it merely is, and which represents the force in it. The so-called Cosmological Proof is of use solely in connection with the effort to bring into consciousness what the inner life, the pure rational element of the inner movement, really is, and which, regarded in its subjective aspect, is called religious elevation. ”

“ And even if what we have called limitless Being, the Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, does not succeed in expressing the absolute fulness of meaning contained in the word God, still God is limitless Being, He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, and thus the spirit rises at least to those divine predicates or to those fundamental qualities of His nature which, though abstract, are yet universal, or at least to that universal region, to the pure æther in which God dwells. ”

“ These general forms of thought do certainly pass through men’s minds, as we say, because men are thinking beings, and when they have received a fixed form in language they are still further developed into the conscious thought upon which the proof proper is based, but even in that case they take, to begin with, the form of characteristics of concrete objects; they don’t require to get a fixed place in consciousness as independent in their own right. ”

“ This elevation of the soul to God is, speaking generally, that fact in the history of the human spirit which we call religion, but religion in a general sense, that is, in a purely abstract sense, and thus this elevation is the general, but merely the general, basis of religion. ”

“ It is quite possible that individuals and nations belonging to an earlier age, or who, while belonging to our age, are living outside the pale of Christianity and of our civilisation, might have no more profound idea of God than this. ”

“ In the case of Kant we see, at any rate, in his treatment of the subject, the definite presuppositions from which he starts, and the logical result of the reasoning process he follows, so that any opinion arrived at is expressly reached and proved by means of principles, and it is held that any view must be deduced from principles, and be, in fact, of a philosophical kind. ”