Christianity and Greek Philosophy / or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

by B. F. Cocker

[Transcriber's note: In the original document, page 64 is a duplication of page 63. The real page 64 seems to be missing.]

....eur, and consequently to develop its true philosophy. Its fundamental error is the assumption that all our knowledge is confined to the observation and classification of sensible phenomena--that is, to changes perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into causes at all."

II. The second hypothesis offered in explanation of the facts of religious history is, that religion is part of that PROCESS OR EVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (i.e., the Deity) which, gradually unfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to the fullest self-consciousness in philosophy.

This is the theory of Hegel, in whose system of philosophy the subjective idealism of Kant culminates in the doctrine of "Absolute Identity." Its fundamental position is that thought and being, subject and object, the perceiving mind and the thing perceived, are ultimately and essentially one, and that the only actual reality is that which results from their mutual relation. The outward thing is nothing, the inward perception is nothing, for neither could exist alone; the only reality is the relation, or rather synthesis of the two; the essence or nature of being in itself accordingly consists in the coexistence of two contrarieties. Ideas, arising from the union or synthesis of two opposites, are therefore the concrete realities of Hegel; and the process of the evolution of ideas, in the human mind, is the process of all existence--the Absolute Idea.

The Absolute(die Idée) thus forms the beginning, middle, and end of the system of Hegel. It is the one infinite existence or thought, of which nature, mind, history, religion, and philosophy, are the manifestation. "The absolute is, with him, not the infinite substance, as with Spinoza; nor the infinite subject, as with Fichte; nor the infinite mind, as with Schelling; it is a perpetual process, an eternal thinking, without beginning and without end." [⁴⁴] This living, eternal process of absolute existence is the God of Hegel.

It will thus be seen that the Absolute is, with Hegel, the sum of all actual and possible existence; "nothing is true and real except so far as it forms an element of the Absolute Spirit." [⁴⁵] "What kind of an Absolute Being," he asks, "is that which does not contain in itself all that is actual, even evil included?" [⁴⁶] The Absolute, therefore, in Hegel's conception, does not allow of any existence out of itself. It is the unity of the finite and the infinite, the eternal and the temporal, the ideal and the real, the subject and the object. And it is not only the unity of these opposites so as to exclude all difference, but it contains in itself, all the differences and opposites as elements of its being; otherwise the distinctions would stand over against absolute as a limit, and the absolute would cease to be absolute.

God is, therefore, according to Hegel, "no motionless, eternally self-identical and unchangeable being, but a living, eternal process of absolute self-existence. This process consists in the eternal self-distinction, or antithesis, and equally self-reconciliation or synthesis of those opposites which enter, as necessary elements, into the constitution of the Divine Being. This self-evolution, whereby the absolute enters into antithesis, and returns to itself again, is the eternal self-actualization of its being, and which at once constitutes the beginning, middle, and end, as in the circle, where the beginning is at the same time the end, and the end the beginning." [⁴⁷]

[Footnote 44: ][ (return) ] Morell, "Hist, of Philos., p. 461."

[Footnote 45: ][ (return) ] "Philos. of Religion," p. 204.