P. [158], § 86. Cf. Schelling, iii. 372: I = I expresses the identity between the 'I,' in so far as it is the producing, and the 'I' as the produced; the original synthetical and yet identical proposition: the cogito=sum of Schelling.
P. [159]. Definition of God as Ens realissimum, e.g. Meier's Baumgarten's Metaphysic, § 605.
Jacobi, Werke, iv. 6, thus describes Spinoza's God.
As to the beginning cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 14 (speaking of 'absolute knowing'): 'It is not a knowing of something, nor is it a knowing of nothing (so that it would be a knowing of somewhat, but this somewhat be nothing): it is not even a knowing of itself, for it is no knowledge at all of;—nor is it a knowing (quantitatively and in relation), but it is (the) knowing (absolutely qualitatively). It is no act, no event, or that somewhat is in knowing; but it is just the knowing, in which alone all acts and all events, which are there set down, can be set down.'
History of Philosophy; cf. Hegel, Werke, i. 165. 'If the Absolute, like its phenomenon Reason, be (as it is) eternally one and the same, then each reason, which has turned itself upon and cognised itself, has produced a true philosophy and solved the problem which, like its solution, is at all times the same. The reason, which cognises itself, has in philosophy to do only with itself: hence in itself too lies its whole work and its activity; and as regards the inward essence of philosophy there are neither predecessors nor successors.
'Just as little, as of constant improvements, can there be talk of "peculiar views" of philosophy.... The true peculiarity of a philosophy is the interesting individuality, in which reason has organised itself a form from the materials of a particular age; in it the particular speculative reason finds spirit of its spirit, flesh of its flesh; it beholds itself in it as one and the same, as another living being. Each philosophy is perfect in itself, and possesses totality, like a work of genuine art. As little as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, could have seemed to them mere preliminary exercises for themselves—but as cognate spiritual powers;—so little can reason in its own earlier formations perceive only useful preparatory exercises.' Cf. Schelling, iv. 401.
P. [160], § 86. Parmenides (ap. Simplic. Phys.): of the two ways of investigation the first is that it is, and that not-to-be is not.
ἡ μὲν ὅπως ἓστι τε καὶ ὡς οὐκ ἓστι μὴ εἶναι
P. [161], § 87. The Buddhists. Cf. Hegel, Werke, xi. 387. Modern histories of Buddhism insist upon the purely ethico-religious character of the teaching. Writers like von Hartmann (Religionsphilosophie, p. 320) on the contrary hold that Buddhism carried out the esoteric theory of Brahmanism to the consequence that the abstract one is nothing. According to Vassilief, Le Bouddhisme, p. 318 seqq., one of the Buddhist metaphysical schools, the Madhyamikas, founded by Nâgârdjuna 400 years after Buddha, taught that All is Void.—Such metaphysics were probably reactions of the underlying Brahmanist idea.
But generally Buddhism (as was not unnatural 60 years ago) is hardly taken here in its characteristic historical features.