[3] Anselm on the contrary says: Negligentiae mihi videtur, si post-quam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus, quod credimus, intelligere. (Methinks it is carelessness, if, after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not exert ourselves to see the meaning of what we believe.) [Tractat. Cur Deus Homo?] These words of Anselm, in connexion with the concrete truths of Christian doctrine, offer a far harder problem for investigation, than is contemplated by this modern faith.
[CHAPTER VI.]
LOGIC FURTHER DEFINED AND DIVIDED.
79.] In point of form Logical doctrine has three sides: (α) the Abstract side, or that of understanding: (ß) the Dialectical, or that of negative reason: (y) the Speculative, or that of positive reason.
These three sides do not make three parts of logic, but are stages or 'moments' in every logical entity, that is, of every notion and truth whatever. They may all be put under the first stage, that of understanding, and so kept isolated from each other; but this would give an inadequate conception of them.—The statement of the dividing lines and the characteristic aspects of logic is at this point no more than historical and anticipatory.
80.] (α) Thought, as Understanding, sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own.
In our ordinary usage of the term thought and even notion, we often have before our eyes nothing more than the operation of Understanding. And no doubt thought is primarily an exercise of Understanding:—only it goes further, and the notion is not a function of Understanding merely. The action of Understanding may be in general described as investing its subject-matter with the form of universality. But this universal is an abstract universal: that is to say, its opposition to the particular is so rigorously maintained, that it is at the same time also reduced to the character of a particular again. In this separating and abstracting attitude towards its objects, Understanding is the reverse of immediate perception and sensation, which, as such, keep completely to their native sphere of action in the concrete.
It is by referring to this opposition of Understanding to sensation or feeling that we must explain the frequent attacks made upon thought for being hard and narrow, and for leading, if consistently developed, to ruinous and pernicious results. The answer to these charges, in so far as they are warranted by their facts, is, that they do not touch thinking in general, certainly not the thinking of Reason, but only the exercise of Understanding. It must be added however, that the merit and rights of the mere Understanding should unhesitatingly be admitted. And that merit lies in the fact, that apart from Understanding there is no fixity or accuracy in the region either of theory or of practice.