The Doctrine of Right, Duties and Religion for the Lower Class

[p. 273]

§ 73

The elevation above the sensible and finite constitutes, negatively, from our side, the mediation of this knowledge, but only insofar as one indeed sets out from the sensible and finite, but at the same time leaves it and knows it in its nullity. But this knowledge of the absolute is itself an absolute and immediate knowledge and cannot have something finite as its positive ground or be mediated, as by a proof, through something that it is not itself.

§ 74

This knowledge must determine itself more closely and not remain inner feeling, faith in the indeterminate essence in general, but become a cognition of it. The cognition of God is not above reason – for this is only the reflected radiance of God and is essentially the knowledge of the absolute -, but that cognition is only above the understanding, the knowledge of the finite and relative.

§ 75

Religion itself consists in the occupation of feeling and thought with the absolute essence and in the making present of its representation, with which the self-forgetfulness of one’s particularity in this elevation, and acting in this sense, with regard to the absolute essence, is necessarily bound up.

§ 76

God is the absolute spirit, i.e. he is the pure essence that makes itself into object, but therein only intuits itself, or in its becoming other returns absolutely into itself and is equal to itself.

§ 77

God is, according to the moments of his essence, 1. absolutely holy, insofar as he is the essence universal absolutely in itself. He is