[18th Paragraph]
|XXIII| This is also what constitutes the more concrete sense of what was designated more abstractly above as the unity of form and content, for the form in its most concrete meaning is reason as comprehending cognition, and the content is reason as the substantial essence of ethical as well as natural actuality; the conscious identity of both is the philosophical idea. – It is a great obstinacy, the obstinacy that does man honor, to refuse to recognize anything in disposition that is not justified through thought—and this obstinacy is the characteristic of the modern age, indeed the peculiar principle of Protestantism. What Luther began as faith in feeling and in the witness of the spirit is the same thing that the further matured spirit strives to grasp in the concept and thus to liberate itself in the present and thereby find itself therein. Just as it has become a famous word that a half-philosophy leads away from God—and it is the same halfness that places cognition in an approximation to truth—but that true philosophy leads to God, so it is the same with the state. Just as reason is not content with approximation, which is neither cold nor hot and is therefore spewed out, so it is just as little satisfied with the cold despair that admits that things go poorly or at best mediocrely in this temporality, but that nothing better is to be had in it and only for that reason is peace to be kept with actuality; it is a warmer peace with it that cognition procures.9)
9) Cf. Hegel’s “Wastebook” (1803–1806): “Original, quite wonderful works in the realm of culture are like a bomb falling into an idle town, where everyone sits over the beer mug, supremely wise, and does not feel that its flat well-being is exactly what brought on the crash of the thunder.”
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