the Universal is my object, are one and the same. Here I renounce myself actually and really. Working and living in objectivity is the true confession of finiteness, is real humility.
It may be remarked that it is an essential characteristic of thought that it is mediated action or activity, mediated Universality,—which as negation of negation is affirmation. It is mediation by the annulling of mediation. Universality, Substance, for instance, are thoughts which exist only through negation of the negation. Thus the mode of immediacy is contained here, but no longer it only. And hence the expression that we have immediate knowledge of God: knowledge is pure activity, and only negates the impure, the immediate. We can know God in an empirical manner; this universal Object is then immediately before me without demonstration. This immediacy in the empirical subject is itself partly a result of much mediation, and partly it is only one phase of this activity. A difficult piece of music can be played with ease after it has been gone through by frequent repetition of single passages; it is played with immediate activity as the result of so many mediatory actions. The same is the case with habit, which has become like a second nature to us. The simple result seen in the discovery of Columbus was the consequence of many detached acts and deliberations, which had preceded it.
The nature of such an activity is different from its outward appearance. Thus the nature of thought is this identity with itself, this pure transparency of the activity, which in itself is negation of the negative. Thought is the result which renders itself immediate, which appears as immediate.
I am therefore determined in relation to the object as thinking; and not in philosophy merely, but also in religion in its affirmative form, in devotion, which has its origin in thinking and in what is thought, does God exist for me. This thinking of the Universal, then, is a
