It is Spirit which after this fashion starts from what is positive but is essentially in it; it must be the true, right spirit, the Holy Spirit which apprehends and knows the Divine, and which apprehends and knows this content as divine. This is the witness of the Spirit, and it may have a more or less developed form.
The main thing, therefore, so far as the Positive is concerned, is that Spirit occupies a thinking relation to things, that it appears in an active form in the categories or specific forms of thought, that Spirit is active here and may take the shape of feeling, reasoning, &c. Some don’t know this, and are not conscious when they have impressions that they are active in receiving them.
Many theologians, while treating their subject exegetically, and as they imagine taking up a purely receptive attitude to what is in the Bible, are not aware that they are at the same time thinking actively and reflecting. Since this kind of thinking is accidental, governed by no necessary laws, it yields itself up to the guidance of the categories of finitude, and is consequently incapable of grasping the divine element in the content; it is not the divine but the human spirit which is actively present in such categories.
It is owing to this finite way of conceiving of the Divine, of what has full and complete Being, what is in and for itself, and to this finite way of thinking of the absolute content, that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity have for the most part disappeared from Dogmatics. At the present time it is philosophy which is not only orthodox, but orthodox par excellence; and it is it which maintains and preserves the principles which have always held good, the fundamental truths of Christianity.
In treating of this religion we do not go to work historically after the fashion of that form of mental action which starts from what is outward, but, on the contrary, we start from the Notion. That form of activity which starts from what is outward takes the shape of some-
