we might give prominence to the affirmative element which it contains for the knowledge of the at first absolutely general and formal nature of the notion. We must pay attention to this so far as it has reference to the speculative basis and connection of our treatment of the subject in general. This is an aspect of the question which we merely indicate, whereas in itself it can indeed be nothing else but the truly leading one; but it is not our intention to follow it out in our treatment of the subject, or to confine ourselves to it alone.
It may therefore be remarked by way of preliminary, that what was previously called the notion or conception of God for itself and its possibility, is now to be called thought simply, and indeed abstract thought. A distinction was drawn between the notion of God and the possible existence of God. It was only such a notion which was in harmony with possibility, with abstract identity; and so, too, of what was intended to be taken not as the Notion in general but as a particular notion, in fact as the notion of God, nothing remained but simply this very abstract characterless identity.
It is already implied in what has been said that we cannot take any such abstract determination of the Understanding as applicable to the Notion, but rather that we must simply regard it as concrete in itself, as a unity which is not indeterminate but essentially determinate, and thus only as a unity of determinations; and this unity itself, which is thus joined on to its determinations, is therefore nothing but the unity of itself and its determinations, so that apart from the determinations the unity is nothing and disappears, or, more strictly speaking, it is even degraded to the condition of what is merely an untrue determinateness, and requires to get into relation in order to be true and real. To what has just been said, we may further add that such a unity of determinations—and it is they which constitute the content—is therefore not to be taken as a subject to which they are attached as representing several predicates which would
