Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/313

at least appears great and wide; and yet how thoroughly we realise what human limitation is, when these aims, and plans, and wishes, and all that so long as it is in the mind has no limits, are brought into contact with the reality for which they are intended. All that wide extent of practical imagination, all that endeavour, that aspiration, reveals its narrowness by the very fact that it is only endeavour, only aspiration. It is this finitude with which the attempt to form a conception of the Infinite, to comprehend it, is confronted. The critical Understanding which holds by this principle, supposed to be so convincing, has really not got beyond the stage of culture occupied by that organist in L          , has in fact not even attained to it. The organist used the pictorial idea referred to in the simplicity of his heart, in order to bring the idea of the greatness of God’s love before a peasant community. The critical Understanding, on the other hand, employs finite things in order to bring objection against God’s love and God’s greatness, that is to say, against God’s presence in the human spirit. This Understanding keeps firmly in its mind the midge of finitude, that proposition already considered—the finite is, a proposition the falseness of which is directly evident, for the finite is something the essential character and nature of which consist just in this that it passes away, that it is not, so that it is impossible to think of the finite or form an idea of it apart from the determination of Not-Being, which is involved in the thought of what is transient. Who has got the length of saying, the finite passes away? If the idea of Now is inserted between the finite and its passing away, and if in this way a kind of permanence is supposed to be given to Being—“the finite passes away, but it is now”—then this Now itself is something which not only passes away, but has itself actually passed away, since it is. The very fact that I have this consciousness of the Now, and have put it into words, shows that it is no longer Now, but something