Here we have the determination of freedom as such, of an activity as freedom, a working in accordance with freedom, no longer an unhindered working in accordance with power, but a working in accordance with ends. Freedom is self-determination, and what is active has self-determination implicitly as its end in so far as it spontaneously determines itself within itself. Power is simply the act of self-projection, and implies that there is an unreconciled element in what is projected; and though this is implicitly an image or picture of the power, still it is not expressly felt in consciousness that what creates simply preserves and produces itself in its creation in suchwise that the characteristics of the Divine itself appear in the creature. God is here conceived of as possessed of the characteristic of wisdom, of activity in accordance with an end. Power is good and righteous, but action in accordance with an end is what first constitutes this characteristic of rationality, according to which nothing comes out of the act but what had been already previously determined upon, that is, this identity of the creating power with itself.
The difference which exists among the proofs of the existence of God consists simply in the difference of their determination. There is in them a mediation, a starting-point, and a point at which we arrive. In the Teleological and Physico-theological Proofs both points possess in common the characteristic of conformity to an end. We start from a form of Being which is actually characterised as in conformity with an end, and what is thereby mediated is the idea of God as positing and working out an end. Being, considered as the immediate from which we start in the Cosmological Proof, is, to begin with, a manifold, contingent Being. In accordance with this, God is defined as necessity which has Being in-and-for-itself, the force or power which is above the contingent. The higher determination accordingly is, that conformity to an end is present in Being. The
