When the matter is regarded from this standpoint of immediate knowledge, what is said is this. It is a fact of consciousness that I have the idea of God, and along with this idea, Being must be given, so that Being is bound up with the content of the idea. If it is said that we believe it, that we know it immediately, then the unity of the idea and Being is expressed in the form of the presupposition just exactly as it is in Anselm’s argument, and we have not got one bit further. This is the presupposition we everywhere meet with in Spinoza too. He defines the Absolute Cause, Substance, as that which cannot be thought of as not existing, the conception of which involves existence; that is, the idea of God is directly bound up with Being.
This inseparableness of Notion and Being is found in an absolute form only in the case of God. The finitude of things consists in the fact that the Notion, and the determinate form of the Notion, and the Being of the Notion, are essentially different. The finite is what does not correspond to its notion or rather to the Notion.
We have the notion of Soul; the reality, the Being is represented by the corporeal form. Man is mortal; we express this truth also by saying, Soul and body can part. There we have the fact of separation, but in the pure Notion we have the inseparableness referred to.
When we say that every impulse is an example of the Notion which realises itself, we are saying what is formally correct; the impulse which has received satisfaction is undoubtedly infinite so far as the form is concerned. But the impulse has a content, and so far as the determinate character of its content is concerned, it is finite and limited; in this respect it does not correspond to the Notion, to the pure Notion.
This is the explanation of what is involved in the standpoint of the knowledge of the Notion. What was considered last was the knowledge of God, the certainty of the existence of God in general. The essential thought
