experience — a procedure which can result only in sophistry — much less by assuming moral postulates which could not escape the charge of being arbitrary. Its object is attained by showing the gradually developing revelation of the controlling and purposive reason of God throughout the entire world-order. Here it must not be forgotton that the world-order in each of its phases, the natural, moral, and religious, includes both consciousness and the external world, and consists in their uniform correlation, that is to say, in the fact that each of these two factors is related to and determined by the other. The fact that thinking and being, moral personality and society, are so correlated that they develop in constant conformity with one another, and that neither can be conceived without its counterpart, forces us to presuppose a transcendental unity which manifests itself in this double order and reciprocal relation. In short, we are compelled to find in the world-order a manifestation of God. Furthermore, the different sides and stages which the world-order offers to view allow a more complete determination of the idea of God. In the natural world-order, that correlation of consciousness and existence, we find the divine revelation as all-consciousness and omnipotence. In the moral world-order, that correlation of conscience and social laws, the divine revelation manifests itself as holiness and justice. Finally, in the plan of salvation (as it culminates in Christianity) we discover the divine revelation as love and wisdom. The theoretical contemplation of the universe as the divine revelation gives to the religious idea of God its content and at the same time its rational ground. We are, indeed, able to comprehend the essence of God, but only in so far as this is manifested in the world-order as an efficient cause. To be sure, God is not identical with this order of the universe. An order presupposes and is the manifestation of an active ordering subject. But no subject is entirely exhausted by its external effects: it has also an inner side, a being-for-itself, which reflects and unites its manifold effects into a persistent unity. The laws of logic demand that this same thought be applied to God. Here, indeed, we have reached the limits of what is knowable.
