of the Platonic dialogues.”  The importance of the work is evidenced by the influence it has exercised over the mind of a later generation; and many readers, to whom Hegel (see Vol.  XIV) is little more than a name, will certainly find here the sources of much that has become familiar as an essential part of the religious atmosphere of a later day, and of the apologies of modern speculative theology.

I.  THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION

The object of religion is the same as that of philosophy; it is the external verity itself in its objective existence; it is God—­nothing but God and the unfolding of God.  Philosophy is not the wisdom of the world, but the knowledge of things which are not of this world.  It is not the knowledge of external mass, of empirical life and existence, but of the eternal, of the nature of God, and of all which flows from His nature.  For this nature ought to manifest and develop itself.  Consequently, philosophy in unfolding religion merely unfolds itself, and in unfolding itself it unfolds religion.  In so far as philosophy is occupied with the eternal truth, the truth which is in and for itself; in so far as it is occupied with this as thinking spirit, rather than in an arbitrary fashion and in view of a particular interest, philosophy has the same sphere of activity as has religion.  And if the religious consciousness aspires to abolish all that is peculiar to itself and to be absorbed in its object, the philosophic spirit likewise plunges with the same energy into its object and renounces all particularity.

Religion and philosophy are thus at one in having one and the same object.  Philosophy, in fact, also is the adoration of God, it is religion; for, seeing that God is its object, it involves the same renunciation of every opinion and every thought that is arbitrary and subjective.  Philosophy is, in consequence, identical with religion.  Only it is religion in a peculiar manner, and this it is which distinguishes it from religion commonly so called.  So philosophy and religion are both religion, and that which distinguishes one from the other is no more than the characteristic mode in which respectively they consider their object, God.

Here is the difficulty of understanding how philosophy can make but one with religion, a difficulty which has even been mistaken for impossibility.  Thence also arise the fears which philosophy inspires in theology and the hostile attitudes which they assume towards each other.  What brings about this attitude is, on the side of theology, that for her philosophy does nothing but corrupt, pull down, and profane the content of religion, and that she understands God in a totally different manner from that after which religion understands Him.  It is the same opposition which long ago among the Greeks caused a free and democratic people like the Athenians to burn books and to condemn Socrates.  In our own day, however, this opposition is considered a thing which it is natural to admit—­more natural indeed than the other opinion concerning the unity of religion and philosophy.