Great Throughts Treasury

"The proposition: the movement of the concept is the universal absolute activity leaves nothing left for God than the movement of the concept, i.e. than for himself to be only the concept. The concept does not have the meaning here of just the concept (Hegel protests most vigorously against this), but instead the meaning of the thing itself (Sache selbst), and in the same way as the Zoroastrians say that the true creator is time, one admittedly cannot reproach Hegel with holding the opinion that God is just a concept; his opinion is rather: the true creator is the concept; with the concept one has the creator and needs no other outside this creator."

"The reality of God is not just a postulation made by morality; rather, only he who recognizes God — in whatever way — is a truly moral person. Moral laws ought to be obeyed not because they are related to God as the lawmaker (or whatever other relationship the finite mind is able to conceive) but because the essence of God and that of morality are one and the same and because by acting morally we are revealing the essence of God. A moral world exists only if God exists, and to postulate His existence in order for a moral world to exist is a complete reversal of the true and necessary relations."

"The one basic prejudice, to which all others reduce, is no other than this: that there are things outside us. This is a conviction that rests neither on grounds nor on inferences (since there is not a single reputable proof of it) and yet cannot be extirpated by any argument to the contrary (naturam furea expellas, tamen usque redibit); it makes claim to immediate certainty, since it assuredly relates to something entirely different from us, and even opposed to us, of which we understand not at all how it enters into immediate consciousness; and hence it can be regarded as nothing more than a prejudice – innate and primary, to be sure – but no less a prejudice on that account."

"The soul is not eternal because its duration is without beginning or end but rather because it has no relationship to time at all. Therefore, it cannot be called immortal in a sense that would include an individual continuity. Since this could not be conceived of independent of finitude and the body, immortality would only be a continued mortality and an ongoing imprisonment of the soul rather than a liberation."

"There would be no real history of the world without a free beginning. Those who could not understand the free beginning also could not find the access to real history."

"Whoever holds that good can be recognized without evil commits the greatest of all errors, for in philosophy, as in Dante's poem, the path toward heaven leads through the abyss."

"What we call the world, which is so completely contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression of something which has arisen by the necessity of reason… it contains a preponderant mass of unreason."

"The visible universe is not dependent because it has a beginning in time but rather by virtue of its nature or concept. It genuinely has neither begun nor not begun, for it is a mere nonbeing, and a nonbeing can no more come into being as not come into being."

"You recognize its [the earth's] true essence only in the link by which it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its things and again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do not imagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it, there is another earth which is the unity of these things, rather the same which is the multiplicity is also unity, and what the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what you call its existence (…) Existence is the link of a being (Wesen) as One, with itself as a multiplicity."

"What Hegel primarily sought to avoid was precisely that God, as, of course, it could not be otherwise within a logical philosophy, should only be posited in the concept. For him God was not both just a concept and the concept God; for him the concept had the meaning that it was God. His opinion is: God is nothing but the concept which step by step becomes the self-conscious Idea (Idee), as self-conscious Idea releases itself into nature, and, returning from nature into itself, becomes absolute spirit."