Demaris Norman Encounters Racialism P. 2

Mendelssohn is directly opposed to Jacobi, for Mendelssohn took his stand on cognition, placed true existence immediately in thought and conception, and maintained: “What I cannot think as true does not trouble me as doubt. A question which I do not understand, I cannot answer, it is for me as good as no question at all."(2) He continued to argue on these same lines. His proof of the existence of God thus carries with it this necessity of thought, viz. that actuality must plainly be in thought, and a thinker must be pre-supposed, or the possibility of the actual is in the thinker. “What no thinking Being conceives as possible is not possible, and what is thought by no thinking creature as actual cannot be actual in fact. If we take away from anything whatsoever the conception formed by a thinking Being that that thing is possible or actual, the thing itself is done away with.” The Notion of the thing is thus to man the essence of the same. “No finite Being can think the actuality of a thing in its perfection as actual, and still less can he perceive the possibility and actuality of all present things. There must thus be a thinking Being or an understanding which in the most perfect way thinks the content of all possibilities as possible, and the content of all actualities as actual; i.e. there must be an infinite understanding, and this is God."(3) Here on the one hand we see a unity of thought and Being, on the other the absolute unity as infinite understanding — the former is the self-consciousness which is apprehended as finite merely. Actuality, Being, has its possibility in thought, or its possibility is thought; it is not a process from possibility to actuality, for the possibility remains at home in the actuality.


By reason, however, mediate knowledge merely is on the one hand understood, and on the other the intellectual perception which speaks of facts (supra, pp. 413-415). In this respect it is true that reason is the knowledge and revelation of absolute truth, since the understanding is the revelation of the finite (Jacobi's Werke, Vol. II. pp. 8-14, 101). “We maintained that two different powers of perception in man have to be accepted: a power of perception through visible and tangible and consequently corporeal organs of perception, and another kind of power, viz. through an invisible organ which in no way represents itself to the outward senses, and whose existence is made known to us through feeling alone. This organ, a spiritual eye for spiritual objects, has been called by men — generally speaking — reason. He whom the pure feelings of the beautiful and good, of admiration and love, of respect and awe, do not convince that in and with these feelings he perceives something to be present which is independent of them, and which is unattainable by the outward senses or by an understanding directed upon their perceptions alone — such an one cannot be argued with” (Jacobi's Werke, Vol. II. pp. 74, 76). But by faith Jacobi likewise understands all that has immediacy of Being for me: “Through faith we know that we have a body, we become aware of other actual things, and that indeed with the same certainty with which we are aware of ourselves. We obtain all conceptions through the qualities which we receive and accept, and there is no other way of attaining real knowledge; for reason, when it begets objects, begets phantoms of the brain. Thus we have a revelation of nature."(11) Hence the expression faith, which had a deep significance in religion, is made use of for different contents of every kind; this in our own time is the point of view most commonly adopted.