....eur, and consequently to develop its true philosophy. Its fundamental error is the assumption that all our knowledge is confined to the observation and classification of sensible phenomena--that is, to changes perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into causes at all." II. The second hypothesis offered in explanation of the facts of religious history is, _that religion is part of that_ PROCESS OR EVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (_i.e._, the Deity) _which, gradually unfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to the fullest self-consciousness in philosophy_. This is the theory of Hegel, in whose system of philosophy the subjective idealism of Kant culminates in the doctrine of "_Absolute Identity_." Its fundamental position is that thought and being, subject and object, the perceiving mind and the thing perceived, are ultimately and essentially _one_, and that the only actual reality is that which results from their mutual relation. The outward thing is nothing, the inward perception is nothing, for neither could exist alone; the only reality is the relation, or rather synthesis of the two; the essence or nature of being in itself accordingly consists in the coexistence of two contrarieties. Ideas, arising from the union or synthesis of two opposites, are therefore the _concrete realities_ of Hegel; and the _process_ of the evolution of ideas, in the human mind, is the process of all existence--_the Absolute Idea_. _The Absolute_(die Idée) thus forms the beginning, middle, and end of the system of Hegel. It is the one infinite existence or thought, of which nature, mind, history, religion, and philosophy, are the manifestation. "The absolute is, with him, not the infinite _substance_, as with Spinoza; nor the infinite _subject_, as with Fichte; nor the infinite _mind_, as with Schelling; it is a perpetual _process_, an eternal thinking, without beginning and without end."[44] This _living, eternal process of absolute existence is the God of Hegel_.