This vicious working of the Understanding against the Reason, in the same sentences, can be more fully illustrated from the following extracts. "God, as necessarily determined to pass from absolute essence to relative manifestation, is determined to pass either _from the better to the worse, or from the worse to the better_. A third possibility that both states are equal, as contradictory in itself, and as contradicted by our author, it is not necessary to consider."--_Sir William Hamilton's Essays_, p. 42. "Again, how can the Relative be conceived as coming into being? If it is a distinct reality from the absolute, it must be conceived as passing from non-existence into existence. But to conceive an object as non-existent is again a self-contradiction; for that which is conceived exists, as an object of thought, in and by that conception. We may abstain from thinking of an object at all; but if we think of it, we cannot but think of it as existing. It is possible at one time not to think of an object at all, and at another to think of it as already in being; but to think of it in the act of becoming, in the progress from not being into being, is to think that which, in the very thought, annihilates itself. Here again the Pantheistic hypothesis seems forced upon us. We can think of creation only as a change in the condition of that which already exists; and thus the creature is conceivable only as a phenomenal mode of the being of the Creator."--_Limits of Religious Thought_, p. 81.