(_a_) The notion of being, spontaneously reached by the human mind, is found on reflection to be the _simplest_ of all notions, defying every attempt at analysis into simpler notions. It is involved in every other concept which we form of any object of thought whatsoever. Without it we could have no concept of anything. (_b_) It is thus the first of all notions _in the logical order_, _i.e._ in the process of rational thought. (_c_) It is also the _first_ of all notions _in the chronological order_, the first which the human mind forms in the order of time. Not, of course, that we remember having formed it before any other more determinate notions. But the child’s awakening intellectual activity must have proceeded from the simplest, easiest, most superficial of all concepts, to fuller, clearer, and more determinate concepts, _i.e._ from the vague and confused notion of “being” or “thing” to notions of definite modes of being, or kinds of thing. (_d_) This direct notion of being is likewise the _most indeterminate_ of all notions; though not of course entirely indeterminate. An object of thought, to be conceivable or intelligible at all by our finite minds, must be rendered definite in some manner and degree; and even this widest notion of “being” is rendered intelligible only by being conceived as positive and as contrasting with absolute non-being or nothingness.(49) According to the Hegelian philosophy “pure thought” can apparently think “pure being,” _i.e._ being in absolute indeterminateness, being as not even differentiated from “pure not-being” or absolute nothingness. And this absolutely indeterminate confusion (we may not call it a “synthesis” or “unity”) of something and nothing, of being and not-being, of positive and negative, of affirmation and denial, would be conceived by our finite minds as the objective correlative of, and at the same time as absolutely identical with, its subjective correlative which is “pure thought”. Well, it is with the human mind and its objects, and how it thinks those objects, that we are concerned at present; not with speculations involving the gratuitous assumption of a Being that would transcend all duality of subject and object, all determinateness of knowing and being, all distinction of thought and thing. We believe that the human mind can establish the existence of a Supreme Being whose mode of Thought and Existence transcends all human comprehension, but it can do so only as the culminating achievement of all its speculation; and the transcendent Being it thus reaches has nothing in common with the monistic ideal-real being of Hegel’s philosophy. In endeavouring to set out from the high _a priori_ ground of such an intangible conception, the Hegelian philosophy starts at the wrong end.