If this were all, we should have only a formal expression of the divine nature which would not really go beyond a statement of the nature of the notion itself. And that the notion, in its most abstract terms, involves being is plain. For the notion, whatever other determination it may receive, is at least reference back on itself, which results by abolishing the intermediation, and thus is immediate. And what is that reference to self, but being? Certainly it would be strange if the notion, the very inmost of mind, if even the 'Ego,' or above all, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to include so poor a category as being, the very poorest and most abstract of all. For, if we look at the thought it holds, nothing can be more insignificant than being. And yet there may be something still more insignificant than being,--that which at first sight is perhaps supposed to _be,_ an external and sensible existence, like that of the paper lying before me. However, in this matter, nobody proposes to speak of the sensible existence of a limited and perishable thing. Besides, the petty stricture of the _Kritik_ that 'thought and being are different' can at most molest the path of the human mind from the thought of God to the certainty that He _is_: it cannot take it away. It is this process of transition, depending on the absolute inseparability of the _thought_ of God from His being, for which its proper authority has been re-vindicated in the theory of faith or immediate knowledge,--whereof hereafter. 52.] In this way thought, at its highest pitch, has to go outside for any determinateness: and although it is continually termed Reason, is out-and-out abstract thinking. And the result of all is that Reason supplies nothing beyond the formal unity required to simplify and systematise experiences; it is a _canon,_ not an _organon_ of truth, and can furnish only a _criticism_ of knowledge, not a _doctrine_ of the infinite. In its final analysis this criticism is summed up in the assertion that in strictness thought is only the indeterminate unity and the action of this indeterminate unity. Kant undoubtedly held reason to be the faculty of the unconditioned; but if reason be reduced to abstract identity only, it by implication renounces its unconditionality and is in reality no better than empty understanding. For reason is unconditioned, only in so far as its character and quality are not due to an extraneous and foreign content, only in so far as it is self-characterising, and thus, in point of content, is its own master. Kant, however, expressly explains that the action of reason consists solely in applying the categories to systematise the matter given by perception, _e._ to place it in an outside order, under the guidance of the principle of non-contradiction.