In the case, for instance, of a special form and positive rule of faith, the incompetency of the reason and understanding to pass a definitive judgment on such high and divine matters may be acknowledged, and even the external will may sacrifice its own inclinations and submit to the requirements of a positive law. But so long as all this remains, as it were, external to man, so long as the soul within does not concur therewith--a fact which may be infallibly discerned by the want or absence of love--then in this case it is but a dead faith, even though outwardly, and in the judgment of others, it may pass as legitimate and orthodox. Then only is it a true living faith when it is wholly received into the entire soul, as manifested by its internal fruitfulness in spiritual thought and moral action. For it is the soul that believes--that same thinking and loving soul which we have already designated the center of the collective consciousness of man and of his moral life. In this state, however, the soul has undergone a change; is this higher act of believing its cogitation has become steady and uniform, and its love perfectly pure and abidingly permanent in God. But now, if in the triple consciousness the soul be the principle of faith, then is the spirit or mind [_geist_] that of higher science, of free thought, of a full and complete discernment, and of the final and supreme act of distinguishing and deciding. And by this higher science I mean that which has for its exclusive object the eternal truth, and Him who is the sum and source of all immutable verities. But, thirdly, the sensuous faculty is the principle of all lower sensible, terrestrial, and natural knowledge. And this comprises all human history, and together therewith all language and art, and every branch of learning that is occupied therewith. But besides the physical sciences, mathematics also belong to this department, for these are dependent on the sensuous conditions of number, weight, and measure, and consequently on time and space, and on those material properties which fill space, viz., gravity and solidity.