Since the human mind is a part of the whole of nature, viz., that part which has the desire and longing to obtain a conception of all the other parts, and more than that, to understand the interconnection between the parts and the undivided and infinite whole, it is easy to comprehend the fact that the philosophers have occupied themselves so much with the most real and most perfect being. Whether this being was called God, or substance, or idea, or the absolute, or nature, or matter, all of these terms cannot prevent us today from approaching infinite nature with sober senses, in order to gain, by its help, a lifelike picture of the human intellect, which is not a mystical being, but a reasonable part of the same nature that lives reasonably and intelligibly in all other parts of nature. The inexperienced powers of distinction which did not understand their function, magnified the difference between the infinite and its finite phenomena out of all proportion. Now that we have made the philosophical experience that the general as well as the special nature of the human intellect admits only of moderate and bounded distinctions, we arrive at the conclusion that the immeasurable, all-perfect, and eternal being is composed of finite, commensurable, imperfect, and transient things in such a way that the universal being combines in itself all perfections as well as all imperfections. This contradictory universal being, this nature to which all contradictory attributes may be simultaneously assigned, in a certain sense puts the old rule to shame that you cannot at the same time affirm and deny the predicate of any subject. Nature comprises all and is all. Reason and unreason, being and not being, all these contradictions are contained in it. Outside of it there are no affirmations and no contradictions. Since the human mind eternally moves in affirmations and negations, in order to obtain a clear picture of things, it has an interminable task in understanding the interminable object.