itself, since it is likewise a connection with God in God, is hence immediately mystical and speculative; thus here there is the call to thought which was first of all responded to by the Fathers, and then by the scholastics. But since, in the third place, there exists the opposition between the doctrine of the Church and the worldly man—who has indeed through thought worked his way out of this same barbarism, but who in his healthy human understanding has not yet penetrated to reason—the mode in which Philosophy was treated at this time for the setting forth of formal thought, has still no concrete content. We may appeal to the human concrete mind; in it we have a living present as thinking and feeling; a concrete content such as this has its root in the thought of man, and constitutes the material for his independent consciousness. Formal thought directs its course by this; the wanderings of abstract reflection have in such consciousness an aim, which sets a limit upon them, and leads them back to a human concrete. But the reflections of the scholastics on such a content depend unsupported on the determinations of formal thought, on formal conclusions; and all the determinations regarding natural relationships, laws of nature, &c., that may issue, receive as yet no sustenance from experience; they are not yet determined by the healthy human understanding. In this respect the content likewise is unspiritual, and these unspiritual relationships are inverted and carried into the spiritual in so far as advance is made to determinateness of a higher kind. These three points constitute the main characteristics of this philosophy.