49.] (y) The third object of the Reason is God (§36): He also must be known and defined in terms of thought. But in comparison with an unalloyed identity, every defining term as such seems to the understanding to be only a limit and a negation: every reality accordingly must be taken as limitless, _i.e._ undefined. Accordingly God, when He is defined to be the sum of all realities, the most real of beings, turns into a _mere abstract._ And the only term under which that most real of real, things can be defined is that of Being--itself the height of abstraction. These are the two elements, abstract identity, on one hand, which is spoken of in this place as the notion; and Being on the other,--which Reason seeks to unify. And their union is the _Ideal_ of Reason. 50.] To carry out this unification two ways or two forms are admissible. Either we may begin with Being and proceed to the _abstraction_ of Thought: or the movement may begin with the abstraction and end in Being. We shall, in the first place, start from Being. But Being, in its natural aspect, presents itself to view as a Being of infinite variety, a World in all its plenitude. And this world may be regarded in two ways: first, as a collection of innumerable unconnected facts; and second, as a collection of innumerable facts in mutual relation, giving evidence of design. The first aspect is emphasised in the Cosmological proof: the latter in the proofs of Natural Theology. Suppose now that this fulness of being passes under the agency of thought. Then it is stripped of its isolation and unconnectedness, and viewed as a universal and absolutely necessary being which determines itself and acts by general purposes or laws. And this necessary and self-determined being, different from the being at the commencement, is God. The main force of Kant's criticism on this process attacks it for being a syllogising, _i.e._ a transition. Perceptions, and that aggregate of perceptions we call the world, exhibit as they stand no traces of that universality which they afterwards receive from the purifying act of thought. The empirical conception of the world therefore gives no warrant for the idea of universality. And so any attempt on the part of thought to ascend from the empirical conception of the world to God is checked by the argument of Hume (as in the paralogisms, § 47), according to which we have no right to think sensations, that is, to elicit universality and necessity from them.