h is attained by
the consummate art of the Platonic dialogues." The importance
of the work is evidenced by the influence it has exercised
over the mind of a later generation; and many readers, to whom
Hegel (see Vol. XIV) is little more than a name, will
certainly find here the sources of much that has become
familiar as an essential part of the religious atmosphere of a
later day, and of the apologies of modern speculative
theology.

_I. THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION_

The object of religion is the same as that of philosophy; it is the
external verity itself in its objective existence; it is God--nothing
but God and the unfolding of God. Philosophy is not the wisdom of the
world, but the knowledge of things which are not of this world. It is
not the knowledge of external mass, of empirical life and existence, but
of the eternal, of the nature of God, and of all which flows from His
nature. For this nature ought to manifest and develop itself.
Consequently, philosophy in unfolding religion merely unfolds itself,
and in unfolding itself it unfolds religion. In so far as philosophy is
occupied with the eternal truth, the truth which is in and for itself;
in so far as it is occupied with this as thinking spirit, rather than in
an arbitrary fashion and in view of a particular interest, philosophy
has the same sphere of activity as has religion. And if the religious
consciousness aspires to abolish all that is peculiar to itself and to
be absorbed in its object, the philosophic spirit likewise plunges with
the same energy into its object and renounces all particularity.

Religion and philosophy are thus at one in having one and the same
object. Philosophy, in fact, also is the adoration of God, it is
religion; for, seeing that God is its object, it involves the same
renunciation of every opinion and every thought that is arbitrary and
subjective. Philosophy is, in consequence, identical with religion. Only
it is religion in a peculiar manner, and this it is which distinguishes
it from religion commonly so called. So philosophy and religion are both
religion, and that which distinguishes one from the other is no more
than the characteristic mode in which respectively they consider their
object, God.

Here is the difficulty of understanding how philosophy can make but one
with religion, a difficulty which has even been mistaken for
impossibility. Thence also arise the f