Note 70 — LECTURE IV. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES.

We have many times designated these two rocks, for example, 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 5, p. 92:—"One cannot help smiling when, in our times, he hears individual reason spoken against. In truth it is a great waste of declamation, for the reason is not individual; if it were, we should govern it as we govern our resolutions and our volitions, we could at any moment change its acts, that is to say, our conceptions. If these conceptions were merely individual, we should not think of imposing them upon another individual, for to impose our own individual and personal conceptions on another individual, on another person, would be the most extravagant despotism.... We call those mad who do not admit the relations of numbers, the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, the just and the unjust. Why? Because we know that it is not the individual that constitutes these conceptions, or, in other terms, we know that the reason has something universal and absolute, that upon this ground it obligates all individuals; and an individual, at the same time that he knows that he himself is obligated by it, knows that all others are obligated by it on the same ground."—Ibid., p. 93: "Truth misconceived is thereby neither altered nor destroyed; it subsists independently of the reason that perceives it or perceives it ill. Truth in itself is independent of our reason. Its true subject is the universal and absolute reason."