The confession that all our knowledge is conjecture does not simply mean that absolute and exact truth remains concealed from us; but is intended at the same time to encourage us to draw as near as possible to the eternal verity by ever truer conjectures.  There are degrees of truth, and our surmises are neither absolutely true nor entirely false.  Conjecture becomes error only when, forgetting the inadequacy of human knowledge, we rest content with it as a final solution; the Socratic maxim, “I know that I am ignorant,” should not lead to despairing resignation but to courageous further inquiry.  The duty of speculation is to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the divine, even though the ultimate revelation will not be given us until the hereafter.  The fittest instrument of speculation is furnished by mathematics, in its conception of the infinite and the wonders of numerical relations:  as on the infinite sphere center and circumference coincide, so God’s essence is exalted above all opposites; and as the other numbers are unfolded from the unit, so the finite proceeds by explication from the infinite.  A controlling significance in the serial construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first four numbers—­as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity, thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further, the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe, the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of matter.  Beside the quaternary the tern also exercises its power—­the world divides into the stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense, or truth, probability, and confusion.  The divine trinity is reflected everywhere:  in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as creative force, concept, and will.  The triunity of God is very variously explained—­as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably, as unity, equality, and the combination of the two.

God is related to the world as unity, identity, complicatio, to otherness, diversity, explicatio, as necessity to contingency, as completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this, and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it.  God is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by negations than by affirmations.  To deny that he is light, truth, spirit, is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything which can be expressed