If we accept the common answers to this question, God will abide in us as the object of faith, of feeling, of representation, of knowledge.

We shall have to examine more closely later on in a special fashion with respect to this point, these forms, faculties, aspects of ourselves.  In this place we shall not seek a reply to this question; nor shall we say, basing our answer on experience and observation, that God is in our feeling, etc.  But, to begin with, we will confine ourselves to what we have actually before us, to this One, to this universal, to this concrete Being.

If we take this One, and ask for what power, for what activity of our mind does this One, this absolutely universal Being, exist, we cannot but name the one activity of mind which corresponds to it as constituting its proper natural domain.  This activity, which corresponds to the universal, is thought.

Thought is the field in which this content moves; it is the energising of the universal, or the universal in the reality of its activity.  Or, if we say that thought embraces the universal, that for which the universal is will still be thought.

This universal which can be produced by thought, and which is for thought, may be a quite abstract universal.  In this sense it is the unlimited, the infinite, the being without bounds, without particular determination.  This universal, negative to begin with, has its seat not elsewhere than in thought.

To think of God is to rise above the things of sense, exterior and individual, above simple feeling into the region of pure being; being at unity with itself—­that is to say, into the pure region of the universal.  And this region is thought.

Such is the substratum for this content considered on the subjective side.  Here the content is that Being in which is no difference, no schism; Being which abides in itself, the universal; and thought is the form for which this universal is.

Thus we have a difference between thought and the universal which we have called God.  It is a difference which in the first place belongs only to our reflection, and is by no means to be found in the content on its own account.  There is the result to which philosophy comes—­a result already comprised in religion as under the form of faith—­to wit, that God is the sole veritable reality, the Being without which no other reality would exist.

In the unity of this reality, in this cloudless shining, the reality and the distinction which we call thinking-being have as yet no place.

What we have before us is this absolute unity.  This content, this determination we cannot yet call religion because to religion belongs subjective spirit consciousness.  Thought is the seat of this universal, but this seat is, to begin with, absorbed in this being which is one, eternal, in and for itself.

This universal constitutes the beginning and the point of departure, but only as unity which so abides.  It is not a mere substratum whence differences are born; rather, all differences are included in this universal.  No more is it an abstract and inert universal, but the absolute principle of all activity, the matrix, the infinite source whence all things proceed, whither all things return, and in which they are eternally preserved.