ABSTRACT
This chapter examines more closely the factor of idealisation in the organisation of the religious interest, certain peculiarities appear. The ideal itself of the religious interest—the ideal personality of God—is set up not as simply ideal, simply desirable and possible, but as actually existing. The integrity of the logical movement is also impaired. The religious object, although taken to exist, is not the outcome of processes of knowledge of a logical sort—generalisation, implication, reasoning. The sharp antinomy in the meaning of the religious object makes the reality it postulates unsatisfying as a synthetic mode of experience. The recurring concept of the devil serves to set forth most plainly the antinomy between the ideal and the actual inherent in the religious postulate as such. The chapter discusses the topic of the supremely or "ideally" bad, the summum malum, in treating of the ethical mode of negation.
