Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/197

194 when reflection begins; the term "God" implies "the source of our susceptible and independent being." Religious ideas and concepts are all secondary. They are deduced by reflection on the immediate states of feeling in which the essence of religion consists. The demand for expression and communion furnishes the impulse to clothe the subjective experiences in word and symbol. Such words and symbols constitute dogmas, i.e. symbolical expressions of religious states of mind. Each separate dogma must bear a direct relation to some feeling, and the dogmatician must never deduce a dogma from another dogma by purely logical processes. Whenever dogmatic statements are taken literally, dogmatics becomes mythology. This appertains, e.g. to the ideas of the personality of God, personal immortality, creation, the first human pair, etc. It likewise applies to the idea of miracle. The interests of religion can never place God and the world in opposition to each other. The Christian-religious feeling is characterized by the fact that Christians experience a purifying and an enlargement of their own circumscribed feelings through the type expressed in the congregation; in this way they experience Christ as the Redeemer.

Schleiermacher's philosophy marks an important advance, especially in its psychological aspect. But he is likewise disposed to identify symbolic statement and causal explanation in the same way as he identifies dogma and symbol. On these points the philosophy of religion receives further development at the hands of Strauss and Feuerbach.

5. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a Kantian in epistemology, but he claims to have discovered a direct revelation of the thing-in-itself. He discovers the solution of the riddle of the universe with romantic precipitancy