Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/148

 withdraw ourselves into the sphere of our contingency, and merely look at the object as it is there. In this sphere each man makes the object his own affair, something peculiar to himself; and thus if one person says you ought to have such feelings, another may reply, I simply have not those feelings; as a matter of fact, I am not so constituted. For what is really in question in this demand is merely that contingent existence of mine, which takes this or the other form indifferently.

Further, feeling is that which man has in common with the lower animals; it is the animal, sensuous form. It follows, therefore, that when what belongs to the category of justice, of morality, of God, is exhibited to us in feeling, this is the worst possible way in which to draw attention to the existence of a content of such a kind. God exists essentially in Thought. The suspicion that He exists through thought, and only in thought, must occur to us from the mere fact that man alone has religion, not the beasts.

All in man, whose true soil or element is thought, can be transplanted into the form of feeling. Justice, freedom, morality, and so on have their roots in the higher destiny of man, whereby he is not beast, but Spirit. All that belongs to the higher characteristics of humanity can be transplanted into the form of feeling; yet the feeling is only the form for this content, which itself belongs to a quite different region. Thus we have feelings of justice, freedom, morality; but it is no merit on the part of feeling that its content is true. The educated man may have a true feeling of justice, of God; he does not, however, derive this from feeling, but he owes it to the education of thought; it is only through thought that the content of the idea, and thus the feeling itself, is present. It is a fallacy to credit the true and the good to feeling.

Yet not only may a true content exist in our feeling, it ought to exist, and must exist; or, as it used to be put,