Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/150

 true content, is therefore the concern of the individual; but a theology which only describes feelings does not get beyond the empirical, the historical, and such contingent particulars, and has not yet to do with thoughts that have a content.

The ideas and knowledge of an educated man do not exclude feeling and emotion. On the contrary, feeling nourishes itself, and gives itself permanence by means of ideas, and by means of ideas renews and kindles itself afresh. Anger, resentment, hatred, show just as much activity in keeping themselves alive by representing to themselves the various aspects of the injustice sustained, and the various aspects in which they view the enemy, as do love, goodwill, joy, in giving themselves fresh life by figuring to themselves the equally manifold relations of their objects. If we do not think, as it is called, of the object of hatred, anger, or of love, the feeling and the inclination become extinct. If the object fades out of the mind, the feeling vanishes too, and every external cause stirs up sorrow and love afresh. To divert the mind, to present other objects to it to exercise itself upon, and to transplant it into other situations and circumstances in which those various relations are not present to the mind, is one of the means of weakening sensation and feeling. The mind must forget the object; and in hatred to forget is more than to forgive, just as in love to forget is more than to be unfaithful, and to be forgotten is worse than to be only disregarded. Man, as Spirit, since he is not merely animal, in feeling essentially exercises knowledge; he is consciousness, and he only has knowledge of himself when he withdraws himself out of immediate identity with the particular state of the moment. Therefore if religion is only to exist as feeling, it dies away into something void of ideas, and equally void of action, and loses all definite content.

In fact, it is so far from being the case that in feeling alone we can truly find God, that if we are to find this