Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/219

 makes itself empty, so experience becomes hollow too, just as I cannot see without light from outside. If the content be negated or driven away from this region, there is no longer present that which can supply the true qualities of experience. If, therefore on the one hand, it must be conceded, as above, that there may be more in devotion than in religious consciousness, it is on the other hand an evidence of caprice or clumsiness when that which is present in a man himself or in others, is not observed. Properly speaking, however, this caprice, this clumsiness or want of skill, does not make its first appearance here, for if a man is only to observe, observation thereby is limited to the field of finiteness. To observe means, to place oneself in relation to something external, which is in observation to remain external, and this is only posited in so far as it is external to oneself, and is thus finite. Therefore, if any one occupy such a standpoint, he has before him only what is worthy of this standpoint, and appropriate to it.

If observation would observe the infinite in accordance with its true nature, it must itself be infinite; that is, it must no longer be observation of the true object, but the object itself. Speculative thought may be observed too, but this observation is only for the thinker himself. In like manner, religion is only for the religious man; that is, for him who at the same time is what he observes. There is no such thing as mere observation here: the observer is, on the contrary, in such a relation to the object, that his observation is not purely external; he is not a simple observer, is not merely in a negative relation to that which he observes.

From this it follows that in order to find the true seat of religion we must relinquish the attitude of the observer; we must abandon this empirical point of view, for the very reason that it is only empirical, and because it has, as we saw, annulled itself by its own act. Reflection possesses, it is true, the relation of the finite to the infinite; this,