Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/286

 FIRST DIVISION.

I.

IMMEDIATE RELIGION.

Immediate religion is what has in recent times been called natural religion. It coincides with the religion of nature in so far as thought is brought into prominence in the latter.

What in recent times has been understood by “the religion of nature” is what man is capable of discovering and knowing of God by his own unassisted powers, by means of the natural light of his reason. Thus it has been customary to contrast it with revealed religion, and to maintain that what he has in his reason can alone be true for men. But natural reason is a wrong expression; for what we understand by “natural” is the natural as sensuous, the Immediate. The nature of reason is rather the notion or conception of reason. It belongs to the very essence of Spirit to rise above nature. Natural reason in its true meaning is Spirit, reason according to the Notion, and this is in no kind of opposition to revealed religion. God, the Spirit, can only reveal Himself to Spirit, to reason.

Merely metaphysical religion, to speak more precisely, has in recent times been called natural religion, in so far as metaphysic has conveyed the same meaning as thoughts of the understanding, ideas formed by the understanding. This is that modern religion of the understanding which is known as Deism, the result of Enlightenment—that knowing of God as an abstract something, to which abstraction all attributes of God, all faith, are reduced. This cannot be properly called natural religion; it is the ultimate point reached by the extreme development of the abstract understanding, as the result of the Critique of Kant.