Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/191

 away from the genuinely immediate visible certainty which they derived from His immediate presence, from His own sayings and spoken words heard with their ears and apprehended through their senses and feelings, away from such a faith and such a source of faith to the truth, into which they were to be led only in the further future and through the Spirit. For the attainment of anything more in addition to this highest certainty, derived from the source above indicated, there exists nothing except just what is in the content itself.

Faith, in so far as it is defined to be immediate knowledge, as distinguished from what is mediate, reduces itself to the abstract formalism above mentioned. This abstraction makes it possible not only to rank as faith the sensuous certainty which I have that I possess a body, and that there are things outside me, but to deduce or prove from it what the nature of faith is. But we should do gross injustice to what in the sphere of religion is termed faith if we were to see in it only this abstraction. Faith must rather be full of substance; it must be a content, and this is to be a true content; it must be far removed from such a content as the sensuous certainty that I have a body, that things perceived by the senses surround me. It must contain the truth, and quite a different truth from that last mentioned, the truth of finite things of sense, and derived from quite a different source. The tendency above indicated to formal subjectivity must find faith as such even too objective, for this latter has always to do with ideas of things, with a knowledge of them, with a state of conviction regarding some content. This extreme form of the subjective, in which the definite form of the content and the conception and knowledge of it have vanished, is that of feeling. We cannot, therefore, avoid speaking of it too; it is this form, moreover, which is asked for in our times, not feeling of the simple or naive kind, but as a result of culture, derived from grounds or reasons which are the same as those already referred to.