Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/192

 FOURTH LECTURE

has been shown in the preceding lecture, the form of feeling is closely related to mere faith as such. It is the yet more intensive forcing back of self-consciousness into itself, the development of the content to mere definiteness of feeling.

Religion must be felt, must exist in feeling, otherwise it is not religion; faith cannot exist without feeling, otherwise it is not religion. This must be admitted to be true, for feeling is nothing but my subjectivity in its simplicity and immediacy—myself as this particular existent personality. If I have religion only as idea, faith takes the form of certainty about these ideas; its content is before me, it is still an object over against me; it is not yet identical with me as simple self; I am not so penetrated through and through with it that it constitutes my qualitative, determinate character. The very inmost unity of the content of faith with me is requisite in order that I may have quality or substance, its substance. It thus becomes my feeling. As against religion Man must hold nothing in reserve for himself, for it is the innermost region of truth. Religion must therefore possess not only this as yet abstract “I,” which even as faith is yet knowledge, but the concrete “I” in its simple personality, comprehending the whole of it in itself. Feeling is this inwardness which is not separated in itself.

Feeling is, however, understood to have the property of being something purely individual, lasting for a single moment, just as one individual thing in the process of alternation with another exists either after that other or