Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/259

] value of the possessions of the heart can neither be determined by the fact, nor intensity, of feeling, but by the objective truth and goodness which the heart impropriates.

Mysticism exaggerates the subjective element of experience, dogmatism exaggerates the "objective element of the truth of its contents." In the 'Glaubenslehre,' religious sentiment is constituted by the feeling of dependence. This is certainly inadequate, and Hegel's remark that, if a sense of dependence constitutes religion, the dog is the most religious of animals, is a well-directed shaft. No student of the History of Religion can accept this exiguous account of it. Réville has said: "Mais le sentiment de dépendance ne constitue pas à lui seul le sentiment religieux. D'autres éléments en font aussi partie intégrante, tels que l'admiration, la vénération, la crainte, la confiance, l'amour."

In the second 'Address,' Schleiermacher contends that religion is neither theory nor action. It is not theory, for knowledge is not the measure of piety. Contemplation, though an element of religion, is not the contemplation of science. It is the intuition of the finite in the whole of the Universe, or God, the temporal in the Eternal. It is not action, for action demands a realm of spontaneity; but passive self-surrender is a religious element, and self-abdication occurs in the realm of the ordered as well as in the realm of freedom. But both theory and action have their place in religion, and are made perfect by it. Religion is "a system only in so far as it is formed according to an inward and necessary connection." But what is Schleiermacher's valuation of dogmas? Miracle, Inspiration, Revelation, are not important to religious feeling; but they must be taken account of by philosophy, and cannot be evaded. True piety will find miracles in everything, the trivial and the great, the vulgar and the sublime. Revelation is the influx of every suggestion from the life of the Universe. Belief in sacred writings, according to Schleiermacher, does not make men religious; he alone is religious who can easily do without their aid, because in the inward life itself he has seized intuitively, and with the heart, the great secrets of the Universe and God. The last discourse has, perhaps, exerted the greatest influence upon the schools of religious thought. The clarion note—"the fundamental intuition of a religion must be some intuition of the Infinite in the Finite"—stirred all minds, especially those of the younger generation, who were weary of the cold abstractions of the 'Illumination.' The God of the Illuminati was outside both of nature and man. The God of Schleiermacher was a God of the Consciousness, in whom man lives, moves, and has his being. The Moravian fervor was manifest in Schleiermacher to the last, and in spite of his one-sidedness of view, it melted the ice of the old Intellectualism. His mysticism commended itself to religious thinkers who represented opposing schemes of theology, and who recoiled even from Schleiermacher'sown assumptions. Singular destiny of a thinker who roused, but did not satisfy, the religious aspirations of so many minds! The vibrations of his