her created a new epoch by his
separation between religion and related departments with which it had often
been identified before his time, as it has been since. In its origin and
essence religion is not a matter of knowing, further, not a matter of
willing, but a matter of the heart. It lies quite outside the sphere of
speculation and of practice, coincides neither with metaphysics nor with
ethics, is not knowledge and not volition, but an intermediate third: it
has its own province in the emotional nature, where it reigns without
limitation; its essence is intuition and feeling in undivided unity. In
_feeling_ is revealed the presence of the infinite; in feeling we become
immediately aware of the Deity. The absolute, which in cognition and
volition we only presuppose and demand, but never attain, is actually
given in feeling alone as the relative identity and the common ground
of cognition and volition. Religion is _piety_, an affective, not an
objective, consciousness. And if certain religious ideas and actions
ally themselves with the pious state of mind, these are not essential
constituents of religion, but derivative elements, which possess a
religious significance only in so far as they immediately develop from
piety and exert an influence upon it. That which makes an act religious
is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing,
between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction
of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality. And as
feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again,
the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling. What sort of a
feeling, then, is piety? Schleiermacher answers: A feeling of _absolute
dependence_. Dependence on what? On the universe, on God. Religion grows
out of the longing after the infinite, it is the sense and taste for the
All, the direction toward the eternal, the impulse toward the absolute
unity, immediate experience of the world harmony; like art, religion is the
immediate apprehension of a whole. In and before God all that is individual
disappears, the religious man sees one and the same thing in all that is
particular. To represent all events in the world as actions of a God,
to see God in all and all in God, to feel one's self one with the
eternal,--this is religion. As we look on all being within us and without
as proceeding from the world-ground, as determined by an ultimate caus