e, we
feel ourselves dependent on the divine causality. Like all that is finite,
we also are the effect of the absolute Power. While we stand in a relation
of interaction with the individual parts of the world, and feel ourselves
partially free in relation to them, we can only receive effects from God
without answering them; even our self-activity we have from him.
Nevertheless the feeling of dependence is not to be depressing, not
humbling merely, but the joyous sense of an exaltation and broadening of
life. In our devotion to the universe we participate in the life of the
universe; by leaning on the infinite we supplement our finitude--religion
makes up for the needy condition of man by bringing him into relation with
the absolute, and teaching him to know and to feel himself a part of the
whole.

From this elevating influence of religion, which Schleiermacher eloquently
depicts, it is at once evident that his definition of it as a feeling of
absolute dependence is only half correct. It needs to be supplemented by
the feeling of freedom, which exalts us by the consciousness of the oneness
of the human reason and the divine. It is only to this side of religion,
neglected by Schleiermacher, that we can ascribe its inspiring influence,
which he in vain endeavors to derive from the feeling of dependence. Power
can never spring from humility as such. This defect, however, does not
detract from Schleiermacher's merit in assigning to religion a special
field of spiritual activity. While Kant treats religion as an appendix to
ethics, and Hegel, with a one-sidedness which is still worse, reduces it to
an undeveloped form of knowledge, Schleiermacher recognizes that it is
not a mere concomitant phenomenon--whether an incidental result or a
preliminary stage--of morality or cognition, but something independent,
co-ordinate with volition and cognition, and of equal legitimacy. The proof
that religion has its habitation in feeling is the more deserving of thanks
since it by no means induced Schleiermacher to overlook the connection of
the God-consciousness with self-consciousness and the consciousness of
the world. Schleiermacher's theory, moreover, may be held correct without
ignoring the relatively legitimate elements in the views of religion which
he attacked. With the view that religion has its seat in feeling, it is
quite possible to combine a recognition of the fact that it has its origin
in the will, and its basis in morals,