an above
the finite, temporal and transitory, and frees him from the control of
the phenomenal world. Even the lowest form of religion does this; and
when it is said that Schleiermacher has been unjustly criticized for
this expression of dependence, this distinction is overlooked.--

Sec. 157. But religious feeling as such rises into something higher when
the spirit distinguishes the content of this religious feeling from any
other content which it also feels, represents it clearly to itself, and
places itself over against it formally as a free individual.

--But we must not understand that the religious feeling is destroyed in
this process; in rising to the form of distinct representation, it
remains at the same time as a necessary form of the Intelligence.--

Sec. 158. If the spirit is held back and prevented from passing out of the
simplicity of feeling into the act of distinguishing the perception from
what it becomes, the conception--if its efforts towards the forming of
this conception are continually re-dissolved into feeling, then feeling,
which was as the first step perfectly healthy and correct, will become
morbid and degenerate into a wretched mysticism. Education must,
therefore, make sure that this feeling is not destroyed by the progress
of its content into perception and conception on the side of
psychological form, but rather that it attains truth thereby.

Sec. 159. (2) Conception as the ideally transformed perception dissects
the religious content on its different sides, and follows each of these
to its consequence. Imagination controls the individual conceptions, but
by no means with that absoluteness which is often supposed; for each
picture has in itself its logical consequence to which imagination must
yield; e.g. if a religion represents God as an animal, or as half animal
and half man, or as man, each of these conceptions has in its
development its consequences for the imagination.

Sec. 160. We rise out of the stage of Conception when the spirit tries to
determine the universality of its content according to its necessity,
i.e. when it begins to think. The necessity of its pictures is a mere
presupposition for the imagination. The thinking activity, however,
recognizes not only the contradiction which exists between the sensuous,
limited form of the individual conception, and the absolute nature of
its content, but also the contradiction in which the conceptions find
themselves with respect