“I” has vindicated Being for itself, Being has dropped away from the object. If the object is notwithstanding to be spoken of as possessed of Being, a reason or ground must be given for this. It must be shown that God is in my Being, and thus—since we are now in the region of experience and observation—the demand sounds as if we were asked to point to the state or condition in which God is in me, in which we are not two; something observable, where the separateness drops away, where God is in this Being which remains to me in virtue of the fact that I am; a place in which the Universal is in me as possessed of Being, and not separated from me.
This place is Feeling.
b. Religious feeling is commonly spoken of as that element in which faith in God is given to us, and as that inmost region in which it is for us absolutely certain that God is. Of certainty we have already spoken. This certainty means that two different kinds of Being are posited in reflection as One Being. Being is abstract relation to self; there are, however, two things possessed of Being, but they are only one Being, and this undivided Being is my Being; this is certainty. This certainty, with a content in a more concrete form, is feeling, and this feeling is set forth as the ground of faith and of the knowledge of God. What is in our feeling, that we call knowledge, and so, accordingly, God exists. In this way feeling is regarded as that which is the basis or causal ground. The form of knowledge is what is first, then come the distinctions, and with these enter the differences between the two, and the reflection that the Being is my Being, that it belongs to me. And here accordingly is the need that the object, too, should be in this Being which I assume as mine; and this is Feeling. In this way we refer or appeal to feeling.
“I feel something hard;” when I thus speak, “I” is
