content there, we must already know it from some other source. And if it be affirmed that we do not truly know God, that we can know nothing of Him, how then can we say that He is in feeling? We must first have looked around us in consciousness in search of characteristics belonging to the content which is distinct from the Ego, and not till then shall we be in a position to point to feeling as religious, that is, in so far as we rediscover those characteristics of the content in it.
In more recent times it has been customary to speak of conviction, and not of the heart, the “heart” being the expression still used for any one’s immediate character. When, however, we speak of acting according to conviction, it is implied that the content is a power which governs me; it is my power, and I belong to it; but this power rules me from within in a fashion which implies that it is already mediated by thought and intellectual insight.
In regard further to what has special reference to the idea that the heart is the germ of this content, it may be freely conceded that the idea is correct, but this does not carry us far. That the heart is the source, means nearly this—that it is the first mode in which any such content appears in the subject; it is its first place, or seat. A man begins by having religious feeling or wanting it; in the former case the heart is undoubtedly the germ; but as a vegetable seed-corn represents the undeveloped mode of the plant’s existence, so feeling, too, is this hidden or undeveloped mode.
That seed-corn, with which the life of the plant begins, is only in appearance, in an empirical fashion, what is first; for the seed-corn is likewise a product, a result, is what is last. It is the result of the fully developed life of the tree, and incloses this perfect development of the nature of the tree in itself. The primariness is therefore only of a relative character. In a similar way in our subjective actuality, this entire content exists in an
