this free Being, in feeling; nor do we find the content as a self-existent content; on the contrary, any kind of particular content may be in feeling. If feeling is to be of a truthful, genuine character, it must be so by means of its content; but it is not feeling which, as such, renders its content true.
Such is the nature of this sphere of feeling, and such are the characteristics which pertain to it. It is feeling of any kind of content, and simultaneously feeling of self. In feeling we thus as it were have the enjoyment of our own selves, of our realisation of the object. The reason why feeling is so popular, is just because in it a man is in presence of his particularity or particular existence. He who lives in the object or actual fact itself, in science, in the practical, forgets himself in it; it involves no feeling so far as feeling is recollection of his individual self, and in that forgetting of himself he is as regards his particular existence a minimum. Vanity, self-satisfaction, on the other hand, which likes nothing better than self, and the possession of self, and only desires to remain in the enjoyment of self, appeals to personal feeling, and therefore does not arrive at objective thinking and acting. A man who has to do with feeling only is not as yet complete; he is a beginner in knowledge, in action, &c.
We must now therefore look around us for another basis for God. In feeling, we have not found God either in accordance with His independent Being, or in accordance with His content. In immediate knowledge, the Object was not possessed of Being; on the contrary, its Being was found in the knowing subject, which discovered the basis of this Being in feeling.
In regard to the determinate character of the Ego, which constitutes the content of feeling, we have already seen that it is not only distinct from the pure Ego, but must also be distinguished from feeling in its own peculiar movement in that the Ego finds itself determined as
