to enter into the experience of it, into the feeling of it; just in the same way as we may perhaps understand a dog without being able to enter experimentally into its sensations. For to do this would mean to fill up entirely the totality of the subject with a similar particular determination, so that it would become our determinateness. Even into religions which approach more nearly to our modes of thought we cannot enter experimentally in this way; they cannot become for a single moment so much our own particular religion that we should be able, for example, to worship a Grecian statue of a god, however beautiful that statue might be. And, moreover, the stage of immediate religion lies at the farthest distance from us, since, even in order to make it intelligible to ourselves, we are obliged to forget all the forms of our own culture.
We must regard man immediately, as he exists for himself alone upon the earth, and thus at the very beginning, as wholly without reflection or the power of rising up to thought. It is with the entrance of thought that more worthy conceptions of God first appear.
Here man is seen in his immediate personal strength and passion, in the exercise and attitude of immediate willing. He asks no theoretical questions yet, such as “Who made that?” &c. This separation of objects into a contingent and an essential side, into that of causality and that of what is merely dependent, merely an effect, does not as yet exist for him.
It is the same with the will. This dualism or division is not as yet present in it, there is as yet no repression of itself within it. In willing, the theoretical element is what we call the Universal, right, law, established determinations, boundaries for the subjective will. These are thoughts, universal forms which belong to thought, to freedom.
These are distinguished from subjective caprice, passion, inclination; all this is repressed, dominated by
