shares that of feeling with it. If feeling is religious feeling, religion is its definite quality. If it is wicked, bad feeling, what is bad and wicked is its definite quality. It is this determinate quality which forms the content for consciousness, what in the words already used is called thought. Feeling is bad on account of its bad content; the heart, because of its sinful thoughts. Feeling is the common form for the most different kinds of content. It can on that account just as little serve as a justification for any of its determinate qualities, for its content, as can immediate certainty.
Feeling makes itself known as a subjective form, as being something in me, while I am the subject of something. This form is that which is simple, which remains equal to itself, and therefore potentially indeterminate in every difference of content—the abstraction of my existence as a single individual. The determinateness or special character of the feeling is, on the contrary, to begin with, difference in general, the being unlike some other, being manifold. It must therefore be explicitly distinguished from the general form whose particular and definite quality it is, and be regarded on its own account. It has the form of the content which must be regarded “on its own merits,” and judged on its own account; on this value depends the value of the feeling. This content must be true, to begin with, and independently of the feeling, just as religion is true on its own account—it is what is in itself necessary and universal—the Thing or true fact which develops itself to a kingdom of truths and of laws, as well as to a kingdom of their knowledge and their final ground, God.
I shall indicate only in outline the consequences which ensue if immediate knowledge and feeling as such are elevated into a principle. It is their very concentration which carries with it for the content, simplification, abstraction, and indefiniteness. Thus they both reduce the divine content, be it religious as such, or legal and moral,
