In the life of feeling this subject exists rather in the above-mentioned identity with the content, it is definite consciousness in it, and remains as this individual “I,” object and end to itself. As the religious individual “I,” it is end to itself; this individual “I” is object and end in general; in the expression, for instance, that I am blessed, and in so far as this blessedness is brought about through belief in the truth, the “I” is filled with truth and penetrated by it. Filled in this way with yearning, it is unsatisfied in itself; but this yearning is the yearning of religion; it is, accordingly, satisfied in having this yearning in itself; in it it has the subjective consciousness of itself, and of itself as the religious self. Carried beyond itself only in this yearning, it is just in it that it preserves itself and the consciousness of being satisfied, and in close connection with this the consciousness of its contentment with itself. But this inwardness involves at the same time the opposite condition which consists in that most unhappy sense of division experienced by the pure hearted. While I regard myself strictly as this particular and abstract “I,” and compare my particular impulses, inclinations, and thoughts, with what ought to fill my nature, I am able to feel that this contrast is a painful contradiction within myself, which becomes permanent, owing to the fact that “I,” as this particular subjective “me,” have it as my aim and object to concern myself about myself as my individual self. It is just this fixed reflection which prevents me from being filled by the substantial content, by the Thing or true fact, for in the true fact I forget myself; in the very act of becoming absorbed in it that reflection upon myself disappears of itself. I am characterised as subjective only in that opposition to the Thing which remains with me through reflection on myself. In thus keeping myself outside of the Thing or true fact, and since this Thing constitutes my end, the real interest is transferred from the attentive observation of the Thing back to myself. I thus go on unceasingly
