[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Quaebicker, Ueber Schleiermachers erkeuntnisstheoretische Grundansicht, 1871, and the Inquiries by Bruno Weiss in the Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie, vols. lxxiii.-lxxv., 1878-79.]

The popular ideas of God ill stand examination by the standard furnished by the principle of identity.  The plurality of attributes which we are accustomed to ascribe to God agree but poorly with his unity free from all contrariety.  In reality God does not possess these manifold attributes; they first arise in the religious consciousness, in which his unconditioned and undivided working is variously reflected and, as it were, divided.  They are only the various reflections of his undivided nature in the mind of the observer.  In God ability and performance, intelligence and will, his thought of self and his thought of the world coincide in one.  Even the concept of personality must not be ascribed to God, since it is a limitation of the infinite and belongs to mythology; while the idea of life, on the contrary, is allowable as a protection against atheism and fatalism.  When Schleiermacher, further, equates the activity of God and the causality of nature he ranges himself on the pantheistic side in regard to the question of the “immanence or transcendence of God,” without being willing to acknowledge it.  It sounds Spinozistic enough when he says:  God never was without the world, he exists neither before nor outside it, we know him only in us and in things.  Besides that which he actually brings forth, God could not produce anything further, and just as little does he miraculously interfere in the course of the world as regulated by natural law.  Everything takes place necessarily, and man is distinguished above other beings neither by freedom (if by freedom we understand anything more than inner necessitation) nor by eternal existence.  Like all individual beings, so we are but changing states in the life of the universe, which, as they have arisen, will disappear again.  The common representations of immortality, with their hope of future compensation, are far from pious.  The true immortality of religion is this—­amid finitude to become one with the infinite, and in one moment to be eternal.

Schleiermacher’s optimism well harmonizes with this view of the relation between God and the world.  If the universe is the phenomenon of the divine activity, then considered as a whole it is perfect; whatever of imperfection we find in it, is merely the inevitable result of finitude.  The bad is merely the less perfect; everything is as good as it can be; the world is the best possible; everything is in its right place; even the meanest thing is indispensable; even the mistakes of men are to be treated with consideration.  All is good and divine.  In this way Schleiermacher weds ideas from Spinoza to Leibnitzian conceptions.  From the former he appropriates pantheism, from the latter optimism and the concept of individuality; he shares determinism with both:  all events, even the decisions of the will, are subject to the law of necessity.