In the philosophy of religion Schleiermacher created a new epoch by his separation between religion and related departments with which it had often been identified before his time, as it has been since.  In its origin and essence religion is not a matter of knowing, further, not a matter of willing, but a matter of the heart.  It lies quite outside the sphere of speculation and of practice, coincides neither with metaphysics nor with ethics, is not knowledge and not volition, but an intermediate third:  it has its own province in the emotional nature, where it reigns without limitation; its essence is intuition and feeling in undivided unity.  In feeling is revealed the presence of the infinite; in feeling we become immediately aware of the Deity.  The absolute, which in cognition and volition we only presuppose and demand, but never attain, is actually given in feeling alone as the relative identity and the common ground of cognition and volition.  Religion is piety, an affective, not an objective, consciousness.  And if certain religious ideas and actions ally themselves with the pious state of mind, these are not essential constituents of religion, but derivative elements, which possess a religious significance only in so far as they immediately develop from piety and exert an influence upon it.  That which makes an act religious is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing, between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality.  And as feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again, the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling.  What sort of a feeling, then, is piety?  Schleiermacher answers:  A feeling of absolute dependence.  Dependence on what?  On the universe, on God.  Religion grows out of the longing after the infinite, it is the sense and taste for the All, the direction toward the eternal, the impulse toward the absolute unity, immediate experience of the world harmony; like art, religion is the immediate apprehension of a whole.  In and before God all that is individual disappears, the religious man sees one and the same thing in all that is particular.  To represent all events in the world as actions of a God, to see God in all and all in God, to feel one’s self one with the eternal,—­this is religion.  As we look on all being within us and without as proceeding from the world-ground, as determined by an ultimate cause, we feel ourselves dependent on the divine causality.  Like all that is finite, we also are the effect of the absolute Power.  While we stand in a relation of interaction with the individual parts of the world, and feel ourselves partially free in relation to them, we can only receive effects from God without answering them; even our self-activity we have from him.  Nevertheless the feeling of dependence is not to be depressing, not humbling merely, but the joyous sense of an exaltation and broadening of life.  In our devotion to the universe we participate in the life of the universe; by leaning on the infinite we supplement our finitude—­religion makes up for the needy condition of man by bringing him into relation with the absolute, and teaching him to know and to feel himself a part of the whole.