From this elevating influence of religion, which Schleiermacher eloquently depicts, it is at once evident that his definition of it as a feeling of absolute dependence is only half correct.  It needs to be supplemented by the feeling of freedom, which exalts us by the consciousness of the oneness of the human reason and the divine.  It is only to this side of religion, neglected by Schleiermacher, that we can ascribe its inspiring influence, which he in vain endeavors to derive from the feeling of dependence.  Power can never spring from humility as such.  This defect, however, does not detract from Schleiermacher’s merit in assigning to religion a special field of spiritual activity.  While Kant treats religion as an appendix to ethics, and Hegel, with a one-sidedness which is still worse, reduces it to an undeveloped form of knowledge, Schleiermacher recognizes that it is not a mere concomitant phenomenon—­whether an incidental result or a preliminary stage—­of morality or cognition, but something independent, co-ordinate with volition and cognition, and of equal legitimacy.  The proof that religion has its habitation in feeling is the more deserving of thanks since it by no means induced Schleiermacher to overlook the connection of the God-consciousness with self-consciousness and the consciousness of the world.  Schleiermacher’s theory, moreover, may be held correct without ignoring the relatively legitimate elements in the views of religion which he attacked.  With the view that religion has its seat in feeling, it is quite possible to combine a recognition of the fact that it has its origin in the will, and its basis in morals, and that, further, it has the significance of being (to use Schopenhauer’s words) the “metaphysics of the people.”

Although religion and piety be made synonymous, it must still be admitted that in a being capable of knowing and willing as well as of feeling, this devout frame will have results in the spheres of cognition and action.  In regard to cultus Schleiermacher maintains that a religious observance which does not spring from one’s own feeling and find an echo therein is superstitious, and demands that religious feeling, like a sacred melody, accompany all human action, that everything be done with religion, nothing from religion.  Instead of expressing itself in single specifically religious actions, the religious feeling should uniformly pervade the whole life.  Let a private room be the temple where the voice of the priest is raised.  Dogmas, again, are descriptions of pious excitation, and take their origin in man’s reflection on his religious feelings, in his endeavor to explain them, in his expression of them in ideas and words.  The concepts and principles of theology are valid only as descriptions and presentations of feelings, not as cognitions; by their unavoidable anthropomorphic character alone they are completely unfitted for science.  The dogmatic system is an envelopment which religion