and punishments, and showed that the real foes of religion were the rational and practical persons who endeavored to suppress the yearning for the transcendent in man and to drive out all mystery in seeking to make everything clear to him.  We cannot have conceptual knowledge of God, for conceptual thought is concerned with differences and opposites, whereas God is without such differences and oppositions:  he is the absolute union or identity of thought and being.  Religion is grounded in feeling, or divining intuition; in feeling, we come into direct relation with God; here the identity of thought and being is immediately experienced in self-consciousness, and this union is the divine element in us.  Religion is the feeling of absolute dependence upon an absolute world-ground; it is the immediate consciousness that everything finite is infinite and exists through the infinite.

The conception of God as the unity of thought and being, and the idea of man’s absolute dependence upon the world-ground, call to mind the pantheism of Spinoza.  Schleiermacher seeks to tone this down by giving the world of things a relative independence; God and the world are inseparable, and yet must be distinguished.  God is unity without plurality, the world plurality without unity; the world is spatial-temporal, while God is spaceless and timeless.  He is, however, not conceived as a personality, but as the universal creative force, as the source of all life.  The determinism implied in this world-view is softened by giving the individual a measure of freedom and independence.  The particular individuals are subject to the law of the whole; but each self has its unique endowment or gifts, its individuality, and its freedom consists in the unfolding of its peculiar capacities.  With Goethe, Schiller, and Romanticism, our philosopher rejects the rigoristic Kantian-Fichtean view of duty which, in his opinion, would suppress individuality and reduce all persons to a homogeneous mass; like them he regards the development of unique personalities as the highest moral task.  “Every man should express humanity in his own peculiar way in a unique mixture of elements, in order that it may reveal itself in every possible form, and that everything may become real in the infinite fulness which can spring from its lap.”  “The same duties can be performed in many different ways.  Different men may practise justice according to the same principles, each man keeping in view the general welfare and personal merit, but with different degrees of feeling, all the way from extreme coldness to the warmest sympathy.”  The command, therefore, is not merely:  Be a person; but:  Be a unique person, live your own individual life.  There is no irreconcilable conflict between the natural law and the moral law, between impulse and reason.  For the same reasons he defends the diversity of religions and the claims of personal religion; in each unique individual, religion should be left free to express itself in its own unique and intimate way.  His ideal is the development of unique, novel, original personalities; and these are expressions of the divine, which rationalism cannot bring under either its theoretical or practical rubrics.