the eyes of your opponents, and not observe the very obvious beam in your own eyes? why make yourselves an exception to a universally valid law? Admit that your personal God is nothing else than your own personal nature, that while you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extranaturalism of your own self.
In the Creation, as everywhere else, the true principle is concealed by the intermingling of universal, metaphysical, and even pantheistic definitions. But one need only be attentive to the closer definitions to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve; now it becomes an act, and therewith it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distinct from the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this positing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjective nature, when the world is separated from it?[1] It is true that when astute reflection intervenes, the distinction between extra and intra is disavowed as a finite and human (?) distinction. But to the disavowal by the understanding, which in relation to religion is pure misunderstanding, no credit is due. If it is meant seriously, it destroys the foundation of the religious consciousness; it does away with the possibility, the very principle of the creation, for this rests solely on the reality of the abovementioned distinction. Moreover, the effect of the crea-
- ↑ It is not admissible to urge against this the omnipresence of God, the existence of God in all things, or the existence of things in God. For, apart from the consideration that the future destruction of the world expresses clearly enough its existence outside of God, i.e., its non-divineness, God is in a special manner only in man; but I am at home only where I am specially at home. “Nowhere is God properly God, but in the soul. In all creatures there is something of God; but in the soul God exists completely, for it is his resting-place.”—Predigten etzlicher Lehrer, &c., p. 19. And the existence of things in God, especially where it has no pantheistic significance, and any such is here excluded, is equally an idea without reality, and does not express the special sentiments of religion.
