there entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture.[1] With Christianity man lost the capability of conceiving himself as a part of Nature, of the universe. As long as true, unfeigned, unfalsified, uncompromising Christianity existed, as long as Christianity was a living, practical truth, so long did real miracles happen; and they necessarily happened, for faith in dead, historical, past miracles is itself a dead faith, the first step towards unbelief, or rather the first and therefore the timid, uncandid, servile mode in which unbelief in miracle finds vent. But where miracles happen, all definite forms melt in the golden haze of imagination and feeling; there the world, reality, is no truth; there the miracle-working, emotional, i.e., subjective being, is held to be alone the objective, real being.
To the merely emotional man the imagination is immediately, without his willing or knowing it, the highest, the dominant activity; and being the highest, it is the activity of God, the creative activity. To him feeling is an immediate truth and reality; he cannot abstract himself from his feelings, he cannot get beyond them: and equally real is his imagination. The imagination is not to him what it is to us men of active understanding, who distinguish it as subjective from objective cognition; it is immediately identical with himself, with his feelings, and since it is identical with his being, it is his essential, objective, necessary view of things. For us, indeed, imagination is an arbitrary activity; but where man has not imbibed the principle of culture, of theory, where he lives and moves only in his feelings, the imagination is an immediate, involuntary activity.
The explanation of miracles by feeling and imagination is regarded by many in the present day as superficial. But let any one transport himself to the time when living, present miracles were believed in; when the reality of things without us was as yet no sacred article of faith; when men were so void of any theoretic interest in the world, that they from day
- ↑ Culture in the sense in which it is here taken. It is highly characteristic of Christianity, and a popular proof of our positions, that the only language in which the Divine Spirit was and is held to reveal himself in Christianity is not the language of a Sophocles or a Plato, of art and philosophy, but the vague, unformed, crudely emotional language of the Bible.
