is external. The world, the finite, reconciles itself in this way with itself. If the truth has hitherto been expressed by saying that God has reconciled the world with Himself, this reconciliation is now seen to take place in me as finite. I, as an individual, am good; when I have fallen into error I only need to cast what is accidental from me and I am reconciled with myself. The inner life is only disturbed on the surface; this disturbance does not reach to its foundation; the spirit has not formed any relation with it; it keeps outside of it, and is not implicated in it. The inner life, the spirit, is what is originally good, and the negative does not get its specific character within the nature of the spirit itself.
In the older theology, on the contrary, you had the idea of eternal damnation. This presupposed that the will was absolutely free. According to this, what I am depends not upon my nature, but upon my self-conscious will: I am guilty through the will. Thus my nature, what I originally am, is not goodness; I can attribute no goodness to myself outside of my will: that quality pertains only to my self-conscious spirit. Here, on the other hand, it is the goodness of the original state only which is assumed, and the effects produced on it by what is other than itself are done away with through the restoration of what is original. To this goodness of the original state nothing further can be added than the knowledge of it—the conviction of the belief in one’s goodness; and that reconciling mediation consists merely in this consciousness, this knowledge that I am by nature good, and is consequently a worthless and empty see-saw system. I swing myself, so to speak, over into a longing for and in the direction of the “Beyond,” or, it may be, into a recognition of the faults I have committed; and again I swing myself within the limits of this longing and emotion which have their place purely within me, back to myself, and in all this I never travel beyond myself.
This is the abstract characterisation of this attitude.
