With reference to this stage of the religion of nature—which we cannot hold to be worthy of the name of religion—we must, in order to understand it, forget the ideas and thoughts which are, it may be, thoroughly familiar to us, and which even pertain to the superficial nature of our education and culture.
For natural consciousness, which is what we have here before us, the prosaic categories, such as cause and effect, have as yet no value, and natural things are not yet degraded into external things.
Religion has its soil in Spirit only. The spiritual knows itself as the Power over the natural, and that nature is not what exists on its own account, or in and for itself. Those categories just spoken of are the categories of the understanding, in which nature is conceived of as the Other of Spirit, and Spirit as the True. It is from this fundamental determination that religion has its first beginning.
Immediate religion, on the contrary, is that in which Spirit is still natural, in which Spirit has not as yet made the distinction of itself as the universal Power from itself as what is particular, contingent, transitory, and accidental. This distinction, namely, the antitheses of universal Spirit as universal Power and essential Being, and subjective existence with its contingency, has not yet appeared, and forms the second stage within the religion of nature.
Here in the primal immediate religion, in this immediacy, man has as yet no higher Power than himself. There is perhaps a power over contingent life and its purposes and interests, but this is no essential power in the sense of being inherently universal, being rather found in man himself. The Spiritual here exists in a particular and immediate form.
We may indeed be able to understand and think this form of religion, for in this case we still have it before our thoughts as an object. But it is not possible for us
