Herder, and even Goethe, abandoned him to his fate. He rejected
the shallow proofs of the _Aufklärung_, as well as the orthodox
utilitarian view of God as the dispenser of rewards 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