§ 4.
The distinction between the “heathen,” or philosophic, and the Christian God—the non-human, or pantheistic, and the human, personal God—reduces itself only to the distinction between the understanding or reason and the heart or feelings. Reason is the self-consciousness of the species, as such; feeling is the self-consciousness of individuality; the reason has relation to existences, as things; the heart to existences, as persons. I am is an expression of the heart; I think, of the reason. Cogito, ergo sum? No! Sentio, ergo sum. Feeling only is my existence; thinking is my non-existence, the negation of my individuality, the positing of the species; reason is the annihilation of personality. To think is an act of spiritual marriage. Only beings of the same species understand each other; the impulse to communicate thought is the intellectual impulse of sex. Reason is cold, because its maxim is, audiatur et altera pars, because it does not interest itself in man alone; but the heart is a partisan of man. Reason loves all impartiality, but the heart only what is like itself. It is true that the heart has pity also on the brutes, but only because it sees in the brute something more than the brute. The heart loves only what it identifies with itself. It says: Whatsoever thou dost to this being, thou dost to me. The heart loves only itself; does not get beyond itself, beyond man. The superhuman God is nothing else than the supernatural heart; the heart does not give us the idea of another, of a being different from ourselves. “For the heart, Nature is an echo, in which it hears only itself. Emotion, in the excess of its happiness, transfers itself to external things. It is the love which can withhold itself from no existence, which gives itself forth to all; but it only recognises as existing that which it knows to have emotion.”[2] Reason, on the contrary, has pity on animals, not because it finds itself in them, or identifies them with man, but because it recognises them as beings distinct from man, not existing simply for the sake of man, but also as having rights of their own. The heart sacrifices the species to the individual, the reason sacrifices the individual to the species. The man without feeling has no home, no private hearth. Feeling, the heart, is the domestic life; the reason is the res publica of man. Reason is the truth of Nature, the heart is the truth of man. To speak popularly, reason is the God of Nature, the heart the God of man;—a distinction however which, drawn thus sharply, is, like the others, only admissible in antithesis. Everything which man wishes, but which reason, which Nature denies, the heart bestows. God, immortality, freedom, in the supranaturalistic sense, exist only in the heart. The heart is itself the existence of God, the existence of immortality. Satisfy yourselves with this existence! You do not understand your heart; therein lies the evil. You desire a real, external, objective immortality, a God out of yourselves. Here is the source of delusion.
But as the heart releases man from the limits, even the essential limits of Nature; reason, on the other hand, releases Nature from the limits of external finiteness. It is true that Nature is the light and measure of reason;—a truth which is opposed to abstract Idealism. Only what is naturally true is logically true; what has no basis in Nature has no basis at all. That which is not a physical law is not a metaphysical law. Every true law in metaphysics can and must be verified physically. But at the same time reason is also the light of Nature;—and this truth is the barrier against crude materialism. Reason is the nature of things come fully to itself, re-established in its entireness. Reason divests things of the disguises and transformations which they have undergone in the conflict and agitation of the external world, and reduces them to their true character. Most, indeed nearly all, crystals—to give an obvious illustration—appear in Nature under a form altogether different from their fundamental one; nay, many crystals never have appeared in their fundamental form. Nevertheless, the mineralogical reason has discovered that fundamental form. Hence nothing is more foolish than to place Nature in opposition to reason, as an essence in itself incomprehensible to reason. If reason reduces transformations and disguises to their fundamental forms, does it not effect that which lies in the idea of Nature itself, but which, prior to the operation of reason, could not be effected on account of external hindrances? What else then does reason do than remove external disturbances, influences, and obstructions, so as to present a thing as it ought to be, to make the existence correspond to the idea; for the fundamental form is the idea of the crystal. Another popular example. Granite consists of mica, quartz, and feldspar. But frequently other kinds of stone are mingled with it. If we had no other guide and tutor than the senses, we should without hesitation reckon as constituent parts of granite all the kinds of stone which we ever find in combination with it; we should say yes to everything the senses told us, and so never come to the true idea of granite. But reason says to the credulous senses: Quod non. It discriminates; it distinguishes the essential from the accidental elements. Reason is the midwife of Nature; it explains, enlightens, rectifies and completes Nature. Now that which separates the essential from the non-essential, the necessary from the accidental, what is proper to a thing from what is foreign, which restores what has been violently sundered to unity, and what has been forcibly united to freedom,—is not this divine? Is not such an agency as this the agency of the highest, of divine love? And how would it be possible that reason should exhibit the pure nature of things, the original text of the universe, if it were not itself the purest, most original essence? But reason has no partiality for this or that species of things. It embraces with equal interest the whole universe; it interests itself in all things and beings without distinction, without exception;—it bestows the same attention on the worm which human egoism tramples under its feet, as on man, as on the sun in the firmament. Reason is thus the all-embracing, all-compassionating being, the love of the universe to itself. To reason alone belongs the great work of the resurrection and restoration of all things and beings—universal redemption and reconciliation. Not even the unreasoning animal, the speechless plant, the unsentient stone, shall be excluded from this universal festival. But how would it be possible that reason should interest itself in all beings without exception, if reason were not itself universal and unlimited in its nature? Is a limited nature compatible with unlimited interest, or an unlimited interest with a limited nature? By what dost thou recognise the limitation of a being but by the limitation of his interest? As far as the interest extends, so far extends the nature. The desire of knowledge is infinite; reason then is infinite. Reason is the highest species of being;—hence it includes all species in the sphere of knowledge. Reason cannot content itself in the individual; it has its adequate existence only when it has the species for its object, and the species not as it has already developed itself in the past and present, but as it will develop itself in the unknown future. In the activity of reason I feel a distinction between myself and reason in me; this distinction is the limit of the individuality; in feeling I am conscious of no distinction between myself and feeling; and with this absence of distinction there is an absence also of the sense of limitation. Hence it arises that to so many men reason appears finite, and only feeling infinite. And, in fact, feeling, the heart of man as a rational being, is as infinite, as universal as reason; since man only truly perceives and understands that for which he has feeling.
Thus reason is the essence of Nature and Man, released from non-essential limits, in their identity; it is the universal being, the universal God. The heart, considered in its difference from the reason, is the private God of man; the personal God is the heart of man, emancipated from the limits or laws of Nature.[3]