[p. 211]
|211| heart or feeling that something of this way of acting is good or evil; we also have a feeling of religion; we are religiously affected. What feeling says as an approval or disapproval of it contains merely the immediate pronouncement or assurance that something is so or is not so. Feeling gives no grounds and does not speak according to grounds. What feeling we have, of approval or disapproval, is likewise mere experience of the heart. – Feeling, however, is in general inconstant and changeable. At one time it is constituted thus, at another otherwise. Feeling is in general something subjective. As an object is in feeling, so it is merely in me as a particular individual. When I say: “I feel something thus” or “thus it is in my heart”, I say thereby that it is so only in me. I leave undecided whether it is so in others too. When in something I appeal merely to my feeling, I do not wish to go into grounds, thus not into the universal. I then withdraw into myself and express only how the matter is in me, not how it is in and for itself, objectively and universally. The objective or the universal is what belongs to the understanding, or the concept.
If one wants to cognize truly what a rose, carnation, oak etc. is, or to grasp their concept, one must first of all grasp the higher concept which underlies them, here therefore the concept of a plant; and in order to grasp the concept of the plant in turn, one must again grasp the higher concept on which the concept of plant depends, and this is the concept of an organic body. – In order to have the representation of bodies, surfaces, lines and points, one must have the representation of space, because space is the universal; bodies, surface etc., on the other hand, are only particular determinations in space. Thus future, past and present presuppose time as their universal ground, and so it is also with right, with duty and religion, namely they are
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