Hence, as might be expected, the dogmatic reality of such doctrines as the Trinity was weakened.(771) The deity of the Son, as distinct from his superhuman character, became unimportant, save as the historical embodiment of the ideal union of God with humanity.(772) The Spirit was viewed, not as a personal agent, but as a living activity, having its seat in the Christian consciousness of the church.(773) The objective in each case was absorbed in the spiritual, as formerly in the old rationalism it had been degraded into the natural. It followed also that the Christian consciousness, thus able to find as it were a philosophy of religion, and of the material apprehended by the consciousness of inspired men, possessed an instinct to distinguish the unimportant from the important in scripture, and valued more highly the eternal ideas intended than the historic garb under which they were presented. The ideological tendency, as it is now called,(774) the natural longing of the philosophical mind that tries to rise beyond facts into their causes, to penetrate behind phenomena into ideas, grows up in a country, as is seen by the example of ancient Greece, when the popular creed and the scientific have become discordant. Suggested in Germany by the old rationalism, it had been especially stimulated by the subjective philosophy of Kant and Fichte. Historic facts were the expression of subjective forms of thought. The Non-ego was a form, in which the Ego was expressing itself. This theory, suggested to Schleiermacher from without, fell in with his own views as above developed, and affected his critical inquiries. When he involved himself in the great questions of the higher criticism, which have been already treated in connexion with Semler, subjective criticism(775) was used in an exaggerated manner, not merely to suggest hypotheses, or to check deductions by Christian appreciation, but as a substitute _à priori_ for historic investigation. In the controversy as to the composition of the Gospels, which will be hereafter explained, he was led, by his ideological theory and his instinctive perception of the relative importance of doctrines in theological perspective, to abandon the historical importance of miracles as compared with doctrine, and also the verity of the early history of Christ’s life, considered to have been communicated by tradition; while he held fast to the moral and historical reality of the latter.(776)