Because of this immediate unity of the species with individuality, this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas, the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; and the reality which presents itself to us in distinction from this abstraction is the multitude of separate, limited individuals. In God, on the contrary, feeling has immediate satisfaction, because here all is embraced in one, i.e., because here the species has an immediate existence,--is an individuality. God is love, is justice, as itself a subject; he is the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians are distinguished from the heathens in this, that they immediately identify the individual with the species--that with them the individual has the significance of the species, the individual by himself is held to be the perfect representative of the species--that they deify the human individual, make him the absolute being. Especially characteristic is the difference between Christianity and heathenism concerning the relation of the individual to the intelligence, to the understanding, to the nous. The Christians individualised the understanding, the heathens made it a universal essence. To the heathens, the understanding, the intelligence, was the essence of man; to the Christians, it was only a part of themselves. To the heathens therefore only the intelligence, the species, to the Christians, the individual, was immortal, i.e., divine. Hence follows the further difference between heathen and Christian philosophy.