Now the more the living faith becomes love the more does it, through the immediate feeling and personal experience of life, attain to the certainty of science. For whatever we experience in our own selves, or whatever our own life brings as acquainted with, whatever we are immediately sensible of, and feel that we also know and are certain of it, that at least is a matter on which we are not likely to be led astray by the seeming dialectical proofs of the opposite, or by all skeptical attacks, or objections to the effect that such an immediate sensation and knowledge of a higher object is impossible. Although we are incapable of refuting them, we are, nevertheless, unmoved by the doubts which are raised even against the possibility of our own life and existence. We let them pass by and still live on in the world until, in some unlooked-for moment, and some unhoped-for way, the true solution, and the answer to these cavils which call in question the reality both of man’s inner life and his personal experience, spontaneously suggest themselves. And in the same way that the highest science, so soon as it discerns and understands its own nature, also becomes conscious of faith, and of its own dependence on faith, and being supported, completed, and perfected thereby, comes into immediate and living contact with it, so, on the other hand, the higher faith in the divine, the more vivid and the more earnest it is in love, becomes a more immediate conviction, and a science founded on the personal experience of life. Faith in the soul, as the center of man’s entire consciousness, may be likened to the outspread canopy of the blue heavens, according to that olden notion of it as a firmament, which perhaps in its figurative investiture still contains much that is strikingly true. According to this old but beautiful conception, the firmament was a definite limit that divides the heaven from the earth. Above it the free ether of light diffuses itself and stretches into the wide regions of illimitable space; while in the lower sphere, inclosed by the firmament, the wind of life [_Lebenswind_] now plays with refreshing motion, now descends to the earth in quickening dews or fertilizing showers, or draws out of the ground and to the light the hidden springs of life and mighty streams. Faith, therefore, is, as it were, the heavenly firmament in the consciousness that divides the streams of spiritual life and of external and internal science that are above it, from those that are under it. If this boundary be taken away, or violently broken through, the light and the darkness are no longer held apart, but mingle together in one confused and orderless mass. The true light grows darker and gradually becomes extinct, while the darkness begins to shine with a false glare and the glimmering twilight of pernicious delusion. The old chaos breaks in again upon the human mind, and it becomes anew what it formerly was, “without form and void.”