_Everything is in sensation_ (feeling): if you will, everything that
emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin
in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner
in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and
religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling.
What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the
facts of it are objective—set over against consciousness, so that as it is
put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me
(from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a
mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a
form: it is thus treated as my _very own_. My own is something inseparate
from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with
its underlying self in all its definite content is just this
inseparability; which however yet falls short of the ego of developed
consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is
with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the
conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of
feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no
philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything
the _heart_ must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which
anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, &c., and an
appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad.
This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than
that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, &c.? That the
heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: “From
the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy,
&c.” In such times when “scientific” theology and philosophy make the
heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it
is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is
nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property
by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in
common with them.