[256F-LER: p. 173]
“ … individuality is the principle of generation and creation; only very individual conditions of the earth, geological upheavals such as have not taken place since, produced organic beings, at least those of them that have existed on earth in the most recent geological era.” [256F-LER: p. 173]
[257F-LER: p. 174]
“ … the origin of organic beings, the origin of the earth, and even of the sun if we conceive of it as having come into being, was never anything but a natural process; … in trying to visualize and understand this origin, we must not take man, the artist, the artisan, the thinker, who builds the world out of his thoughts, as our starting point, but nature – just as the ancient peoples, whose sound natural instinct led them, at least in their religious and philosophical cosmogonies, to take the reproductive process as the model and prototype of world creation; … that nature cannot be derived from spirit, cannot be explained on the basis of a God, because all those attributes of God that are not patently human are derived and abstracted from nature alone.” [257F-LER: p. 174]
[258F-LER: p. 174-175]
[P. 174] “ … it is the human faculty of [P. 175] abstraction and the related imagination (for it is only thanks to his imagination that man hypostatizes abstract, universal concepts and comes to conceive of them as entities, as Ideas) that lead him to look outside the sensuous world and to derive it from a non-sensuous, abstract being.” [258F-LER: p. 175]
[259F-LER: p. 177-178]
[P. 177] “But what is it that transforms a natural phenomenon into a human being? The imagination. (…) [P. 178] Christians designate the theoretical religious faculty by the word faith or belief. (…) But on closer scrutiny the words mean nothing other than imagination.” [259F-LER: p. 177-178]
[260F-LER: p. 179]
“ … this power of faith or God, unhampered by the laws of nature, is precisely the power of the imagination, to which nothing is impossible. Faith sees the invisible … . And the imagination, as well, is not of things which are seen but of things which are not seen. The imagination concerns itself exclusively with things and beings which are no longer or not yet, or which at least are not present.” [260F-LER: p. 179]
[261F-LER: p. 180-181]
[P. 180] “ … a God is an imaginary being, a product of fantasy; and because fantasy is the essential form or organ of poetry, it may also be said that religion is poetry, that a God is a poetic being. If religion is taken as poetry, may it not be inferred that to abolish religion, to break it down into its basic components, is to do away with poetry and all art? (…) My adversaries throw up their hands in horror at the hideous desolation to [P. 181] which my doctrine would reduce human life,
