must work,’ says the other, the god who is not differentiated from nature and merely expresses the essence of nature. For nature is a worker bee, while the gods are drones.” [337F-LER: p. 317]
[338F-LER: p. 320-321]
[P. 320] “Human ignorance is bottomless, and the human imagination knows no bounds; deprived of its foundations by ignorance and of its limits by the imagination, the power of nature becomes divine omnipotence. (…)
(…) In short, an object considered as subject, the essence of nature differentiated from nature and seen as a human being, the essence of man differentiated from man and seen as a not-human being - this is the essence of divinity and religion, [P. 321] the secret of mysticism and speculation, this is the great thauma, the wonder of all wonders, which fills men with the profoundest amazement and rapture.” [338F-LER: p. 320-321]
[339F-LER: p. 321]
“God is man, but a man who is nature and whose imagination embraces the cosmos … .” [339F-LER: p. 321]
[340F-LER: p. 321]
[Footnote:] It goes without saying that this fusion of man and nature into a single being, who is termed the supreme being precisely because he is the summit of the imagination, is involuntary. And ‘the instinct for religion or divinity’ owes its name and existence to the involuntary character of this fusion.” [340F-LER: p. 321]
[341F-LER: p. 321-322]
[P. 321] “The God of the Koran and the Old Testament is still filled with the sap of nature, still wet and cold from the cosmic ocean whence He sprang, whereas the God of Christian monotheism is a withered, dried-out God in whom all traces of His origin in nature is effaced; there He stands like a creation out of [P. 322] nothing; on pain of the rod He even forbids the inevitable question: ‘What did God do before He created the world?’ or more correctly: What was He before nature? In other words, He makes a secret of His physical origin, hiding it behind a metaphysical abstraction.” [341F-LER: p. 321-322]
[342F-LER: p. 322-323]
[P. 322] “True, ‘what we think, exists,’ but only as thought; thought is one thing, reality is another; no sleight-of-hand can make them [P. 323] the same.” [342F-LER: p. 322-323]
[343F-LER: p. 324]
“Man is a practical, not a theoretical being, he is motivated not by ethereal imagination but by hungry, painful reality.” [343F-LER: p. 324]
