Note 6 — Chapter XVIII · THE CHRISTIAN HEAVEN, OR PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.

In order to comprehend a particular faith, or religion in general, it is necessary to consider religion in its rudimentary stages, in its lowest, rudest condition. Religion must not only be traced in an ascending line, but surveyed in the entire course of its existence. It is requisite to regard the various earlier religions as present in the absolute religion, and not as left behind it in the past, in order correctly to appreciate and comprehend the absolute religion as well as the others. The most frightful “aberrations,” the wildest excesses of the religious consciousness, often afford the profoundest insight into the mysteries of the absolute religion. Ideas, seemingly the rudest, are often only the most childlike, innocent, and true. This observation applies to the conceptions of a future life. The “savage,” whose consciousness does not extend beyond his own country, whose entire being is a growth of its soil, takes his country with him into the other world, either leaving Nature as it is, or improving it, and so overcoming in the idea of the other life the difficulties he experiences in this.6 In this limitation of uncultivated tribes there is a striking trait. With them the future expresses nothing else than home-sickness. Death separates man from his kindred, from his people, from his country. But the man who has not extended his consciousness, cannot endure this separation; he must come back again to his native land. The negroes in the West Indies killed themselves that they might come to life again in their fatherland. And, according to Ossian’s conception, “the spirits of those who die in a strange land float back towards their birthplace.”7 This limitation is the direct opposite of imaginative spiritualism, which makes man a vagabond, who, indifferent even to the earth, roams from star to star; and certainly there lies a real truth at its foundation. Man is what he is through Nature, however much may belong to his spontaneity; for even his spontaneity has its foundation in Nature, of which his particular character is only an expression. Be thankful to Nature! Man cannot be separated from it. The German, whose God is spontaneity, owes his character to Nature just as much as the Oriental. To find fault with Indian art, with Indian religion and philosophy, is to find fault with Indian Nature. You complain of the reviewer who tears a passage in your works from the context that he may hand it over to ridicule. Why are you yourself guilty of that which you blame in others? Why do you tear the Indian religion from its connection, in which it is just as reasonable as your absolute religion?