Note 9 — Chapter IX · THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM, OR OF NATURE IN GOD.
George Eliot translation
The abstraction expresses a judgment,—an affirmative and a negative one at the same time, praise and blame. What man praises and approves, that is God to him;9 what he blames, condemns, is the non-divine. Religion is a judgment. The most essential condition in religion—in the idea of the divine being—is accordingly the discrimination of the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, of the perfect from the imperfect; in a word, of the positive from the negative. The cultus itself consists in nothing else than in the continual renewal of the origin of religion—a solemnising of the critical discrimination between the divine and the non-divine.