'At Kilne there was no weathercock, And that's the reason why.'
Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly, religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the inner peace, the absolute harmony of the true reality. _Pectus facit theologum._ The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the sense of absolute independence in God--that strength of faith is the very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs a risk of falling into the fallacy of _Post hoc_, _ergo propter hoc._ She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only a parable,--they are but
'Flesh and blood To which she links a truth divine.'
Hegel--in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion--is reported to have given the following characteristics of 'representation,' (_a_) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative thought divest itself:--the eternally living idea is chained to the transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (_b_) Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names, incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (_c_) The terms by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective arrangement[3].