1. Man and Religion in Relation to Nature.

...The defining difference between humans and animals is therefore consciousness and self-consciousness, which marks the boundary and dividing line from which specifically human significance begins. It is true that the animal also becomes aware of the impressions of the external world through its sense organs; it possesses sensation and expresses what it feels through muscular movement; it feeds on the matter provided by nature and assimilates it into its corporeality corporeality: Leiblichkeit – the state of being a physical, living body. However, while the animal is entirely absorbed in feeding and in external existence, the human reaches the point of becoming aware that the external world—from which they receive nourishment and sensory impressions—is something distinct from themselves. The human achieves the consciousness that their own existence and their surroundings stand in opposition as a foreign external world. Indeed, the human becomes aware of their own physical activities, distinguishes them from the bodily existence of the organism, and, in their consciousness, sets their own sensation against themselves; that is, they achieve self-consciousness. A person only truly becomes "human" by arriving at this self-conscious I the I: Ich – the Ego or the self-aware subject. With this, they begin a spiritual life In this context, "spiritual life" (geistiges Leben) refers to the life of the mind, intellect, and self-awareness, rather than just religious practice. distinct from material life. However, insofar as the material that the human spirit reshapes is physicality, and the spiritual life is indeed active but not independent of the body, the unity of the sensory and the spiritual must constitute the true sphere of the human being.

In the period preceding self-consciousness, the child speaks of itself in the third person; it still lives in a "twilight" until the sun of consciousness and self-consciousness rises for it, from which point onward it refers to itself as "I." It is said that the philosopher Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a major German philosopher who argued that the "I" or the Self is the foundation of all knowledge. celebrated the day he first heard his child say the word "I" with great ceremony; this simply proves the significance of that moment, which the great philosopher knew how to appreciate.

The animal, which has no higher task than to live, to express its internal life of feeling through movement, and to preserve its species through reproduction, fulfills its destiny with its natural end: death. The human being only begins their specifically human life at the moment they become self-aware. But even as an infant,