First Section: Religious Dualism.

...or, according to the anthropological view, reversing the maxim of the theologians: "God created man in His image," and saying: "Man created God in his image"; the essential point of the matter remains that religion rests upon a drive within man toward a higher, more perfect being and in the recognition of a power higher than that of man.

The anthropologist is correct in this: that every conception of God bears traces of human consciousness, as Luther already remarked when he said: "As the heart is, so is the God," original: "Wie das Herz, so der Gott." Martin Luther, the 16th-century reformer, suggested that one's internal emotional and spiritual state dictates how they perceive and experience the Divine. which likely means that, according to a more or less developed stage of education, the human conception of the highest being will also be more or less sensory or refined. The most striking evidence is offered by the religious ideas of nature-peoples nature-peoples: (German: Naturvölker) a term used by 19th-century scholars to describe indigenous or tribal societies living in close contact with nature, often viewed as being at an "early" stage of human development., which essentially consist of the personification of those things in nature on which man believes his existence and destiny depend, and whose favorable or unfavorable turns are attributed to the actions of independent spirits. From this standpoint, the view of nature coincides with the religious view of things, and these spirits are imagined entirely according to the analogy of human individuality.

But the representatives of the feeling of absolute dependence This is a reference to the famous definition of religion by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who argued that the core of piety is the "feeling of absolute dependence" on a higher power. on God also have truth on their side: that feeling is an essential component of religious faith, without which religion can be neither living nor effective, whether from the perspective of belief or action. Outside the context of both historical and conceptual development stands only that view which allows a religion to fall suddenly upon humanity like a meteorite, unforeseen and historically unprepared. The origin of this view is quite explainable to the thinker, although those who hold it consider it incomprehensible The author is likely critiquing the idea of "divine revelation" as something that happens outside of human history; he suggests that while believers see it as a miracle, scholars can see it as part of a historical process..

With an expanded definition of the concept of religion, its elements will be recognized wherever a striving for the Ideal manifests itself, whether this consists in a power of nature or in the ideal of beauty, whether in patriotism or in science; it always remains a relationship to something that stands above the finite—