..續本文上一頁nations in overthrowing their oppressors. The value of internal unity, in their eyes, was proven by its ability to create bonds of unity in the world of social and political action.

　　Schiller saw the process of integration as unending: perfect unity could never be achieved. A meaningful life was one continually engaged in the process of integration. The path was the goal. It was also totally unpatterned and unconstrained. Given the free nature of the play drive, each person”s path to integration was inpidual and unique. Schiller”s colleague, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768‐1834), applied these ideas to religion, concluding that it, like any other art form, was a human creation, and that its greatest function lay in healing the splits both within the human personality and in human society at large. He defined the essence of religion as “the sensibility and taste for the infinite,” which begins in the receptive mind state where awareness opens to the infinite. This feeling for the infinite is followed by an act of the creative imagination, which articulates that feeling to oneself and others. Because these creative acts—and thus all religious doctrines—are a step removed from the reality of the experience, they are constantly open to improvement and change.

　　A few quotations from his essays, On Religion, will give a sense of Schleiermacher”s thought.

　　“The inpidual is not just part of a whole, but an exhibition of it. The mind, like the universe is creative, not just receptive. Whoever has learned to be more than himself knows that he loses little when he loses himself. Rather than align themselves with a belief of personal immortality after death, the truly religious would prefer to strive to annihilate their personality and live in the one and in the all.”

　　“Where is religion chiefly to be sought

　　 Where the living contact of a human being with the world fashions itself as feeling. Truly religious people are tolerant of different translations of this feeling, even the hesitation of atheism. Not to have the pine immediately present in one”s feelings has always seemed to them more irreligious than such a hesitation. To insist on one particular conception of the pine to be true is far from religion.”

　　Schiller and Schleiermacher both had a strong influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, which can easily be seen in the latter”s writings. We”re sometimes told that Emerson was influenced by Eastern religions, but actually his readings in Buddhism and Hinduism simply provided chapter and verse for the lessons he had already learned from the European Romantics.

　　“Bring the past into the 1000‐eyed present and live ever in a new day. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. The essence of genius, of virtue, and of life is what is called Spontaneity or Instinct. Every man knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.”

　　“The reason why the world lacks unity is because man is disunited with himself…. We live in succession, in pision, in parts, in particles. Meanwhile, within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self‐sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.”

　　At present, the Romantics and Transcendentalists are rarely read outside of literature or theology classes. Their ideas have lived on in the general culture largely because they were adopted by the discipline of psychology and translated into a vocabulary that was both more scientific and more accessible to the public at large. One of the most crucial translators was …

《The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…