to each other.

Sec. 161. If the spirit is prevented from passing out of the varied
pictures of conception to the supersensuous clearness and simplicity of
the thinking activity--if the content which it already begins to seize
as idea is again dissolved into the confusion of the picture-world, then
the religion of imagination, which was a perfectly proper form as the
second step, becomes perverted into some form of idolatry, either coarse
or refined. Education must therefore not oppose the thinking activity if
the latter undertakes to criticize religious conceptions; on the
contrary, it must guide this so that the discovery of the contradictions
which unavoidably adhere to sensuous form shall not mislead the youth
into the folly of throwing away, with the relative untruth of the form,
also the religious content in general.

--It is an error for educators to desire to keep the imagination apart
from religious feeling, but it is also an error to detain the mind,
which is on its formal side the activity of knowing, in the stage of
imagination, and to desire to condemn it thence into the service of
canonical allegories. The more, in opposition to this, it is possessed
with the charm of thinking, the more is it in danger of condemning the
content of religion itself as a mere fictitious conception. As a
transition-stage the religion of imagination is perfectly normal, and it
does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has
personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but
in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion.
The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism
then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also,
as if it were a mere conception.--

Sec. 162. (3) In the thinking activity the spirit attains that form of the
religious content which is identical with that of its simple
consciousness, and above which there is no other for the intelligence as
theoretical. But we distinguish three varieties in this thinking
activity: the abstract, the reflective, and the speculative. The
Abstract gives us the religious content of consciousness in the form of
abstractions or dogmas, i.e. propositions which set up a definition as a
universal, and add to it another as the reason for its necessity. The
Reflective stage busies itself with the relation of dogmas to each
other, and with the search for the grounds on which their neces