In consequence of this theory Schleiermacher regards every feeling, every emotion, in so far as it expresses the united life of the Ego and the All in the manner described, as religious. "The feelings, the feelings alone, provide the elements of religion." He maintains that there is no feeling which is not religious, unless it is the product of a diseased or depraved condition, adding a note to the effect that this holds good even of the feelings of sensual enjoyment, so long as they are not contrary to nature or depraved. His endeavour is to rescue religion from antagonism with science and culture by making it out to be the essence of every noble, nay, of every healthy feeling. A true German, he pantheistically maintains that the broad stream of life which flows through all created beings is the sacred fountain of all piety and all religions. Therefore he would do away with every definite religious system; even belief in God and immortality does not seem to him to be essential to religion. He exclaims enthusiastically: "Join with me in reverently offering a lock to the holy, outcast soul of Spinoza in the realm of shades. He apprehended the great world-spirit; the infinite was to him all in all, the universe his one and eternal love; with holy innocence and deep humility he mirrored himself in it, and it in return found its most pleasing mirror in him. He was full of religion and of the spirit of holiness."
Even the age of enlightenment did not deal so-called revealed religion a severer blow than did this emotionalism. Schleiermacher, as we see, resolves religion into feeling, and in so doing destroys its authority by making over this authority to the human soul in all its endless variability. All rules, ordinances, dogmas, and principles disappear; each individual is, by a special process, to make everything his own. For Schleiermacher maintains that "however perfectly a man may understand such principles, however firmly he may be convinced that he possesses them, if he does not know and cannot prove that they have arisen in himself as expressions of his own spiritual life and are consequently originally his own, we must not let ourselves be persuaded to believe that such a man is a religious man. He is not; his soul has never conceived; his religious ideas are only supposititious children, the offspring of other souls, whom he, in the secret feeling of his own impotence, has adopted."