icularist conceptions of his more historically and relativistically-minded contemporaries. The force exerted by this tension allowed Hegel to pursue the Kantian question of the conditions of rational human mindedness, rather than being concerned with giving an account of the developing self-consciousness of God. Thus, when Hegel included self-consciousness and religious self-consciousness within his project, he drew from the German Idealist context within which these formulations first gained their definition.
Therefore, it is worthwhile for us to turn to the chief proponents of German Idealism, namely Kant and Fichte, in order to full understand the workings of this tension within the nub of self-consciousness and religious self-consciousness.
In the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental esthetic and the transcendental logic, and subdivides the latter into transcendental analytic and transcendental dialectic.
By transcendental esthetic, Kant means the "science of all the principles of sensibility a priori," or the inquiry into the a priori conditions of sensation. Our external senses represent their objects as extended in space, and our internal senses represent our conscious states as succeeding each other in time. Space and time are the a priori conditions of external and internal sensation - conditions or forms which make sensation possible. They are, therefore, anterior to all experience. Space and time are not empirical concepts derived from experience; their a priori character appears from the very fact that knowledge based on the nature of space and time (mathematical knowledge) is necessary and universal; for it is a primary postulate of all Kant's transcendental inquiry that nothing which is necessary and universal can come from experience. Space and time are not properties of things; they belong to the subject, inhere in the subject, and are part of the subjective...