The first immediacy is the aesthetic,84 and here the Hegelian philosophy may well be right. But faith is not the aesthetic, or if it is, then faith has never existed just because it has existed always.
Hegel equates faith with immediate knowledge, but also with ‘inspiration, the heart’s revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or common sense’. Of all these he says they ‘agree in adopting as their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented to consciousness’.
