Humanity, for Schleiermacher, comes equipped with a deep intuition that everything we are and everything we do is held within, together by, and emerging from, a Source that is beyond all being. He called this deep intuition the feeling of absolute dependence. We are dependent on that Source for our existence. We are absolutely dependent because that Source is the Source not only of everything, but also of the way in which everything is ordered, as well as of the position each of us occupies within that ordering. We are dependent all the way down.
