By "feeling," Schleiermacher didn’t mean some rush of emotion, but rather a kind of primal experience — or, perhaps better, a way of experiencing. He called it the feeling of piety, and in the Speeches he tried to describe it as the awareness of "the Infinite in the finite." … Sometimes, instead of "feeling," he used the term "self-consciousness," although it is clear that what we are conscious of in our experience of piety is not our isolated ego but the self in relation to something beyond us.