 reflects his understanding of nature as the totality of “the beings [Wesen], things, [and] objects that man distinguishes from himself and his products” (WR 4). Nature, in other words, is the non-human world, devoid of consciousness, will and sentiment. It includes such things as light, electricity, air, water, earth, and the plants and animals upon which the existence of human beings depends, but it also includes the human organism itself insofar as the effects produced by it are produced unconsciously and involuntary. Nature is the “cause and ground of man”; in human beings nature “becomes a personal, conscious, intelligent (verständiges) being” (VWR 29/21). To say that human beings are dependent upon nature is to say, among other things, that nature, which is devoid of consciousness and intention, is what has caused human beings to exist, and that the same physical processes that have produced the human brain have also produced human consciousness. While all organisms are dependent upon nature for their existence, human beings are distinguished from other organisms by the extent of their conscious awareness of this dependence, which Feuerbach finds expressed in the earliest forms of cultic activity, including the earliest forms of nature religion focused, for example, on the changes of the seasons, and in the offering of sacrifice to divine beings associated with various aspects of the natural world. Although nature is the original object of religion, this goes unrecognized initially because human beings do not at first distinguish themselves from nature or vice versa. The forces of nature are instead personified, and naturally occurring events are attributed to the human-like motivations of spirits and gods. Religion, according to Feuerbach, exhibits the following contradiction: When it conceives of itself theistically, it mistakenly thinks of God as a thoroughly non-human being (i.e., one whose existence and attributes in no way depends on the existence and attributes of human beings), and when in conceives of itself as nature religion, it mistakenly attributes consciousness and will to what is in fact entirely non-human.