 Otto does not attempt to give us a straightforward grammar of the numinous feeling, and says in fact that this cannot be done. Instead, he approaches it by comparing it with other experiences and trying out various terms that might approach to it in meaning, without exactly getting it; then the idea is that the reader will find the feeling among his own experiences, and thus be informed. Otto chides Schleiermacher for making the feeling of absolute dependence a mode of self-consciousness and for leaving the non-subjective object of the feeling uncharacterized (p. 10). Contrary to Schleiermacher, Otto says the concept of causation is absent from the most basic feeling. “The point from which speculation starts is not a ‘consciousness of absolute dependence’ — of myself as a result and effect of a divine cause — for that would in point of fact lead to insistence upon the reality of the self [which on Otto’s construction virtually disappears in the confrontation with the mysterium tremendum]; it starts from a consciousness of the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than myself, and it is only as it falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its end — terms generally borrowed from natural science — that that element of the tremendum, originally apprehended as ‘plenitude of power’, becomes transmuted into ‘plenitude of being’” (p. 21).