Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

Influences on Hamann
Hamann was a Pietist Lutheran and a friend (while being an intellectual opponent) of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. For example his work Golgatha and Scheblimini! By a Preacher in the Wilderness (1784) was directed against Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem or on Religious Might and Judaism (1782). Also Hamann asserted that the efficacy of a concept arises from the habits it reflects rather than any inherent quality it possesses.

Johann Georg Hamann (27 August 1730 – 21 June 1788) was a noted German philosopher a main proponent of the Sturm und Drang movement and associated by historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin with the Counter-Enlightenment.