...The middle class is spiritlessness, in the literal sense of the word; determination and fatalism are spiritual despair; but such spiritlessness is also despair. The petty bourgeois lacks every determinant of spirit and terminates in probability, within which the possible finds its insignificant place. Thus it lacks sufficient possibility to take notice of God. Devoid of imagination, as the bourgeois always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs. Thus the middle class has lost its self and God. For in order to be aware of oneself and God imagination must enable a man to soar higher than the misty precinct of the probable, it must wrench one out of this and, by making possible that which transcends the quantum satis of every experience, it must teach him to hope and fear, or to fear and hope. But imagination the middle class does not possess, it does not want to have it, it abhors it. So here there is no help. And if sometimes reality helps by terrors which transcend the parrot-wisdom of trivial experience, then the middle class despairs - that is, it becomes manifest that it was in despair. It lacks the possibility of faith in order by God's help to be able to deliver itself from certain destruction.
in Sygdommen til Døden : The Sickness Unto Death
Kierkegaard in the catalog