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 3 1924 092 308 133 
 
B Cornell University 
 Q Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092308133 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EELIGIOK 
 
PUBLISHED BY 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW^ 
 ^oblislwra to t\xt anibfrsilg. 
 
 MACMILLAN 
 New York, • 
 Toronto^ - 
 London, 
 Cambridge, • 
 EdinburgJi^ - 
 Sydney, - - 
 
 AND CO., LTD., LONDON. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. 
 
 The Macmillan Co. of Canada, 
 
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 Douglas and Foulis. 
 
 Angus and Robertsotu 
 
THE 
 
 EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 
 
 THE OIFFOED LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS IN SESSIONS 
 
 1890-91 AND 1891-9S 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD CAIRD 
 
 MASTER OP BAXLIOL COLLEGE, OXFOBD ; LATE PROFESSOR OF 
 MOBAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF QLASQOW 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
 GLASGOW 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS 
 
 $nt)lish«rs to th; ^nibusit^ 
 
 1907 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
S.TbiV 
 
 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 EEV. BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL 
 
 BY AIT OLD PUPIL WHO OWES MUCH TO 
 HIS TEACHING AND HIS FRIENDSHIP 
 
PEEFACE TO FIEST EDITION. 
 
 These volumes contain the Gifford Lectures delivered - 
 in the University of St. Andrews, during Sessions 
 1890-91 and 1891-92. I have, however, introduced 
 into the First Course two additional Lectures, the 
 Sixth and Twelfth, which seemed necessary to com- 
 plete the argument. 
 
 A Course of Lectures which attempts to give a 
 general view of so great a subject as the Evolution 
 of EeHgion, without going into detail on any special 
 question, and, so far as possible, without using the 
 technical language of philosophy, must leave much to 
 be desired in precision and completeness of statement. 
 And for a time I thought of using what I had written 
 merely as materials for a more systematic work. But 
 on consideration it seemed to me impossible to change 
 the plan originally adopted, without practically writing 
 a new book. The looser form of Lectures seemed also 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 to have some advantage in concentrating attention upon 
 the main issues apart from the details of criticism, 
 and, at the same time, in meeting the wants of readers 
 whom a more elaborate treatise might have repelled. 
 
 In preparing these Lectures I have specially had 
 in view that large and increasing class who have 
 become, partially at least, alienated from the ordinary 
 dogmatic system of belief, but who, at the same 
 time, are conscious that they have owed a great part 
 of their spiritual life to the teachings of the Bible 
 and the Christian Church. To separate what is 
 permanent from what is transitory in the traditions 
 of the past is a difiBcult task which every new 
 generation has to encounter for itself. In the present 
 day there are many who find it hard to understand 
 themselves, and "the signs of the times"; nay, 
 who are divided between two feelings : perplexed on 
 the one side by a suspicion that in cHnging to the 
 orthodox forms of the creed of Christendom, they may 
 be untrue to themselves, and may even seem to 
 assent to doctrines which they have ceased to be- 
 lieve ; and checked on the other side by a fear that, 
 in discarding those forms, they may be casting aside 
 ideas which are essential to their moral and spiritual 
 life. What they want, above all, is some principle or 
 criterion, which wiU make it possible for them to 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IX 
 
 distinguish what is tenable from what is untenable 
 in the opposite claims which are made upon their 
 belief — claims which, on both sides, they cannot help 
 to some extent acknowledging. They want some 
 Mrenicon to reconcile them with themselves, and to 
 enable them to see that there is no discord between 
 the different aspects of truth which their own ex- 
 perience has forced them to recognise. 
 
 In dealing with such difficulties, in the present day, 
 we are greatly assisted by those better methods of 
 historical and philosophical criticism which are making 
 the book of the past so much less hard to read than 
 it was to a previous generation; and, above all, by 
 the great reconciling principle of Development, upon 
 which these methods are based. That principle has 
 for the first time put into our hands "the leaden 
 rule of Lesbian Architecture " ^ which can adapt 
 itself to all the inequalities of the varied and com- 
 plex structure of human opinion. It has made it 
 possible for us to understand the errors of men in 
 the past as partial and germinating truths ; and to 
 detect how ideas grow up under forms which are 
 inadequate to them, and which finally they throw off 
 when they have reached maturity. It has made it 
 possible for us to give a more satisfactory, because a 
 1 Aristotle's Mhics, v. 10. 7 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 more discriminating answer to many questions which 
 a previous generation settled with a simple ' yes ' or 
 ' no ' ; to stop the strife of warring dogmatisms by 
 showing that the question is not one between absolute 
 verity and absolute untruth, but between more or less 
 of each. For, so long as we have our life " am farbigen 
 Ahglans," — in the varied and coloured reflex of our 
 partial human thought and feeling ; so long as our 
 developing thought is divided as it is, between the 
 truth which we have consciously realised, and that 
 which we are only striving to make conscious, so long 
 the question between different schools or stages of 
 thought will not be simply: 'True or false?' but 
 ' How much truth has been brought to expression, 
 and with what inadequacies and unexplained assump- 
 tions?' The idea of development thus enables us to 
 maintain a critical spirit without agnosticism, and a 
 reasonable faith without dogmatism; for it teaches 
 us to distinguish the one spiritual principle which is 
 continuously working in man's life from the changing 
 forms through which it passes in the course of its 
 history. It teaches us to do justice to the past 
 without enslaving the present, and to give freedom to 
 the thought of the present without forgetting that it, 
 in its turn, must be criticised and transcended by 
 the widening consciousness of the future. 
 
PREFACE. xi 
 
 The plan of these Lectures is as follows. After 
 the general statement, in the First Lecture, of the 
 problem which I propose to discuss, I have given 
 in the next six Lectures an explanation, as clear as 
 I could make it, of the principles upon which my 
 view of Religion and of its History is based. It 
 is in this part of the book mainly that difficulties 
 are likely to be felt by readers who are not familiar 
 with philosophical discussion. In the rest of the 
 course I have described what I conceive to be the 
 main stages in the development of pre-Christian re- 
 ligions. In doing so I have been led — partly by a 
 desire to get at the issues that are of most im- 
 portance, and partly by the limitations of my own 
 knowledge — to pass very summarily over the earliest 
 stages of religious thought, and to dwell mainly on 
 those higher forms of religion which may be still said 
 to survive as recognisable influences in modern life. 
 In my Second Course of Lectures I have confined 
 myself almost entirely to the development of the 
 Jewish and the Christian religion. Of course, even 
 these could only be dealt with very briefly and 
 inadequately, though what I have said about them 
 contains the result of the reflexions of many years. 
 What, however, I have aimed at throughout has 
 been rather to illustrate a certain method of dealing 
 
xii PREFACE. 
 
 with the facts of religious history in the light of the 
 idea of development, than to exhaust any one applica- 
 tion of that method. 
 
 Professor Henry Jones, of the University of St. 
 Andrews, has read all the proofs of these volumes, 
 and I owe to him many suggestions and criticisms 
 which have been of great help to me. I have also 
 to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Miss 
 MacLehose, who has prepared the Index for this, 
 as for a former work of mine. 
 
 EDWABD CAIED. 
 
 The Univbrsitt, 
 
 Glasgow, December, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS OF THE FIEST VOLUMK 
 
 LECTURE FIEST. 
 The Possibility op a Science or Eeliqion, 
 
 
 LECTUEE SECOND. 
 DiFPEEBNT Methods of Defining Eeligion, . , , 36 
 
 LECTUEE THIED. 
 The Definition of Eeligion, 60 
 
 LECTUEE FOUETH. 
 
 The Idea of the Infinite as Defined bt Professor 
 
 May MiJLLBR and Mb. Herbert Spencer, . . 84 
 
 LECTUEE FIFTH. 
 
 Me. Spencer's Dualistio View of the Consciousness 
 
 OF the Finite 114 
 
xiv CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 LECTURE SIXTH. 
 
 The Idea of God as the Beginning and the End of 
 
 Knowledge, . 145 
 
 lectuee seventh. 
 
 .k The Main Stages in the Evolution op Eelioion, . 169 
 
 LECTUEE EIGHTH. 
 The Objective Eoem of the Earliest Eeligion, . 199 
 
 LECTUEE NINTH. 
 
 Connexion of Eeligion in its Baeliest Phases with 
 
 moealitt, 233 
 
 LECTUEE TENTH. 
 The Eeligion of Greece 260 
 
 LECTUEE ELEVENTH. 
 
 The Function of the Imagination in the Develop- 
 ment of Objective Eeligion, 286 
 
 LECTUEE TWELFTH. 
 The Logical Justification of Subjective Eeligion, . 316 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 PAO£ 
 
 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. 
 
 The Subjective Religions — Buddhism and the 
 
 Philosophical Religion or the Stoics, . . 348 
 
 LECTURE FOURTEENTH. 
 The Religion of Israel, ...,., 377 
 
LECTURE FIEST. 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 
 
 The Progress of Science due to the Division of the Sciences — The 
 Advance from Simpler to more Complex Problems — TTie conse- 
 quent need for Specific Principles, and the Controversies which 
 arise for want of them — Special difficulties in the case of the 
 Moral Sciences — The Science of Religion — Defects in the earlier 
 Treatment of it — Reasons for the New Interest in the Facts of 
 Religious History — Ideas necessary to explain those Facts — 
 (1) The Unity of Mankind — History of this Idea — Modern Use 
 of it in History and the Philosophy of History — (2) The 
 Development of Man — History of this Idea — Modern Scientific 
 Use of it — How the History of Man's Development throws light 
 -upon the Individual Life — Special Difficulties in applying these 
 Ideas to the History of Religion: (1) hecause__Religion is the 
 most concentrated Form of Man's Consciousness of Himself and 
 Jthe Wortd TJ^ because qf tfH KxW&me Ydridtibn of the Forms 
 of Religion. 
 
 The work of science is to find law, order, and reason 
 in what seems at first accidental, capricious and mean- 
 ingless, and the arduousness of that work grows with 
 the complexity and intricacy of the phenomena to be 
 ■explained. The freer the play of difference, the harder 
 it is to find the underlying unity : the fiercer the con- 
 
 VOL. I. A 
 
2 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 flict of opposites, the more difficult it is to detect the 
 principle out of which it springs. Hence arises the 
 necessity for scientific method. Unconscious of the 
 greatness of the task they were undertaking, the first 
 bold adventurers in the field of science tried to solve 
 the whole problem of the universe at a stroke, and to 
 find some one principle which would account for every- 
 thing. But it soon became obvious that the citadel of 
 knowledge was not to be taken by storm, but only by 
 advancing parallel after parallel in a long and patient 
 siege. In order to gratify the desire of knowledge, it 
 was necessary in the first instance to restrict it ; and 
 the, earliest and most secure triumphs of science were 
 won by separating off some comparatively limited sphere 
 of reality, and treating it as a world by itself. Thus 
 the mathematician was content to deal with a world 
 which had been emptied of everything but quantitative 
 relations, and the physicist with a world of motion 
 without life. And it is just because they thus 
 narrowed the problem that they succeeded in solving 
 it. Divide et invpera. The chaotic aspect which 
 things at first present can be overcome only by the 
 division of the infinite field, and the man of science 
 wins success mainly by confining his attention to 
 one limited sphere of investigation. It is true that, 
 even within this limited sphere he finds a kind 
 of infinity. Mathematics, the earliest of the sciences, 
 still sees an endless series of new problems opening up 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 3 
 
 before it; and, great as has been the progress of 
 physics in modern times, it has raised more ques- 
 tions than it has answered. But though the field of 
 inquiry opened up by each of these sciences is infinite, 
 it has ceased to present the aspect of a chaos: it is 
 progressively revealed as a cosmos by the application 
 of one simple principle. The general nature of the 
 difficulties to be met with is known, and also the 
 methods by which they can be overcome. The field 
 is not, and cannot be exhausted, but such light has 
 been thrown upon it, that no room is left for the fear 
 that, within that department, the progress of science 
 will ever meet with any insurmountable obstacle, or 
 that any new fact which may be discovered wiU throw 
 its conceptions back into the confusion from which 
 they have emerged. 
 
 From this it follows that the general progress 
 of science is not arrested by the incompleteness of 
 its achievements within any particular department. 
 Although it is not possible that investigation should " 
 ever exhaust the sphere of mathematics or physics, 
 it can advance from mathematics to physics, and 
 from physics to biology, with the security of a general 
 who has sufficiently covered a hostile fortress in his 
 rear. Hence the prejudgment or faith that there is no 
 sphere of existence which is exempt from the reign 
 of law, has been gaining ground with every new 
 success of science; in spite of the fact that, in every 
 
4 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 step of its advance from the simple to the complex, 
 the diflBculty has been becoming greater. Men of 
 science met the more intricate problem of biology 
 with the prestige of their success in the fields of 
 mathematics and physics, and they are now meeting 
 the still harder problem of anthropology with the 
 prestige of their certain, though incomplete, victory 
 in biology. If Hegel raised the cry of triumph too 
 soon, when he asserted that " the secret nature of 
 the universe has no power in itself which could 
 offer permanent resistance to the courage of science," 
 yet it may safely be said that the faith which he 
 expressed rests now on a securer basis than ever 
 before, and that it is continually receiving a kind 
 of objective verification, which it received in no 
 previous age. The belief that in some sense the 
 world is a rational or intelligible system, is indeed 
 one which has never been entirely wanting to man- 
 kind, since it is bound up with the very nature of 
 the intelligence ; but by the great scientific advance 
 of the past, and especially of the last century, it has 
 ceased to be a vague anticipation, and become — at 
 least to all educated men — a living, and, we might 
 almost say, a palpable assurance. 
 
 While I say this, however, I must at the same time 
 point out that the faith and the realisation of it have 
 to contend with a difficulty which seems to grow as 
 we advance. For as we pass from mathematics 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 5 
 
 to physics and chemistry, and from physics and 
 chemistry to biology and anthropology, there is an 
 increase in the intricacy of the problems we have 
 to solve. Nor is this due merely to the greater 
 number of the phenomena to be explained. It is due 
 also to successive changes in the character of the 
 phenomena themselves, and it points to the need for 
 specific principles of explanation. The transitions, 
 from motion to life, and from life to sensation and 
 consciousness, are qualitative ; and the endeavour to 
 extend those principles, which enable us to explain 
 the lower terms of the series, to all its higher 
 terms, is doomed to inevitable failure. Thus the 
 general faith that the world is an intelligible system 
 requires to be justified in a different way in every 
 new science. Physics and chemistry have secrets 
 which cannot be unlocked with a mathematical key; 
 nor would biology ever have made the advance, which 
 in this century it has made, without the aid of a 
 liigher conception of evolution, than that which 
 reduces it to a mere "mode of motion." And if 
 the effort which is now being made to explain the 
 nature and history of man is to succeed, it un- 
 doubtedly will require a still higher conception or 
 principle of explanation.^ 
 
 ' Ultimately, every object requires the highest principle to 
 explain it, at least for a philosophy that accepts the principle 
 of evolution. But of this we are not here speaking. 
 
6 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 The necessity for such an ascending series of 
 specific principles is sometimes concealed from us 
 by the fact that we apply the general terms ' law ' 
 and ' cause ' to every kind of rational explanation 
 of things, without considering what sort of law and 
 cause is meant. But to say that there is a uni- 
 versal reign of law, and that nothing happens with- 
 out a cause, is by no means to say that there is 
 one kind of law and one kind of cause for every- 
 thing. The world is not a congeries of things all 
 on the same level. It is more fitly described as a 
 hierarchy, in which the lower orders of being are both 
 presupposed and explained by the higher. If, there- 
 fore, we have a right, as we rise from biology to 
 anthropology, to carry with us the faith that the 
 new sphere, like the old, is under the reign of law, 
 yet we must expect that the new sphere wiU demand 
 a new law or principle of explanation. And if we 
 try to dispense with such a principle, we shall find 
 many a phenomenon escaping into contingency, and 
 defying all our efforts to find a place for it in 
 our imperfectly conceived cosmos. What is worse, 
 the attempt to subject facts to an insufficient 
 theory is apt to awaken a revolt against the very 
 idea of law, and even to call forth a denial of the 
 possibility of any rational explanation of the facts 
 in question. And the only result that can emerge 
 will be an unprofitable controversy between those 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 7 
 
 who would solve the difficulty by means of an in- 
 adequate principle, and those who maintain that it 
 cannot be solved on any principle whatever, or, in 
 other words, that we must be content with a faith 
 that cannot be rationally justified. 
 
 Such reflexions as these naturally arise, when we 
 consider the present state of controversy in regard 
 to the life of man, as a rational or spiritual being. 
 In taking up any question connected with this sub- 
 ject, we are confronted, on the one hand, with those 
 whose scientific principles are too narrow to explain 
 the facts of mind, and especially that moral and re- 
 ligious consciousness with which the highest pheno- 
 mena of mind are connected. On the other hand, 
 we are confronted with those whose spiritual ex- 
 perience has given them a firm intuitive grasp of 
 these facts, and who, recognising the inadequacy of 
 the explanation offered, set themselves against all 
 theory as tending to explain the facts away. On 
 the one side, we hear the demand that the life of 
 man, like everything else, should be brought under 
 law and interpreted in relation to its causes ; but 
 that demand is presented in such a form as practically 
 to involve the reduction of the moral and religious 
 consciousness to an illusion. On the other side, 
 every attempt at scientific explanation is met by 
 an assertion of the freedom of man's will and of the 
 immediacy of his relation to the Infinite Being ; 
 
8 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 but this assertion of man's spiritual nature is so 
 interpreted as to make him an exception to the order 
 of the world, a being who is not subjected to tha 
 reign of law, and cannot be brought into intelligible 
 relation with other natural existences. 
 
 But there is little to choose between an illusion 
 and an unintelUgibUity ; and the mind, in virtue of its 
 native confidence in itself, rises in rebellion against 
 both. The nature of the intelligence and its whole 
 past history are our warrant for rejecting any theory 
 which turns man's highest consciousness of himself 
 into an illusion; but we have the same warrant for 
 asserting that it, the intelligence itself, cannot be an 
 exception to the general system of the world in which 
 it exists and manifests itself. It is impossible that in 
 its highest life reason can be unfaithful to itself ; but 
 it is equally impossible that that highest life should be 
 irrational, or not rationally explicable. To say that 
 the mind is successful abroad, but that it loses all its- 
 power at home : that it can penetrate the secret of the 
 world, but that its own being is permanently un- 
 fathomable to it, is to put it at variance with itself, and 
 to deny to it its essential attribute of self-consciousness. 
 If anything is intelligible, it must be the movement of 
 the intelligence itself It is natural, indeed, that a& 
 the spiritual life of man is the most complex and 
 difficult of all subjects, the subject which includes 
 and transcends all others, it should be the latest to be 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 9 
 
 treated on an adequate method. But this is no reason 
 for denying that it can ever enter upon what Kant 
 calls "the secure path of science." It only calls upon 
 us for increased vigilance, so as to make sure that we 
 are omitting no important element in the statement 
 of so comprehensive a problem, and that, in our at- 
 tempts to solve it, we are not misled into using prin- 
 ciples which are inappropriate or inadequate. 
 
 It is only with one section, though not the least 
 important section, of this subject that we are here con- 
 cerned. We have to ask what success has attended, 
 or is likely to attend, the attempt to give scientific ex- 
 planation of the phenomena of man's religious life. 
 In other words, we have to consider by what method, 
 and upon what principle, the investigation of these 
 phenomena should be conducted, and — so far as is 
 possible in a short course of lectures — to show the 
 nature of the results to which a course of investigation, 
 so conducted, is calculated to lead. 
 
 The science of religion is one of the earliest and 
 one of the latest of the sciences. It is one of the 
 earliest : for philosophy, which is the parent of the 
 sciences, is the child of religion ; and the first efforts 
 of philosophy are spent in the endeavour to find some 
 kind of rationale for the religious consciousness. On 
 the other hand, it is one of the latest : and that for a 
 twofold reason. It is not till quite modern times that 
 the necessary data of the science — the facts to be ex- 
 
10 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 plained — have become fully accessible; and even if they 
 had been accessible at an earlier time, they would have 
 excited no intelligent interest in the absence of the 
 ideas and principles by which alone it is possible to 
 explain them. For, in the development of human 
 thought there is always a double process, by which 
 the ideas are brought to the facts, and the facts to 
 the ideas ; or, rather, these are two factors in one 
 process, the warp and the woof, which are con- 
 tinually being woven together into the web of man's 
 intellectual life. The growing curiosity which leads 
 men to investigate fields of knowledge hitherto 
 neglected or even regarded as unworthy of notice, 
 is the result of the development of man's spirit, 
 and of the half-unconscious action of the new ideas 
 which that development brings with it ; and, on the 
 other hand, these new ideas, as we become more 
 definitely aware of them, not only give new interest 
 to the facts, but enable us to explain them. This 
 is a view of our intellectual progress which avoids 
 at once the false empiricism that sees nothing in 
 growing knowledge but an accumulation of objective 
 materials, and the narrow a •priori philosophy which 
 regards truth as born, like Athene, from our brains, 
 without the marriage of the soul with the world. 
 It is undoubtedly in and through experience that 
 all our knowledge comes, and looking inward with- 
 out looking outward is a process which has never 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. \\ 
 
 brought any gain to the intelligence of man. Nihil 
 in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. But, on the 
 other hand, the world with which experience makes 
 us acquainted is not something foreign to the in- 
 telligence, nor in seeking to understand it do we 
 need to lose ourselves. On the contrary, it is just 
 in the effort to understand the world that the in- 
 telligence grows and comes into possession of itself; 
 and, conversely, its understanding of the world is 
 conditioned by its own growth. The world cannot 
 answer unless the mind question it, and the nature 
 of the questions is at every step determined by the 
 stage of development which the mind has attained. 
 Thus it may for a long time remain utterly blind 
 to facts for which it is not yet ripe ; and the same 
 facts may subsequently become its central interest, 
 just because they appeal to a new consciousness 
 which is growing up within it. In other words, they 
 furnish it with the means of answering a question 
 which, by its own development, it is then con- 
 strained to ask, and thus supply the nutriment it 
 needs for its further growth. The dawning idea 
 makes the facts interesting and intelligible, and the 
 facts make it possible to verify the idea, and bring 
 it to explicit consciousness. Thus, even in the most 
 empirical process of science, we have no mere im- 
 porting into the mind of an external matter alien to 
 its own nature, but a satisfaction of native impulses 
 
12 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 which enables it to attain a clearer consciousness 
 of itself. It would, indeed, be strange if it were 
 otherwise. We can take into our bodies only what 
 the nature of these bodies enables us to assimilate, 
 — only what they can use to build themselves up 
 into their matured structure. It would be strange 
 if our minds were receptacles of all kinds of matter, 
 without reference to their own needs or their own 
 constitution. The mind, indeed, is in one point 
 different from the body, for, in a sense, there is 
 nothing alien to it ; it has a universal appetite and 
 can assimilate all kinds of materials of knowledge. 
 But it can do so only in its own way and in its 
 own time, and it refuses or even repels any infor- 
 mation which does not answer its own questions, and 
 so contribute to its own development. 
 
 It may, therefore, be desirable, before entering 
 upon our subject, to ask a preliminary question. 
 What is it that has awakened the new modern 
 interest in the science of religion, and has given 
 rise to the persistent attempts which are now being 
 made to investigate the facts of religious history 
 in all times and places ? What is it that has 
 made us carry our inquiries beyond the Scriptures 
 of the Old and New Testaments, which are directly 
 connected with our own religious life, and beyond 
 the classical mythology, which is immediately bound 
 up with our literary culture, — that has set to our 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 13 
 
 scholars the task of analyzing the Sacred Books of 
 all nations, and seeking for the "key of all the 
 mythologies " ? What is it that has raised the folk- 
 lore, which was formerly left to children and old 
 women, into an object of keen scientific curiosity, 
 and led an army of careful observers to record with 
 such perseverance the crudest superstitions of savages 
 and their most wayward fancies about the constitu- 
 tion of the universe and the powers that rule over 
 it ? The folk-lore has not ceased to be childish, 
 and, though it may carry in it some elements of 
 genuine imagination — some hints at a poetic idealisa- 
 tion of nature which are worth preserving — it is 
 not for these grains of gold that we turn over the 
 infinite heaps of sand. Nothing can be more coarse 
 and repulsive than are many of the superstitious 
 customs of savages ; nothing can be more absurd 
 and irrational than most of their ideas as to the 
 constitution of the natural and the spiritual world. 
 No civilised being could possibly look to such a 
 source, either for moral guidance or intellectual light. 
 What lends them their interest must, therefore, be 
 their bearing on some new question which we are 
 forced to ask ; it must be their value as giving 
 further definition or illustration of some principle 
 which we seek to verify. I do not, of course, mean 
 that pvery one who feels the impulse to investigate 
 in this new branch of inquiry is conscious of the 
 
14 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 full meaning of what he is doing. The spirit of the 
 time enlists many servants to whom it does not 
 communicate the purpose of the commands it 
 issues. Hundreds feel the pressure of a new desire, 
 the stimulus of a new curiosity, for one who asks 
 himself distinctly what it is that he wants, or why 
 he seeks to fiU his mind with details which to a 
 previous age would have seemed intellectual lumber, 
 as useless to remember as the scandal of a village 
 or the advertisements of a daily paper. But such 
 unconsciousness does not lessen the significance of 
 the fact. The Salfiaiv that thus possesses men is not 
 a meaningless impulse, like a taste for collecting books 
 whose value lies in their errata. It is a spiritual 
 need, an intellectual and even a practical want of 
 man's spirit, which has been awakened by its past 
 growth, and the satisfaction of which is necessary 
 to its further growth. And undoubtedly it is well 
 for us not only to obey the spirit of the time, but 
 also to ask what it means, to try to understand 
 the interest which such inquiries awaken in us and 
 to estimate the good that can come to us by dis- 
 covering the answer to them. For this, if we can 
 attain it, will tend to give method and direction 
 to our efforts, and it may to some extent prevent 
 us from wandering into paths that lead to nothing, 
 or attaching too much or too little importance to 
 particular results. 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 15 
 
 A full answer to this question cannot yet be 
 given ; but it is possible at once to indicate one or 
 two points which lie almost on the surface. First 
 of all, we may observe that the idea of the unity 
 of mankind has within the last century become not 
 merely a dogma, but an almost instinctive presupposi- 
 tion of all civilised men, and that, at the same time, 
 it has been freed from the theological reservations 
 and saving clauses with which it was formerly en- 
 cumbered, even among those who, in a sense, accepted 
 it as a truth. We know now, in a way in which it 
 was never known before, that humanity is a genus 
 which has no proper species ; i.e., that the divisions 
 between men are as nothing in comparison with the 
 fundamental fact of self-consciousness which unites 
 them all to each other. Ancient society was built 
 on the principle of natural kinship, and therefore on 
 a principle which carried with it tribal or national 
 exclusiveness, even where it did not set up further 
 barriers between the members of the society by 
 immovable divisions of family from family, rank from 
 rank, and caste from caste. The artiiicial unity of the 
 Eoman empire, however, with its equal justice and its 
 rigid conception of the rights of the individual person, 
 did much negatively to break dgwn these walls of 
 separation between Greek and barbarian, Jew and 
 Gentile, patrician and plebeian, master and slave. 
 And Christianity sought positively to knit men to- 
 
16 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 gether by a spiritual bond of fellowship, of which all 
 men were regarded as capable. It is true that 
 Christianity for a long time hid its levelling power 
 in the very excess of an idealism, which treated 
 worldly distinctions as indifferent, and therefore 
 allowed them to subsist. But by treating all such 
 distinctions as accidental differences of outward 
 position which a few years must terminate, and by 
 disregarding them in the order of the church, it spread 
 through all the nations which it reached a conscious- 
 ness of the infinite value of each individual soul and 
 of the comparative unimportance of the things that in 
 this world divide one man from, or set him above, 
 another, — a consciousness which in the long run must 
 be fatal to all absolute claims of superiority. The 
 belief that the best which man has it in him to do or 
 to be, springs out of that which is common to all, and 
 therefore that the highest good is open to all, is fatal 
 to all systems of privilege, and it is equally fatal to 
 all national exclusiveness. In the slow progress of 
 humanity, indeed, there is always a long way between 
 the premises and the conclusion, between the ger- 
 minating of an idea in the religious life and its 
 manifestation as a transforming social principle ; and 
 it may work for a long time unconsciously as such a 
 principle before it is explicitly recognised in its 
 universal meaning. Yet, though a thousand years are 
 as one day in the secular process of development, 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 17 
 
 "which is the manifestafcion of the divine spirit in man, 
 the days and the years come to an end, and the fruit 
 follows by an inevitable necessity upon the seed. 
 
 The application of this idea to the case before us it 
 is not difficult to see. The hyper-idealism of early 
 Christianity refused to question the justice of slavery 
 in private life and of despotism in the State. It 
 declared that the powers that be are ordained of God, 
 without asking how they had been established or how 
 they exercised their authority. And the mediaeval 
 church was inclined in its asceticism rather to em- 
 phasise than to criticise the division between the 
 spiritual and the secular orders; though it soon found 
 itself forced by an inevitable logic to insist that the 
 powers of the latter should be used in such a way as 
 not to interfere with the higher interests of the 
 former; and in time this claim inevitably grew into 
 the demand of Hildebrand that the world should be 
 subjected to the church. But the Eeformation 
 brought with it a better solution of the difficulty, 
 leading, as it did, to the denial of the division between 
 world and church as anything more than a distinction 
 of outward order, and to the assertion that the divine 
 principle could be realised, and ought to be realised, 
 in the life of the laity as much as in that of the 
 clergy, in the State as much as in the Church. In 
 this way the theological limit to the realisation of the 
 divine principle in man was broken down. The new 
 
 VOL. I. B 
 
18 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 wine of Christian cosmopolitanism burst through the 
 old bottles of spiritual and secular exclusiveness. The 
 divine right of priests in the church and of a royal 
 or noble class in the world was set aside for the divine 
 right of humanity. And the idea of a unity in men 
 deeper than all racial and social distinctions, deeper 
 than all distinctions of culture or even of religion, 
 became for the first time a living force. 
 
 As usual, the first expression of this truth was 
 extremely one-sided. The cosmopolitanism of the last 
 century carried the abstract assertion of the equality 
 of men to the paradox that civilisation itself is a 
 moral disadvantage, and that the genuine voice of 
 humanity is to be heard only from the natural man, 
 " the noble savage.'' But the irrational consequences 
 of a theory which treated the unity of human nature 
 as the negation of all the different forms in which it 
 has been or can be realised, must not hide from us the 
 immense gain for man's intellectual and moral life 
 which lies in the recognition of that unity. Looking 
 at it in the former respect, with which we are more 
 directly concerned, we see that it furnished the intel- 
 lectual key to a problem which the increasing inter- 
 course of mankind, since the discovery of the New 
 World, had been pressing upon men's minds with ever 
 greater insistence. The conviction that God has 
 formed of one blood all the nations that dwell upon 
 the earth — interpreted as meaning that, as regards 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 19 
 
 that which is deepest and most important in human 
 nature, men are essentially equal — supplied for the 
 first time a point of view from which human life in 
 all its heights and depths, and in the whole range of 
 its history, could be brought within the sphere of 
 science. It swept away at once the literary pre- 
 judices which caused classical models to be regarded 
 as the only humane letters, and the religious pre- 
 judices which consecrated the history of the chosen 
 people and of the early Christian church as the only 
 sacred history. Above all, it set to science the pro- 
 blem how, out of our common humanity, it is possible 
 to explain the almost infinitely diversified forms of 
 culture, literary, social, and religious, which we meet 
 with in diiferent times and in different parts of the 
 world. If we are "not to count anything human alien" 
 to us, we must be able to understand every such form, 
 not merely in the sense of gathering together the facts 
 regarding it and observing their general character, or 
 even of discovering the laws of their co-existence and 
 succession ; but in the sense of throwing ourselves into 
 them, of realising the states of mind in which they 
 arose, the process of thought and feeling by which 
 they grew, and the connexion of the results to which 
 they developed with our own Hfe and thought. In 
 other words, this principle makes us conscious that we 
 have not solved the scientific problem suggested by 
 the lives of other men till we are able to live them 
 
20 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 over again, to reproduce their movement in living 
 imagination, and to repeat in conscious thought the 
 unconscious logic of their growth. It is this desire 
 for a living picture, still more for a rationale, of 
 human life in all its forms, which prompts our minute 
 research into even the most trivial point of custom 
 and observance, of myth and doctrine, in ancient and 
 modern nations. It is this which makes our anthro- 
 pologists at once so greedy of facts and so eagerly 
 anxious to penetrate through the mere facts to the 
 principle that explains their genesis. We want not 
 only to believe in the unity of man, the identity of the 
 spirit of humanity in all times and places, but to see 
 it ; and we cannot see it aright unless we both feel 
 and think it, unless both by imagination and reason 
 we realise how, under the conditions, we might our- 
 selves have developed into such ways of thinking and 
 living. It is this impulse to revivify and reconstruct 
 the facts, — to make the past into a living present, 
 while yet we understand its inner meaning in a way 
 in which the present can never be understood by 
 those who live in it, — it is this that characterises the 
 modern scientific spirit and differentiates it so com- 
 pletely from a mere casual and external curiosity. 
 And it is manifest that such an impulse can never be 
 satisfied with any mere empirical collection of infor- 
 mation, which still leaves us on the outside of that 
 which we are observing ; nor, indeed, with anything 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 21 
 
 short of a real appreciation, both sympathetic and 
 intuitive, of the nature of the process by which the 
 one spirit of man manifests itself in all this difference 
 of forms, and through them all is continually advanc- 
 ing to a fuller realisation and a deeper comprehension 
 of itself 
 
 And this leads me further to point out that it is 
 not merely the bare idea of the unity of man which 
 now furnishes the guiding principle of science in this 
 department, but the idea of that unity as manifesting 
 itself in an organic process of development — first, in 
 particular societies, and, secondly, in the life of 
 humanity as a whole. This also is a conception 
 which has gradually been gaining ground ever since 
 the beginning of the Christian era, but which has 
 for the first time taken an effective form, as an instru- 
 ment of science, in the present day. The favourite 
 idea of classical antiquity was not the idea of progress, 
 but the idea of a cycle of changes in which departure 
 from the original unity and return to it, or, as we 
 should say, differentiation and integration, are not 
 united, but follow each other. This idea seems to 
 be adopted even by Aristotle. The constant march 
 of the Eoman State through campaign after campaign, 
 during century after century, to the empire of the 
 world, suggested to Livy the conception of a process 
 of outward growth, which, however, seemed to him to 
 be accompanied by inward decay ; for the power and 
 
22 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 wealth which patriotism and discipline had won had, 
 in his opinion, proved in the end fatal to the 
 virtues which gave rise to them. The Hebrew 
 Scriptures carry us a step beyond this : for pro- 
 phecy — in so far as it was not mere soothsaying, 
 but a foresight based upon insight — implied a discern- 
 ment of seeds of good and evil in the present which 
 must necessarily ripen to a harvest of greater good and 
 evil in the future; and, in this sense, prophecy was just 
 development read forward. And when Christ spoke 
 of his own ethical doctrine as a fulfilment of that 
 which potentially or in germ was contained in the 
 law, and at the same time represented that doctrine 
 as itself only a grain of mustard-seed which was one 
 day to grow into the greatest of all trees ; still more, 
 when he spoke of the corn of wheat that was to 
 multiply by dying, he gave a clearer expression to the 
 idea of development than it had ever before received, 
 and even perhaps than it has received till quite recent 
 times. By St. Paul this thought was caught up and 
 presented in a more imposing though less suggestive 
 form, under the guise of a great providential world- 
 drama, in which the whole history of the Jews is 
 viewed as a long legal preparation for the new era 
 of the Gospel. And the same idea appears in St. 
 Augustine's City of God, only with the additional 
 suggestion that another act of the same drama is found 
 in the history of the Komans, by whom the nations 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 23 
 
 of the enslaved world were brought together under one 
 universal empire. It is true that Augustine sets the 
 " two cities " in abrupt antagonism to each other, and 
 regards the secular power as the natural enemy, in 
 conflict with which the church had to show its higher 
 spiritual energy. But when the two powers were thus 
 connected and compared, the thought could not fail to 
 arise that the State was not merely the opposite of 
 the Church, but that, on the contrary, it provided the 
 peaceful sphere within which alone the operations of 
 the Church were possible. Hence arose the concep- 
 tion of the two " preparations for the gospel," an 
 outward and an inward preparation — in the history 
 of Rome and in the history of Judaism respec- 
 tively — which culminated in the union of the Holy 
 Eoman Empire and the Catholic Church. This con- 
 ception furnished the guiding principle of what we 
 may call the mediaeval philosophy of history ; and, 
 as such, it is presented to us in the great poem of 
 Dante. But for a deeper and less spectacular ex- 
 pression of that connexion between the different 
 phases of the life of individuals, of nations, and of 
 humanity, which we call development, we have to 
 wait till a much later time. The intuitive genius 
 of Vico discerned the importance of the idea at the 
 dawn of the modern period ; but the full perception 
 of its value as a key to the history of man and of 
 the world was reserved for the end of the last, and 
 
24 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the beginning of this century. It was then that 
 Lessing, Kant, and Herder gave that decisive impulse 
 under which the principle of development was carried 
 into biology by Goethe, Schelling, and many eminent 
 scientific men, while Hegel made it the leading idea 
 of his philosophy, subjected it to a more penetrat- 
 ing analysis than it had ever before received, and 
 applied it with wonderful insight and grasp to the 
 political, the artistic, the religious, and the philoso- 
 phical history of man. After these we need only 
 refer to the names of Lamarck and Comte in France,, 
 of Darwin and Spencer in England, and of Von 
 Hartmann and Wundt in Germany, as writers who 
 have done much to throw light on various aspects 
 of the idea and to give it new applications. We- 
 may, indeed, say without much exaggeration that 
 the thought of almost all the great speculative or 
 scientific writers of this century has been governed 
 and guided by the principle of development, if not 
 directly devoted to its illustration. 
 
 It is by the aid of this principle and by its aid 
 only, that the other idea of which we have already 
 spoken — the idea of the unity of mankind — can be 
 made fully intelligible and applicable to the facts of 
 history. In other words, the unity of mankind must 
 for our purpose be interpreted as involving not only 
 the identity of human nature in all its various mani- 
 festations in all nations and countries, but also as. 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 25 
 
 implying that in their co-existence these manifestations 
 can be connected together as different correlated 
 phases of one life, and that in their succession they 
 can be shown to be the necessary stages of one 
 process of evolution. The conception of development 
 is thus a corollary which cannot be disjoined from the 
 principle of the unity of man itself. For if it be true 
 that we can find light in the history of man only as 
 we throw ourselves into it and live it over again in 
 ourselves, it is only by the aid of the idea of evolution 
 that we can bridge over the gulf between ourselves 
 and the men of an earlier and simpler stage of culture. 
 Without the aid of this idea our sympathies will not 
 stretch far enough. It is, indeed, comparatively easy 
 for us to recognise the identity of a common nature 
 through the differences of language and custom that 
 separate us from nations like the modern Germans or 
 French, who stand, on the whole, on the same level of 
 civilisation with ourselves, and are embraced in the 
 same general spirit of the time. By a further stretch 
 of effort we can reach back to those previous stages of 
 culture that still survive in a recognisable form in our 
 own lives. We can make ourselves citizens of Eome 
 or Athens, because in literature and philosophy, in 
 politics and laws, Eome and Athens still live with us 
 as easily distinguishable influences. And our religion 
 still preserves so much trace of its Jewish source 
 that it is not very difficult for us to realise in some 
 
26 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 
 
 measure the spirit of the prophets and psalmists of 
 Israel. But when we are required to widen our view 
 still farther, and extend the same living sympathy — 
 the sympathy out of which alone true knowledge can 
 spring — to early India and Egypt, to the primitive civi- 
 lisations of Babylon and Mexico and Peru; still more, 
 when we have to include in our idea of humanity the 
 lives of utterly uncivilised races and to realise the first 
 obscure beginnings of religion and morality, nay, even to 
 reproduce the dawn of unconscious reason in the forma- 
 tion of language, — ^the line of continuity seems to be 
 stretched to the breaking-point. And it must needs 
 break but for the help of the idea of evolution, which 
 has at once created a new interest in the earliest 
 vestiges of human life, and has supplied the key for 
 their explanation. This idea, in fact, is the most 
 potent instrument for bringing back difference to 
 identity which has ever been put into the hands of 
 science; and, without it, it would be impossible to hope 
 for a real understanding of the facts of the history of 
 man, a problem which in its complexity and difficulty 
 includes and transcends the complexities and diffi- 
 culties of all the other problems of science. 
 
 One other point may be mentioned. The study 
 of the historical development of man, especially in 
 respect of his higher life, is not only a matter of an 
 external or merely speculative curiosity ; it is closely 
 connected with the development of that life in our- 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 27 
 
 selves. For we learn to know ourselves, first of all, 
 in the mirror of the world ; or, in other words, our 
 knowledge of our own nature and of its possibilities 
 grows and deepens with our understanding of what 
 is without us, and most of all with our understanding 
 of the general history of man. It has often been 
 noticed that there is a certain analogy between the 
 life of the individual and that of the race; and even 
 that the life of the individual is a sort of epitome 
 of the history of humanity. But, as Plato already 
 discovered, it is by reading the large letters that we 
 learn to interpret the small. If in the biography 
 of each of us the history of mankind is repeated, 
 yet it is repeated in an abbreviated and therefore 
 confused way ; in a way analogous to that whereby 
 all the stages of animal life are reproduced in the 
 development of the human embryo. But, as no one 
 could have discovered what these stages were by a 
 mere observation of the growth of the embryo, as, 
 on the contrary, we are forced to interpret the stages 
 in the life of the embryo by reference to the divisions 
 of the animal kingdom, so it is here. The history 
 of the individual mind cannot be used by itself, at 
 least in the first instance, as a key to the history 
 of the race, but rather his life becomes intelligible 
 by means of the large letters in which its stages are 
 written in the life of mankind as a whole. We first 
 come to understand the obscure struggle of different 
 
28 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 tendencies within us, when we regard them as the 
 reproduction in us of great conflicts of race and creed, 
 which once set man against man and even nation 
 against nation. These great forces are also warring 
 in us. But in the microcosm the arena is too close, 
 the forms of the combatants are too indistinct, for the 
 issues to be clearly seen, unless we have identified 
 them under the more conspicuous shapes in which 
 they appear in the macrocosm. Hence our increasing 
 knowledge of the facts of history and of the ideas 
 by which they can be interpreted is not merely the 
 addition of a new chapter to science, but it throws 
 a new light upon our own inner life. In view of 
 the ethical and religious development of humanity, 
 which is the presupposition of our own spiritual 
 life, we are enabled to discern more definitely the 
 moral and religious meaning of our own experience, 
 and, on the other hand, we are taught to regard 
 our own lives as having their main value in the 
 contribution which they make, in turn, to the grow- 
 ing life of humanity. 
 
 To sum up what has been said. We have seen 
 that the studies usually embraced under the name 
 of anthropology, and of which the science of religion 
 is one of the most important, have risen into a 
 prominence and attracted an attention unprecedented 
 in any previous time ; and that they have done 
 so, not only because the extension of our know- 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 29 
 
 ledge of the world's inhabitants and of their 
 history has supplied the necessary data, but 
 because the progress of man's intelligence has 
 brought with it certain ideas, which at once excite 
 our interest in such inquiries, and furnish us with 
 a means of solving the difficulties which they 
 bring with them. These are the ideas of the 
 unity of man, and of the organic connexion of life 
 between the different parts of the human family, 
 and also between the different stages in that secular 
 development of man's spirit, to which all the 
 various forms of culture in all the nations of the 
 world ultimately serve as contributions. These ideas 
 we do not put forward as dogmas, — for, indeed, 
 there are many difficulties, both in their analysis 
 and their verification, on which we have as yet 
 said nothing, — but we point to them as indicating 
 the problems with which at the present time it 
 has become necessary for science to deal, the ques- 
 tions which by its own development the human spirit 
 is now compelled to answer. This necessity lies in 
 the fact that it is only through a deepened conscious- 
 ness of the world that the human spirit can solve 
 its own problem. Especially is this true in the 
 region of anthropology. For the inner life of the 
 individual is deep and fuU, just in proportion to 
 the width of his relations to other men and things ; 
 and his consciousness of what he is in himself 
 
30 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 as a spiritual being is dependent on a compre- 
 hension of the position of his individual life in 
 the great secular process by which the intellectual 
 and moral life of humanity has grown and is 
 growing. Hence the highest practical as well as 
 speculative interests of men are connected with the 
 new extension of science which has given fresh 
 interest and meaning to the whole history of the 
 race. 
 
 Now, these remarks have special application to 
 the history of religion. Without as yet attempting 
 to define religion, or to give any precise account 
 of its characteristics, we may go so far as to say 
 that a man's religion is the expression of his 
 ultimate attitude to the universe, the summed-up 
 meaning and purport of his whole consciousness of 
 things. How, and how far he rises above the parts 
 to the whole ; how, and how far he gathers his 
 scattered consciousness of the world and of himself 
 to a unity ; how, and how far he makes anything 
 like a final return upon himself from all his fortunes 
 and experiences, is shown more clearly in his re- 
 ligion than in any other expression of his inner 
 life. Whatever else religion may be, it undoubtedly 
 is the sphere in which man's spiritual experience 
 reaches the utmost concentration, in which, if at all, 
 he takes up a definite attitude towards his whole 
 natural and spiritual environment. In short, it is 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 31 
 
 the highest form of his consciousness of himself in 
 his relation to all other things and beings ; and, 
 if we want a brief abstract and epitome of the 
 man, we must seek for it here or nowhere. But 
 just for this reason the problem presented by the 
 history of religion contains in an intensified form 
 all the difficulties which we find in aU the other 
 aspects of man's life. All the complexity and 
 diversity, all the opposition and conflict, which 
 make it so hard to find a principle of law and 
 order in the life of man as a physical, moral, and 
 intellectual being, reach their extreme form in his 
 rehgious history. 
 
 Connected with this is a diflficulty which has 
 troubled many writers on the science of religion — 
 the difficulty of finding any one quality or charac- 
 teristic which is common to all religions ; for in his 
 religious life man has sounded the whole gamut of 
 possible forms of consciousness, from the highest 
 inspiration to the lowest superstition. To take only 
 a few instances : there are religions of terror and 
 religions of love, religions of hope and religions of 
 despair, religions in which the gods seem to be wor- 
 shipped mainly as beings who can help or hinder 
 man's effort after his own finite ends, and religions 
 in which he is called on to make absolute surrender 
 of all such ends, and even to merge his very life 
 in the infinite. Whatever element be named as 
 
32 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 essential to religion, it seems easy to oppose a 
 negative instance to it. For instance, Kant tells 
 us that " without a belief in a future life no re- 
 ligion can be conceived to exist." But, to mention 
 only the most obvious facts, the early Jewish religion 
 was without such a belief; and, if some idea as to 
 a life beyond the grave has formed a part of 
 most religions, yet there are many in which it was 
 by no means a prominent or important part. The 
 religions of classical antiquity were for the most 
 part centred in the domestic or the national life, 
 and the immortality thought of by their votaries was 
 the immortality of the family or the state. On the 
 other hand, there have been nations, such as the 
 Egyptians, for which the concerns of the other world 
 and the future life seemed altogether to dwarf the 
 interests of the present. The Egyptian lived among 
 tombs whose size and splendour reduced into insigni- 
 ficance the dwellings of the living; and the most 
 characteristic features of his mythology were repre- 
 sentations of the death and resurrection of nature 
 in winter and summer, as types symbolising the 
 death and resurrection of man. 
 
 Again, in its attitude towards ncdu/re, religion has 
 passed through every phase which it is possible to 
 conceive. At one extreme we have the mythology 
 of the Vedic hymns, in which the " bright ones," 
 the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 33 
 
 with the various elemental powers of storm and 
 wind, are the only distinctly recognised divinities. 
 At some distance from this stands the Jewish 
 religion, which abhors any mingling of the creature 
 with the Creator, and treats nature not as the mani- 
 festation of God, but rather as a weapon in His 
 hand, which He has made, and which He breaks in 
 pieces when He has done with it. Lastly, at the 
 opposite extreme, we find the Buddhist religion, 
 treating the whole objective world as an illusion 
 from which it is the highest aim of the devotee to 
 free himself. 
 
 Again, the religious view of man himself and his 
 relation to the Divine Being passes through a similar 
 series of kaleidoscopic changes. Sometimes, as in 
 Greece, man is the one finite being, whose form is 
 transferable to the divine, and the gods are, above*, 
 all, regarded as the powers that preside over the life 
 of the family or the state. Sometimes, on the other 
 hand, man seems to seek his gods at the farthest 
 possible point from himself, and to find divinity in 
 plants, in animals, in almost anything and every- 
 thing rather than in humanity. And anthropologists 
 have found good evidence of a state of civilisation, 
 in which men could think of kinship as a sacred 
 bond only when they regarded it as a participation 
 in the blood of a zoomorphic or phytomorphie god 
 or totem. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
34 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 To take one other illustration : it might seem that, 
 if anything is essential to religion, it is a belief 
 in the objective reality of God as apart from the 
 religious sentiment of His worshippers ; and in some 
 forms of religion we even find Him treated as a 
 purely external power, with whom no inward relation 
 is possible. Yet we find at least one great religion, 
 that of Buddha, which begins with the negation 
 of all the objective gods of earlier Hindooism, or 
 the reduction of them to parts in the great 
 illusion of outward existence, and which at last 
 finds the divine, if anywhere, only in the self- 
 negating process of the finite mind, and the Nirvana 
 which is supposed to be its result. Finally, even 
 within the compass of the one religion, we find 
 something analogous to all these forms. For Chris- 
 tianity, in the course of its history, passes through 
 phases which recall the opposite forms of polytheism 
 and monotheism, of pantheism and dualism. We 
 find it at one time united with the ascetic morality 
 of the cloister, which carries the negation of nature 
 to the verge of self-annihilation, and at another time 
 associated with an ethics which idealises the natural 
 desires and affections, and a poetry which finds God 
 in nature. 
 
 These variations are so great that it cannot seem 
 wonderful if some are inclined to deny that there is 
 any unity beneath them ; or that the succession of 
 
A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 35 
 
 religions is anything but the play of the wayward 
 fancy of man, in a region which is outside of the 
 sphere of reason and experience. Yet even so, the 
 problem of the changes of religion would form part 
 of the general problem of human history. Even if 
 religion were a madness of humanity, an illusory form 
 of consciousness destined ultimately to disappear, there 
 must be a method in it which we are interested to 
 discover. We cannot suppose any great province of 
 the life of rational beings to lie outside of the 
 general development of reason. Even atheism or 
 agnosticism involves a definite attitude towards the 
 ultimate problem of human life ; and if it is the 
 highest attitude possible to man, it must show itself 
 to be the last term, or one of the elements in the 
 last term, in which the whole process of develop- 
 ment is summed up. For the modern ideas of the 
 organic unity and the organic evolution of man, 
 which are the presuppositions underlying all our 
 investigation into the history of humanity, inevitably 
 compel us to seek for the one principle of life 
 which masks itself in all these various forms, and 
 which through them all is striving towards the 
 complete realisation of itself. 
 
LECTUEE SECON-D- 
 
 DIFFEEENT METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 
 
 Religion and the Theory of Religion — How to define Religion — 
 Definition to he sought not in a Common Element in all Religions, 
 hut in a Common Principle from which they spring — Necessity of 
 this according to the Idea of Development — The Explana tion of 
 \ R£dgiQXlJMLttMill&^rived from its Ea/rliest Forms — First Definition 
 I of Religion^as Conscious RAatipn^ to a Dwine~BeiM^Objectiong 
 to it — Fv/rther step gained hy consideration of the Historical 
 Development of Religion — Meaning of the Question: How Re- 
 ligion is possihle. 
 
 The object of the last lecture was to show that the 
 
 spiritual progress of man brings with it, on the one 
 
 hand, a new kind of interest in the history of that 
 
 progress, and, on the other hand, new ideas which, 
 
 in explaining the facts of history, derive from 
 
 them their own exposition and verification. The 
 
 ideas of the organic unity of mankind, and of the 
 
 organic process of development in which that unity 
 
 is manifested, have given scientific value to many 
 
 objects and events which formerly were matters of 
 
 mere antiquarian interest. For in the light of these 
 
 ideas the facts of history cease to be barren, and 
 
 36 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 37 
 
 become a potent help in solving some of the highest 
 problems of religion and morality. They enable us to 
 read the secrets of our own lives in the large letters 
 of the life of the race, and so, by reflexion, to under- 
 stand the spiritual forces that are working within us. 
 Especially is this the case with the great problem of 
 religion, in which, if anywhere, the meaning and 
 interest of our spiritual life is summed up and con- 
 centrated. 
 
 It is true that it is one thing to have a religion, 
 and quite another thing to understand what religion 
 is ; still more, to trace out the fuU meaning of 
 religion in the light of its history. Nor can it be 
 said that the former is in any direct way dependent 
 upon the latter. Here, as elsewhere, theory comes 
 after the fact which it seeks to explain ; and it 
 would seem to be as absurd to attempt to nourish 
 religious life on a theory of its own nature, as to 
 try to feed the body with a treatise on physiology. 
 Yet this analogy should not be pressed too far ; 
 for even in its earliest stages religion is a process 
 which involves consciousness ; and although con- 
 sciousness is not in the first instance reflective, yet 
 in the course of its development it inevitably becomes 
 so. The elevation of the soul to God, and the sur- 
 render of the will to the inspiration which the con- 
 sciousness of God brings with it, may take place with- 
 out any need being felt for a logical proof of the 
 
38 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 existence of the Divine being, or for a criticism of the 
 process whereby the idea of such a being is awakened 
 and developed within us. They may take place even 
 apart from any attempt to distinguish the elements 
 which enter into our thought of God, or to determine 
 their relation to each other. But inevitably, insensibly, 
 in the growth of the human spirit, a time comes when 
 such questions must begin to trouble it, and constrain 
 it to advance from religion to theology, or as mediaeval 
 writers put it, from veneratio to delectatio, from ex- 
 perience and feeling to reflexion and self-consciousness. 
 In our day especially, when the conceptions of science 
 and philosophy have, in so large measure, penetrated 
 into the general consciousness of men, and transformed 
 their whole view of themselves and the world, it is 
 almost impossible for any one to dwell permanently 
 in the region of simple faith, and to escape altogether 
 the questionings of reflexion. And he who has once 
 listened to these questionings can never, without some 
 attempt to answer them^regain the intuitive certainty 
 of God which he has lost. The spirit of the time 
 compels us to build our temple with arms in our 
 hands, to maintain our religious life amid the jar of 
 controversy, and with the consciousness of many diffi- 
 culties which demand, but cannot always obtain from 
 us, a rational solution. The advance of science, of 
 historical investigation, of philosophical criticism, has 
 forced us to realise how much is required for the evi- 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 39 
 
 dence of any idea so far-reaching as a religious prin- 
 ciple must necessarily be ; it has made us mistrustful 
 of the easy methods in which an earlier age was con- 
 tent to find the proof of a foregone conclusion. The 
 external scaffolding on which religious belief formerly 
 rested has in great part fallen away, and we are 
 obliged to look for a natural and rational basis for 
 many of those convictions which were then propped 
 up by adventitious supports. In this way religion 
 and the theory of religion have been brought into 
 closer relations than they ever before needed to main- 
 tain, and there is a more direct reaction of the latter 
 upon the former. This, no doubt, has its dangers; 
 dangers of which we are made painfully conscious in 
 the inadequate and futile discussion of great questions 
 which invades even our newspapers ; but it has com- 
 pensating advantages. For, if the discussions of the 
 market-place are apt to be superficial, the philosophy 
 which is not obliged to explain itself outside of the 
 school is prone to become scholastic, and to lose all 
 vital relation to that immediate experience of which 
 it claims to be the higher interpretation and vindi- 
 cation. 
 
 In seeking to find such an interpretation and 
 vindication of the religious consciousness, it seems 
 necessary to start, if not with an exact definition, 
 at least with some general idea of the nature of 
 religion, which may enable us to mark out the limits 
 
40 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of the field we have to survey. But, owing to the 
 immense range of variation in the phenomena usually 
 classed as religious, it is no easy task to do even so 
 much as this. For what idea of religion can be 
 found which will not fail to include some of the 
 many species of religions enumerated at the end of 
 the last lecture ? The question would be unanswer- 
 able, if we were obliged — as many writers on this 
 subject have supposed they were obliged — to look 
 for some one quality common to all religions as the 
 basis of our definition. For such a quality, if it 
 could be found, would be something so vague and 
 abstract, that little or nothing could be made of it. 
 The truth, however, is that such a definition would 
 not supply what in this case we want. The different 
 religions are not merely co-ordinate species varying, 
 one in this direction, the other in that, from a 
 single general type. They are, in many cases at 
 least, to be regarded rather as successive stages in 
 one process of development, in which the later in- 
 clude and presuppose the earlier. As there is little 
 to be gained by asking what is common to the bud, 
 the leaf, the flower, and the fruit of the tree, so 
 there is little to be gained by asking what is common 
 to the Yedic Polytheism of early India, to the later 
 Brahmanic system and to the religion of Buddha, if 
 these, -as we find to be the case, are only different 
 stages in one great movement of religious life. There 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 41 
 
 is little to be gained by considering what is common 
 to Judaism and to Christianity, when the latter 
 springs from a soil prepared by the former. And 
 even those religions which have no such direct 
 historical connexion, and which therefore it would 
 be dif&cult to regard as prior and posterior stages 
 of the same course of development, are nevertheless 
 not strictly co-ordinate with each other. The Greek, 
 the Latin, the Celtic, and the German forms of the 
 Aryan mythology are not reciprocally exclusive logical 
 species which are united only by a common generic 
 quality, but rather members of one family, each of 
 which emphasises an element that is present but 
 latent in all the others. And the same truth is 
 illustrated on a still wider scale if we go beyond 
 special religions to such general ideal types of religion 
 as are indicated by the terms Polytheism, Pantheism, 
 and Monotheism; for these are not really species of 
 religion which are co-ordinate with each other, but 
 phases of religious belief, which represent different 
 stages in the development of the idea of religion. 
 In the sequel, an attempt wUl be made to show that 
 Pantheism is simply the culminating phase of Poly- 
 theism, and that Monotheism, in the strict sense of 
 the term, always arises in direct opposition to both. 
 If this view be correct, it would be idle to seek for 
 any common element in these different forms ; or, if 
 we found it, to suppose that in it we had a real 
 
42 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 principle of unity, by reference to which we might 
 classify the religions, and determine their relations 
 to each other. Finally, any definition which we 
 might derive from the analysis and comparison of 
 the higher forms of religion would be too lofty and 
 comprehensive to apply to the superstitions of savages; 
 yet in these superstitions we recognise the obscure 
 beginnings of religious experience, and they could not 
 be left out of account in any definition of religion. 
 Nay, if the different religions be stages in a single 
 development, it is just in such elementary phenomena, 
 if anywhere, that we must find the common element 
 of which we are in search ; for, ex hypothesi, the 
 simplest religion must still contain the essence of 
 religion, and it will contain little or nothing else to 
 disguise that essence from us. Thus it appears that 
 the search for a common element in all religions is 
 entirely misleading. If it yielded any result at all, 
 it would constrain us to define religion in terms of 
 the lowest possible form of it : and it could not yield 
 even so much as this, unless, in the order of develop- 
 ment, each successive religion at once included and 
 transcended the previous one. If, on the other hand, 
 a religion ever arose by movement of recoil against 
 an earlier religion — and this seems actually to be 
 the case with Buddhism in relation to Brahmanism 
 — then the clue of the common element would be 
 entirely lost to us, and we should be obliged to 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 43 
 
 reject from our definition even the elements that 
 appear in its earliest form.^ 
 
 What, however, we really want in a definition 
 of religion is no such summum genus, reached by 
 omission of all that is characteristic of the species, 
 but a germinative principle, a principle of the 
 genesis of religions. Such a principle will reveal 
 itself not so much in each religion taken separately 
 as in all the religions contemplated as stages in a 
 process ; and, most of all, in the transitions of 
 thought whereby one religion develops out of an- 
 other, or asserts itself in conflict against it. Or, if 
 we can expect to find it revealed in any one religion, 
 it must be in the highest rather than the lowest. 
 For a principle of development necessarily mani- 
 fests itself most clearly in the most mature form of 
 that which develops. As we take our definition of 
 man, not from the embryo or the infant but from 
 the grown man, who first shows what was hidden 
 
 'It is, of course, still open to any one to maintain that, 
 dialectically, the later stage in a development includes the 
 earlier, although it is related thereto only in the way of opposi- 
 tion or negation : in other words, it implies and pre-supposes 
 it as a simpler or more elementary stage of thought. But this 
 idea, to which we shall have to return in the sequel, cannot 
 help any one who is seeking to define religion by reference to 
 a supposed common element, as distinguished from a common 
 principle, in all religions, and who therefore regards the different 
 religions simply as reciprocally exclusive logical species falling 
 under one abstract genus. 
 
44 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 in both ; so, in like manner, in defining religion, 
 we must look to Christianity rather than to Judaism, 
 to Buddhism rather than to the Vedic Polytheism, 
 and to all the forms of worship which we find 
 among civilised peoples rather than to the super- 
 stitions of savages. When, indeed, we turn back 
 from the developed organism to the embryo, from 
 the man to the child, we find that a study of the 
 process of genesis casts no little light upon the 
 nature of the being which is its result. The man 
 becomes in a higher sense intelligible, when we 
 trace him back to the child. But, primarily and 
 in the first instance, it is the developed organism 
 that explains the germ from which it grew, and, 
 without having seen the former, we could have 
 made nothing of the latter. No examination of the 
 child could enable us to prophesy the man, if we 
 had not previously had some experience of mature 
 manhood ; still less would an examination of the 
 seed or the embryo reveal to us the distinct 
 lineaments of the developed plant or animal or 
 man. Nor would our insight be greatly helped 
 by a knowledge of the environment in which the 
 process of development was to take place. And the 
 same is true of religion. It is the fuU growth 
 and expansion of this mighty tree, under whose 
 shadow the generations of men have rested, that 
 enables us to understand its obscure beginnings. 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 45 
 
 when it was "the least of all seeds." Develop- 
 ment is not simply the recurrence of the same 
 effects in similar circumstances, not simply the 
 maintenance of an identity under a variation deter- 
 mined by external conditions. Hence it is impos- 
 sible, from the phenomena of one stage of the life 
 of a developing being, to derive laws which wUl 
 adequately explain the whole course of its existence. 
 The secret of the peculiar nature of such a being 
 lies just in the way of regular transition in which, 
 by constant interaction with external influences, it 
 widens the compass of its life, unfolding continually 
 new powers and capacities — powers and capacities 
 latent in it from the first, but not capable of being 
 foreseen with any definiteness by one who had seen 
 only the beginning. It follows that, in the first 
 instance at least, we must read development hack- 
 ward and not forward, we must find the key to 
 the meaning of the first stage in the last; though 
 it is quite true that, afterwards, we are enabled 
 to throw new light upon the nature of the last, 
 to analyse and appreciate it in a new way, by 
 carrying it back to the first. We may derive an 
 illustration of this characteristic of development from 
 the idea of development itself; for the idea of de- 
 velopment is one of the latest ideas whose meaning 
 and value has been brought to light by the progress 
 of man, and it is itself the much wanted key to 
 
46 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the history of that progress. If it has to some 
 extent ceased to be true that, as G-oethe says in 
 the Faust, the " history of the past is a book with 
 seven seals," and that what the historian discovers 
 to be its spirit is only the spirit of the historian 
 himself, ' des Herren eigner Geist,' this is due, more 
 than anything else, to the fact that the idea of 
 development has enabled us to recognise the 
 identical spirit of man in all the enormous cycle 
 of changes through which it has passed, yet with- 
 out suppressing or disguising the differences that 
 separate men from each other in different ages, and 
 under different social conditions. 
 
 It follows from these considerations that, in seeking 
 for a definition of religion, we are not to look for a 
 common element in all religions. For, as we have 
 seen, such a way of defining would force us at once to 
 raise the difficult, or rather, impossible question, " what 
 is the lowest kind of spiritual experience which we 
 can think worthy of the name of a religion ? " And 
 any possible answer to that question would cut across 
 the line of development by an arbitrary determination 
 of the limits within which we shall confine the mean- 
 ing of the word. What we have to look for, on the 
 contrary, is a principle which is bound up with the 
 nature of man, and which, therefore, manifests itself 
 in all stages of his development. A definition of 
 religion in this sense, if we can attain it, will express 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 47 
 
 an idea which is fully realized only in the final form 
 of religion, while in the earlier stages it can be seen 
 only obscurely, and in the lowest and earliest it might 
 escape us altogether but for the light thrown back 
 upon it by that which has arisen out of it. It will 
 thus enable us to cast the light of the present upon 
 the past, and to explain man's first uncertain efforts to 
 name and to realise the divine, in the light of the 
 clearer consciousness and more distinct utterance of a 
 later age. It will permit us to trace back the religious 
 life to its earliest and most elementary forms, and yet 
 it will exempt us from the vain effort to extract from 
 these forms an adequate idea either of the religious 
 consciousness or of its object. 
 
 We may illustrate this way of looking at the subject 
 by reference to a misconception which has greatly 
 interfered with the impartial consideration of the 
 development of religion. There is a common prejudice 
 — a hope on the one side, a fear on the other — that, 
 if the history of religion be brought under the idea 
 of development, religion itself will be explained away 
 by reducing it to its lowest terms. Such a hope and 
 such a fear equally arise from an insufficient apprehen-' 
 sion of the nature of development, and of the sense 
 in which what goes before in development can be said 
 to account for what follows. Causation, indeed, is a 
 word of ambiguous meaning, and it might lead to 
 misunderstanding if we were simply to assert that 
 
48 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 " development is not causation " ; for this might be 
 taken to mean that there is only an arbitrary and 
 external connexion between the successive stages in 
 it. But, this misunderstanding being precluded, we 
 may undoubtedly lay it down that the phenomena of 
 the beginning of a life are not to be regarded as the 
 causes of the phenomena that follow ; but that the 
 former are imperfect manifestations of a principle 
 which is more completely manifested in the latter.^ 
 Beneath the most elementary phenomena of life there 
 is a unity, which is not exhausted in them ; a unity 
 which grows by subordinating the environment to 
 itself, and which, through all its stages, maintains 
 its identity with itself, while it enlarges its sphere 
 of manifestation. This unity, therefore, is the more 
 clearly manifested the further we advance along the 
 line of development. Hence we cannot from an 
 examination of the first stage of a development 
 pronounce any final judgment either for good or ill 
 upon the later results of it. 
 
 To apply this to the case in point. It has been 
 maintained on the one side, and disputed on the other, 
 that religion develops out of a belief in ghosts, which 
 is suggested by the remembered or imaginary forms 
 that present themselves to us in dreams ; and those 
 
 1 Trom a slightly diflFerent point of view we might say that the 
 explanation of facts of development by their causes is always of 
 great value, but that it can never be a. final explanation of them. 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 49 
 
 who have maintained, as well as those who have 
 disputed this idea, have spoken as if the question of 
 the value and truth of religion depended on its being 
 proved or disproved. In other words, they have 
 assumed that a tendency which manifests itself at first 
 as a belief in ghosts, must necessarily remain to the 
 last an illusory tendency, a tendency to give form and 
 substance to what is really the baseless fabric of a 
 vision. But those who say this might just as well 
 maintain that the man is only a larger child, because 
 the "child is father of the man"; or that science is 
 merely a collection of fancies, because its first efforts 
 produced nothing but vague hypothesis. Now, as we 
 have already seen, it lies in the very nature of the 
 case that the earliest form of that which lives and 
 develops is the least adequate to its nature, and 
 therefore that from which we can get the least distinct 
 clue to the inner principle of that nature. Hence 
 to trace a living being back to its beginning, and to 
 explain what follows by such beginning would be 
 simply to omit almost all that characterises it, and 
 then to suppose that in what remains we have the 
 secret of its existence. This is not really to explain 
 it, but to explain it away ; for, on this method, 
 we necessarily reduce the features that distinguish it 
 to a minimum., and, when we have done so, the 
 remainder may well seem to be itself reducible to 
 something in which the principle in question does not 
 
 VOL. I. D 
 
50 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 manifest itself at all. If we carry the animal back to 
 protoplasm, it may readily seem possible to explain it 
 as a chemical compound. And, in like manner, by the 
 same minimising process, we may seem to succeed in 
 reducing consciousness and self-consciousness in its 
 simplest form to sensation, and sensation in its sim- 
 plest form to something not essentially different from 
 the nutritive life of plants. The fallacy of the sorites 
 may thus be used to conceal all qioalitative changes 
 under the guise of quantitative addition or diminution, 
 and to bridge over all difference by the aid of the 
 idea of gradual transition. For, as the old school 
 of etymologists showed, if we are at liberty to 
 interpose as many connecting links as we please, 
 it becomes easy to imagine that things the most 
 heterogeneous should spring out of each other. 
 While, however, the hypothesis of gradual change — 
 change proceeding by infinitesimal stages which melt 
 into each other so that the eye cannot detect where 
 one begins and the other ends — makes such a tran- 
 sition easier for imagination, it does nothing to 
 diminish the difficulty or the wonder of it for thoiigM. 
 For the change which we call "development" is always 
 qualitative as well as quantitative, and to treat it as 
 merely quantitative is to omit the distinctive character- 
 istic of the facts we have to explain. 
 
 We shall return to the analysis of the idea of 
 development at a farther stage in our inquiry. For 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 51 
 
 the present enough has been said to show that in 
 the deiinition of religion we have not to seek for 
 something which is common to all religions, but rather 
 for that which underlies them all as their principle. 
 In other words, what we are looking for is that motive 
 power, working in the human mind and essentially 
 bound up with its structure, which manifests itself 
 even in the sorcery and ghost-seeing of savages, which 
 causes the gradual transition from such superstitions 
 to better forms of worship, and which fully reveals its 
 character only in the highest types of the religious life 
 of Christianity. It need not, therefore, be a matter of 
 wonder, if an examination of the facts of religious his- 
 tory, taken in relation to their psychological possibility, 
 should lead us to a definition of religion which con^ 
 tains ideas quite beyond the reach of uncivilised men, 
 and even to ideas that are not present to the conscious- 
 ness of many who are in a high degree civilised. This, 
 indeed, lies in the very nature of the case, and may be 
 easily illustrated by many analogies. Thus, the 
 structure of language contains implicitly in it a wealth 
 of relations and distinctions of thought, which it 
 requires the most subtle metaphysic to analyse. Yet 
 all the thought which such metaphysic can discover is- 
 actually involved in the forms of grammar. It is not 
 an external addition to the facts, but must in some 
 way have been present in, if not to, the minds of those 
 who created the language. Man is rational and self- 
 
52 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 conscious long before he has made reason and self- 
 consciousness the object of his reflexion ; and therefore 
 he is guided in the creation of language, as in the 
 development of his social relations and of all the 
 institutions of his life, by a rational principle, of which 
 he is never fully conscious, and of which at first he 
 is not conscious at all. And the same holds good 
 of his religion. It is only at an advanced stage of 
 reflexion that we begin to ask what religion is, and 
 any answer to the question must involve conceptions 
 which were altogether beyond the reach of those 
 who were first moved by the religious sentiment. 
 They did not know and could not know what "the 
 spirit which was within them did signify," when it 
 awed their souls into worship, or lifted them in 
 passionate aspiration. It was impossible for them 
 to analyse the idea that possessed them. A religion 
 even partially conscious of itself could only be the 
 result of a long process of development. It is there- 
 fore no valid objection to a definition of religion that it 
 contains much that was not consciously present to 
 mankind under many of the earlier religions, though 
 it would be an objection to it if it did not furnish 
 the means of explaining what was present to them, — 
 explaining it, that is, as a stage in the development of 
 the religious consciousness. A principle is far on the 
 way to a complete realisation of itself when it has 
 become self-conscious, yet it is only then that it 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 53 
 
 is able to explain the simplest facts of its own 
 evolation. 
 
 With these preliminary explanations, we may now 
 proceed with the attempt to define religion. We 
 may begin by asserting that religion involves a re- 
 lation, and, indeed, a conscious relation, to a being 
 or beings whom we designate as divine. This, of 
 course, is little more than a nominal definition of 
 religion ; for, prior to an explanation of the term 
 God, it does not tell us anything, except that it is 
 a relation of the conscious subject to some kind of 
 object. Even to this definition, general as it is, 
 objections might be taken. It might be said that, 
 in some forms of savage superstition, there is no ob- 
 jective existence believed in, to which the name of 
 God could properly be applied; and it might be 
 pointed out that in Buddhism we have an instance 
 of a religion which is purely subjective, and which 
 finds its absolute principle only in the soul that 
 turns away from the illusion of objective existence 
 altogether. 
 
 But both these objections really rest on that false 
 view of what is wanted in a definition, and especi- 
 ally in the definition of any being or thing that 
 develops, which we have been considering. The 
 phenomena of savage religion (assuming them to be 
 primitive phenomena, a point which we are not here 
 concerned to discuss) are explicable only as the 
 
54 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 obscure beginnings of a religious consciousness that 
 has not yet taken definite form ; and the fact that 
 in them a clear idea of God is still wanting only 
 shows their immaturity. It would be as absurd to 
 say that the idea of religion is to be confined to 
 that which religion shows itself to be among savages, 
 as to say that the idea of language is to be confined 
 to that which is revealed in the speech of an infant. 
 The principle of development makes such imperfect 
 forms intelligible ; for it teaches us to expect that in 
 the first steps of the evolution of any form of con- 
 sciousness, its expression will be indistinct and un- 
 certain, and will least of all show what it really is. 
 
 The same answer, mutatis mutandis, may be made 
 to the other objection to which I have referred. A 
 true conception of development will enable us to 
 understand the peculiarities of the Buddhist religion, 
 and especially its denial of an objective God. For 
 it will teach us to explain that denial as the result 
 of the recoil of the soul of man, from the worship 
 of God under a purely objective or external form, 
 to the opposite extreme of subjectivity. Such a one- 
 sided development of religious thought becomes in- 
 telligible, when we cease to regard it as an isolated 
 fact, and when we take account of that alternation 
 of movements, that swaying from side to side, which 
 necessarily accompanies the advance of human thought 
 from one stage to another. When we take the 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 55 
 
 separate religions as stages in a process, we cease 
 to wonder at the excessive prominence of one factor 
 of religion at one period, and of another at another. 
 Eeligion may seem at one time to become alto- 
 gether objective, the awe or fear of an external 
 power which does with man what it will ; and at 
 another, it may seem to shrink up into a purely 
 subjective experience, in which harmony with self 
 takes the place of harmony with God. But such 
 one-sided developments must always be regarded as 
 stages in a movement, transitionary phases of con- 
 sciousness, which we cannot estimate rightly except 
 by considering at once that which they have developed 
 from, and that which they are developing to. The 
 preponderance of particular elements at particular 
 times — and especially the alternating preponderance 
 of the objective and the subjective elements — should 
 not, therefore, hide from us the fact that the whole 
 process turns upon the changing relations between 
 two constant terms, God and man, each of which is 
 conceived as essentially distinguished from, and essen- 
 tially related to, the other, — God, as manifesting Him- 
 self to and m man, and man, as consciously seeking 
 by acts of worship, by prayer or sacrifice or self- 
 surrender, to establish or maintain harmonious rela- 
 tions between himself and his God or gods. 
 
 But is this all that we can say of the Being thought 
 of as divine, or can we say anything more ? Can we 
 
56 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 say that God is to be thought of as a natural or as a 
 spiritual Being ; as a Being whose image is to be found 
 in man himself, or in any of the animals or plants, or 
 in the heavenly bodies, or the powers of nature ? Or, 
 on the other hand, are we to refrain with pious awe 
 from likening Him to any of the finite things which He 
 has created ? Can we say, we might further ask, 
 whether God is to be conceived as one or as many? 
 In either case, can we say what is the character of 
 the unity or the diversity of His Being ? A merely 
 external consideration of the different religions would 
 naturally lead us to conclude that religion may exist 
 in any one of these forms, and therefore that no one 
 of them can be regarded as necessary to it. But the 
 principle of evolution enables us to regard each of 
 these forms as a stage in the development of the 
 religious idea, a phase through which it has passed in 
 some age and nation. Further, though there may 
 be great difficulties in placing the different religions in 
 any definite genetic relation to each other so as to 
 exhibit a complete scheme of development ; though, 
 perhaps, it is an unattainable ideal to arrange all the 
 forms of religion according to such a scheme, yet there 
 can be little doubt or controversy as to the general 
 direction in which the current of history has run. 
 The most general view of the historical succession of 
 religions is sufficient to show that the movement has 
 been towards a conception of God as one, and not as 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. hi 
 
 many ; as manifested ioth in nature and in spirit, but 
 as reaching a higher and clearer manifestation in 
 spirit than in nature ; as, indeed, reveaKng in man's 
 highest intellectual and moral life much that is hid or 
 only imperfectly prefigured in nature. Thus far we 
 might go without looking beyond the most obvious 
 facts of history. Further, it would be acknowledged 
 that, as the result of this historical process, the pro- 
 blem of religion has for us moderns taken a definite 
 shape, both for those who accept and those who reject 
 it. It would be acknowledged by almost every one 
 that we are now shut up to the alternative, eit'he.r that 
 there is no God, and no revelation or knowledge of 
 Him, or that the revelation of God must be sought in 
 the whole process of nature and history, regarded as 
 a development which finds its ultimate end and its 
 culminating expression in the life of man as a spiritual 
 being. This is the God whom alone it is now 
 considered worth while either to assert or to deny. 
 This is "our highest faith, our deepest doubt," the 
 faith which is supported by the most powerful utter- 
 ances of modern poetry and philosophy, the doubt on 
 which all the scepticism and agnosticism of the age 
 are concentrated. 
 
 Now, postponing in the meantime all attempt to 
 trace out more definitely the course of development 
 which has resulted in such a consciousness as this — in 
 the consciousness that God, if there be a God, must be 
 
58 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 conceived as a self-revealing Spirit, whose revelation 
 reaches its culmination in the intellectual and moral 
 life of man — postponing even the question whether 
 this idea of God rests upon any sufficient evidence, let 
 us simply ask what is implied in the very existence of 
 the idea or consciousness in question. In other words, 
 what are the conditions in the mind of man which 
 make the rise of such a consciousness possible ? 
 What is it in the constitution of the human spirit that 
 explains the origin and the growth of the belief in a 
 Divine Being, and, ultimately, of such a Divine Being ? 
 The broad general fact that religion is a persistent 
 element of man's consciousness, and further, that the 
 religious idea has gone on developing till it has taken 
 this form, and taken it in the minds both of those who 
 assert and of those who deny the reality of its object, 
 makes it necessary to ask for its psychological causes. 
 We may regard it, if we please, as an illusion ; but it is 
 at least no superficial phenomenon of belief, no chance 
 product of phantasy. It is a principle which has grown 
 with man's growth and strengthened with his strength, 
 and which has shown itself to be bound up in some 
 way with his inmost consciousness of himself. We need 
 not deny, at least in the first instance, that there may 
 be a point in his development at which man will 
 throw off religion ; but, if religion ever becomes extinct, 
 it can only be because it has served its purpose and 
 has given rise to some more comprehensive form of 
 
METHODS OF DEFINING RELIGION. 59 
 
 life. And even the final recognition of the unreality 
 of the object or objects of religion would not 
 release us from the necessity of explaining it, of 
 tracing it back to its root in man's nature, and of 
 determining its relation to other elements in his 
 consciousness. And, indeed, it is only in this way 
 that we can finally ascertain its value — its truth, if 
 it contain any truth, or its falsity, if it be nothing 
 but an illusion. For as, on the one hand, we are 
 never sure of a truth till we see the evidencing 
 principle which connects it with our intelligence, 
 so we can never finally rid ourselves of an error 
 till we have found out the secret of its power over 
 us, the semblance of truth whereby it deceived us. 
 Just as Kant sought to determine the value and 
 limits of our knowledge of the immediate world of 
 experience, by asking what makes that knowledge 
 possible, so we must ask what makes possible oiir 
 religious consciousness, our real or supposed know- 
 ledge of a Divine Being. It is only in this way that 
 we can discover whether it is real or not, and, if real, 
 what kind and extent of reality it has. We have to 
 ask, in other words, what is the ground in our rational 
 nature of a consciousness which grows, as the religious 
 consciousness has actually grown, and which finally 
 takes the form which it has now actually taken, in 
 order that we may once for all determine the extent 
 and nature of its validity. 
 
LECTUEE THIED. 
 
 THE DEFINITION OF EELIGION. 
 
 General Result of the Historical Evolution of Religion — The 
 Question of its Possibility — The Three Ideas that define our 
 Consciousness — Place of the Idea of God in relation to the Ideas 
 of Self and Not-Self — That Religion does not imply Reflective 
 Consciousness of the Idea of God — Sense in which the Ordinary 
 Consciousness implies this Idea — Consistency of this with the 
 existence of degraded Types of Religion — The Distinction between 
 what is in, and what is for Consciousness, and its Bearing on 
 the Idea of Development — Religious Reverence, as rising above 
 Slavish Fear of the Object, and Presumptuous Self-assertion of 
 the Subject — Religion as a Principle of Unity in Life. 
 
 In the last lecture we were seeking for some general 
 idea or definition which might be a guide to us in 
 our subsequent inquiries. I endeavoured to show 
 that the idea we want is not to be found in any 
 element common to all religions. For, even if such 
 an element could be detected, it would be too general 
 to supply us with a clue to the facts of religious 
 history. A definition so obtained would correspond, 
 if to any, only to the lowest and most primi- 
 tive form of religious life ; it would not be a prin- 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 61 
 
 ciple adequate to the explanation of the endless 
 multiplicity of forms which religion takes in dif- 
 ferent ages and nations, or of the way in which 
 they successively arise out of each other. Eather, 
 in conformity with the idea of evolution, the defini- 
 tion of religion must be derived from a consideration 
 of the whole course of its history, viewed as a pro- 
 cess of transition from the lowest to the highest 
 form of it. In fact, if the different religions are to 
 be regarded as successive stages in a development, 
 what we have in that history is just religion pro- 
 gressively defining itself, and the idea of religion 
 will be most clearly expressed in the most mature 
 form which it has reached as the result of the whole 
 process. Reflexion, therefore, wUl have to read that 
 history backwards, and to view what is earliest in 
 the light of ideas derived from a consideration of 
 what is latest; somewhat as we search among the 
 sparse records of the boyhood of a great man for 
 the indications of a greatness which none of his con- 
 temporaries saw, or could possibly have seen. 
 
 Now the most general and superficial view of 
 history is sufficient to show that, while all religion 
 involves a conscious relation to a being called God, 
 this Divine Being is in different religions conceived 
 in the most different ways; as one and as many, as 
 natural and as spiritual, as like to, and manifested 
 in, almost every object in the heavens above or earth 
 
62 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 beneath, in mountains and trees, in animals and men ; 
 or, on the contrary, as incapable of being represented 
 by any finite image whatsoever ; and, again, as the 
 God of a family, of a nation, or of humanity. But, 
 further, when we regard the history of religion as 
 a process of evolution, we do not need to go beyond 
 the most general facts to discover that, in the de- 
 velopment of the idea of God, there is a certain 
 trend or direction of progress from multiplicity to 
 unity, from the natural to the spiritual, from the 
 particular to the universal. We are, therefore, able 
 to say that now, as the result of the long process, 
 the only God whom it is possible to worship is one 
 who manifests Himself both in nature and in spirit, 
 but more clearly in spirit than in nature, and most 
 clearly of all in the highest developments of the 
 intellectual and moral life of man. Farther, we can 
 say that all ideas of a family or national god have 
 disappeared from the minds of civilised men, or that 
 they exist only as survivals from an earlier stage of 
 human culture. It is universally acknowledged that, 
 if there be a God, he can be no ' respecter of per- 
 sons,' but must be a ' God of the whole earth,' mani- 
 fested in and to the spirit of man in all times and 
 places alike. Sentiment and aesthetic feeling may at 
 times make us throw ourselves back into the spirit 
 of an earlier faith, and wish, like Wordsworth, that 
 we could 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. fi3 
 
 "Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 But we cannot really worship such divinities. The 
 only Deity we can believe in, nay, we might say, 
 the only Deity we can disbelieve in, or seriously deny 
 is a universal God, a spiritual principle manifested 
 in all nature and history. 
 
 Now, regarding the historical development of re- 
 ligion as a whole, up to its culmination in a uni- 
 versal religion, we may reasonably ask how we are 
 to explain its possibility. An element of human life 
 which has had such a history, whose influence has 
 been steadily widening and deepening with the 
 general advance of civilisation through age after age, 
 must be closely, if not indissolubly, bound up with 
 the nature of man. And it must be so, whether 
 ultimately we are to regard it as a fundamental 
 truth or a fundamental error. It may be an illu- 
 sion, but it is not at least a superficial illusion, 
 produced by the accidental circumstances of our en- 
 vironment, or, as was at one time supposed, by the 
 intrigues of interested impostors. It is a belief 
 which, whether true or false, has a psychological 
 necessity as an important phase in the development 
 of the human spirit, a belief which has a deep root 
 in the spirit of man, even if it is not a permanent 
 element of his life. And the only way to find a 
 rational criterion, by which we may ascertain the 
 
64 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 nature and extent of its validity, and determine the 
 truth or falsity of its claims, is by asking ourselves 
 what that root is. 
 
 What, then, I ask, is the root or basis of religion 
 in the nature of our intelligence ? Why is not man 
 content with the experience of the finite, and why 
 does he seek after an infinite Being, if haply he may 
 find Him ? Can it be said that the idea of God is 
 bound up with the other elements of our general 
 consciousness of the world and of ourselves ? And 
 if so, what place does it hold in relation to the other 
 elements of that consciousness ? 
 
 I answer that, when we consider the general nature 
 of our conscious life — our life as rational beings 
 endowed with the powers of thinking and willing — 
 we find that it is defined and, so to speak, circum- 
 scribed hy three ideas, which are closely, and even 
 indissolubly, connected with each other. 
 
 These are the idea of the object or not-self, the 
 idea of the subject or self, and the idea of the unity 
 which is presupposed in the difference of the self and 
 the not-self, and within which they act and react on 
 each other : in other words, the idea of God. Let 
 me explain these terms more fully, The object is 
 the general name under which we include the ex- 
 ternal world and aU the things and beings in it, all 
 that we know and all that we act on, the whole 
 environment, which conditions the activity of the ego 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 65 
 
 «,nd furnishes the means and the sphere in which it 
 realises itself. All this we call object, in order to 
 indicate its distinction from and its relation to the 
 ■subject for which it exists. We call it by this name 
 also to indicate that we are obliged to think of it as 
 ■one, whole, one world, all of whose parts are embraced 
 in one, connexion of space and all whose changes take 
 place in one, connexion of time. All these parts and 
 <;hanges, therefore, form elements in one system, and 
 modern science teaches us to regard them all as con- 
 nected together by links of causation. There is only 
 ■one thing which stands over against this complex 
 ■whole of existence, and refuses to be regarded simply 
 as a part of the system ; and that is the ego, the self, 
 the subject for which it exists. For the primary con- 
 ■dition of the existence of this subject is that it should 
 distinguish itself from the object as such — from each 
 ■object, and from the whole system of objects. Hence, 
 strictly speaking, there is but one object and one sub- 
 ject for each of us ; for, in opposition to the subject, 
 the totality of objects constitute one world, and in 
 •opposition to the object all the experiences of the 
 subject, all its thought and action, are merged in 
 the unity of one self. All our life, then, moves 
 between these two terms which are essentially dis- 
 tinct from, and even opposed to, each other. Yet, 
 though thus set in an antagonism which can never 
 •cease, because with its ceasing the whole nature of 
 
 VOL. I. E 
 
66 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 both would be subverted, they are also essentially- 
 related, nor could either of them be conceived to 
 exist without the other. The consciousness of the- 
 one, we might even say, is inseparably the conscious- 
 ness of its relation to the other. We know the object 
 only as we bring it back to the unity of the self -y 
 we know the subject only as we realise it in the: 
 object. 
 
 But, lastly, these two ideas, between which our 
 whole life of thought and action is contained, and 
 from one to the other of which it is continually 
 moving, point back to a third idea which embraces- 
 them both, and which in turn constitutes their 
 limit and ultimate condition. For where we have 
 two terms, which are thus at once essentially dis- 
 tinguished and essentially related, which we ar& 
 obliged to contrast and oppose to each other, seeing 
 that they have neither of them any meaning except as 
 opposite counterparts of each other, and which we are 
 equally obliged to unite, seeing that the whole content 
 of each is just its movement towards the other, we are 
 necessarily driven to think of these two terms as the 
 manifestation or realisation of a third term, which is 
 higher than either. Eecognising that the object only 
 exists in distinction from, and relation to, the subject,, 
 we find it impossible to reduce the subject to a mere 
 object among other objects. Eecognising that the 
 subject exists only as it returns upon itself from or 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 67 
 
 realises itself in the object, we find it impossible to re- 
 duce the object to a mere, phase in the life of the 
 subject. But, recognising them as indivisible yet 
 necessarily opposed, as incapable of identification yet 
 necessarily related, we are forced to seek the secret of 
 their being in a higher principle, of whose unity they 
 in their action and reaction are the manifestation, 
 which they presuppose as their beginning and to which 
 they point as their end. How otherwise can we do 
 justice at once to their distinction and their relation, 
 to their independence and their essential connexion 
 with each other ? The two, subject and object, are 
 the extreme terms in the difference which is essential 
 to our rational life. Each of them presupposes the 
 other, and therefore neither can be regarded as pro- 
 ducing the other. Hence, we are compelled to think of 
 them both as rooted in a still higher principle, which is 
 at once the source of their relatively independent exist- 
 ence and the all-embracing unity that limits their inde- 
 pendence. This principle, therefore, may be imaged 
 as a crystal sphere that holds them together, and 
 which, through its very transparency, is apt to escape 
 our notice, yet which must always be there as the con- 
 dition and limit of their operation. To put it more 
 directly, the idea of an absolute unity, which tran- 
 scends all the oppositions of finitude, and especially 
 the last opposition which includes all others — the 
 opposition of subject and object — is the, ultimate -pre- 
 
68 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 supposition of our consciousness. Hence we cannot 
 understand the real character of our rational life or 
 appreciate the full compass of its movement, unless 
 we recognise as its necessary constituents or guiding 
 ideas, not only the ideas of object and subject, but 
 also the idea of God. The idea of God, therefore — 
 meaning by that, in the first instance, only the idea of 
 an absolute principle of unity which binds in one " all 
 thinking things, all objects of all thought," which is at 
 once the source of being to all things that are, and of 
 knowing to all beings that know — is an essential prin- 
 ciple, or rather the ultimate essential principle of our 
 intelligence, a principle which must manifest itself in 
 the life of every rational creature. Every creature, 
 who is capable of the consciousness of an objective 
 world and of the consciousness of a self, is capable also 
 of the consciousness of God. Or, to sum up the whole 
 matter in one word, every rational being as such is a 
 religious being.^ 
 
 While we say this, however, we must at once guard 
 against a misunderstanding which is very apt to arise. 
 If all men are religious, and if religion involves the 
 idea of an absolute principle of unity in our lives, it 
 
 ^ The above, of course, is only a very abstract statement of an 
 idea which requires much illustration and explanation. It was 
 necessary, however, to make it at once, in order to indicate the 
 point of view from which the subject is to be treated. This and 
 several of the following lectures will be devoted to the further 
 exposition of it. 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 69 
 
 might seem to follow that the belief in such a 
 principle must be found in connexion with every 
 form of religion. But, as a matter of fact, this is 
 far from being the case. Indeed, it would be hard 
 to discover in any pre-Christian religion a thought 
 that fully answers to the account of religion just 
 given Yet, in development, the earliest stages 
 always point for their explanation and completion 
 to the later stage ; and the germ of the idea of God 
 as the ultimate unity of being and knowing, subject 
 and object, must in some way be present in every 
 rational consciousness. Tor such a consciousness ne- 
 cessarily involves the idea of the self and the not-self, 
 the ego and the world, as distinct yet in relation, i.e. 
 as opposed within a unity. The clear reflective con- 
 sciousness of the object without, of the subject within, 
 and of God as the absolute reality which is beyond 
 and beneath both — as one complete rational con- 
 sciousness in which each of these terms is clearly 
 distinguished and definitely related to the others — is, 
 in the nature of the case, a late acquisition of man's 
 spirit, one that can come to him only as the result 
 of a long process of development. But the three 
 elements are there in the mind of the simplest 
 human being who opens his eyes upon the world, 
 who distinguishes himself from it yet relates himself 
 to it. And the difficulty and perplexity which is 
 occasioned by the unity and the difference of these 
 
70 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 elements is the moving principle of development 
 from the very dawn of intelligence. 
 
 Let it not, therefore, be thought that we are sup- 
 posing primitive man to possess developed philo- 
 sophical ideas of the relations of the self and the 
 not-self. We can no more expect him to attain 
 to such ideas than we can expect him to analyse 
 grammatically or logically any sentence which he 
 utters. "We assume that he is conscious of an ex- 
 ternal world, but not that he knows anything of 
 the conditions under which knowledge of that world 
 is possible, — anything of the nature of an object as 
 such, or of the relations of objects in general. We 
 assume that he is conscious of a self, but not that 
 he has ever considered what is meant by a self, or 
 that he has distinguished between the self — as the 
 centre of unity in all his thinking and feeling and 
 willing — and the particular thoughts and feelings 
 and acts which he refers to it. Finally, we assume 
 that he does relate self and not-self to each other, 
 and that, therefore, in some way he rises in thought 
 above his own individual existence and the indi- 
 vidual existence of the objects he knows ; we assume, 
 in other words, that, as a rational being, he is not 
 limited to a purely objective consciousness of things, 
 nor imprisoned in a subjective consciousness of his 
 own ideas, but that he takes up a point of view 
 above this opposition. And this necessity of his 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 71 
 
 rational nature, the necessity which places him at a 
 universal point of view, cannot but modify his con- 
 sciousness both of the object and of himself ; it cannot 
 but lead him in some way to raise his thoughts from 
 the world and from himself to that which is beyond 
 both, or to see in them something which is greater 
 than their immediate existence as finite things. But 
 this does not mean that the savage or the child is 
 able to analyse the idea of God or to give any in- 
 telligible account of the infinite and the universal, 
 of that something, higher than the immediate objects 
 of his consciousness, which so persistently haunts him 
 and disturbs his life ' with thoughts beyond the 
 reaches of his soul.' In fact, we only assume that 
 he is a self-conscious being, and that, as such, he 
 cannot but oppose himself to objects and relate him- 
 self to them ; for this already involves that these ; 
 three elements are present, if not to, yet in his/ 
 consciousness, stimulating it. to development, and 
 therefore to the differentiation and integration of the 
 ■confused unity of sense. But this, as wUl be shown 
 more fully in the sequel, is quite consistent with the 
 fullest recognition of the crudeness, the materialism, 
 the almost brutal sensuousness and coarseness, of the 
 ideas of uncivilised man, who has never distinctly 
 realised, nay, who scarce can be said to have realised 
 at all, the existence of anything that is not given 
 in the particular impressions of sense. Whether 
 
72 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 realised or not, the universal principle is there, 
 ruling over man's consciousness of the particular. But. 
 at this early stage he cannot make it an object of 
 reflexion. It cannot, therefore, present itself to him 
 as a universal principle, but only in the guise of a 
 particular and finite object ; and his consciousness, if 
 he has any consciousness of it, must be in the utmost 
 degree incoherent and confused. Man is always man ;. 
 but in this stage he is least of all conscious what it 
 is to be a man ; and, in spite of the immense formal 
 difference which separates him from a pure animal 
 or sensitive being, from beings who are not self-con- 
 scious, the difference of the content of his thought and 
 feeling from theirs seems almost infinitesimal. Nay,, 
 we might even say that, in a moral point of view,, 
 it is a difference for the worse. God has given him 
 a glimpse of heaven's light, and, as Mephistopheles 
 says in the Faust, 
 
 " Er braucht's allein 
 Nur thierischer als jedes Thier zu seyn." 
 
 " He makes use of it only to be more brutal than 
 any brute." He distinguishes himself from the 
 animals mainly by the fact that he has lost the 
 simplicity, the innocence, the contentment with the 
 present, which characterises the animal. The balance 
 of sense has been disturbed or destroyed in him, but 
 the balance of spirit has not been attained. He is- 
 the most greedy and fierce and sensual of beasts^ 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 73 
 
 because he cannot fully satisfy himself with the 
 diet of the beast, and has as yet acquired no idea 
 of any other diet. And his religion, therefore, seems, 
 in our first view of it, to contain little more than 
 a terror of something more powerful than himself, 
 the haunting consciousness of his weakness before 
 the mighty forces of the universe, and the dream 
 that, by some incantation or propitiation, he may 
 bring them to his side. On a closer view, however, 
 when we regard the growth of savage superstition 
 not merely in itself, but in the light of that which 
 springs out of it, we begin to see that under the 
 unsightliness and horror of his superstition, there is 
 germinating a consciousness of that which is greater 
 than himself and greater than any object, and yet 
 which is so close to him that he cannot neglect or 
 evade it. We cannot, indeed, say in this case that 
 corrwptio optimi pessima ; for what we have here is 
 not corruption and decay, but rather the error and 
 defect of imperfect development : not the babblings of 
 senility but the lispings of infancy. But we can say 
 that it is what is best in him — his highest con- 
 sciousness and that which is most distinctive of him 
 as a man — which is troubling and perplexing him. 
 It is ' heaven's light that is leading him astray.' And 
 his wanderings, terrible as they sometimes are, give 
 proof, nevertheless, of something far higher than the 
 dull complacency and innocence of animal life : they 
 
74 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 are the indication of a nature that cannot be satis- 
 fied with the finite. 
 
 It may be desirable to illustrate this idea a little 
 farther, as it is the key to what is perhaps the 
 greatest difficulty connected with the application of 
 the idea of development to the life of man, and 
 particularly to his religious life. It is hard to 
 analyse the religious consciousness, and to express 
 aU the elements it contains, without seeming to 
 attribute to it universally elements which are found 
 only in its highest forms. This difficulty we can 
 meet only by making a clear distinction between 
 that which religion contains or involves — that 
 which it is to one who is able to reflect upon 
 its nature and thoroughly to analyse it — and that 
 which it is to the subject of it, that which the 
 religious man consciously realises. The distinction 
 is one which affects every department of man's 
 rational life, and it cannot be neglected by any 
 one who would seek to understand him as a being 
 who not only exists but develops. Though man is 
 essentially self-conscious, he always is more than he 
 thinks or knows ; and his thinking and knowing are 
 ruled by ideas of which he is at first unaware, but 
 which, nevertheless, affect everything he says or 
 does. Of these ideas we may, therefore, expect to 
 find some indication even in the earliest stage of his 
 development ; but we cannot expect that in that 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 75 
 
 stage they will appear in their proper form or be 
 known for what they really are. We often speak, 
 indeed, in a general and indiscriminating way, as if 
 the undeveloped mind had no contents except that 
 of which it is clearly conscious. In this spirit 
 Wordsworth declares of a rude and uncultivated 
 nature that 
 
 "A primrose by the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 Eut, if we take this literally, it contains an impossi- 
 bility. Peter Bell could not see the primrose with 
 the eyes of a poet; it could not awaken in him all 
 the suggestions of virgin beauty and early decay 
 which made Shakspere's Perdita speak of 
 
 " pale primroses 
 That die unmarried ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength''; 
 
 hut as little could he gaze upon it with the dull 
 uncomprehending gaze of the animal, whose sense is 
 for the moment filled by it to the exclusion of every- 
 thing else. In recognising it as a primrose — by 
 whatever marks or characteristics he does so re- 
 cognise it — he has given it a definite place in his 
 world, a place determined by its relations to other 
 things and to himself. If he has not observed any 
 of the analogies and relations which make the little 
 
76 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 flower so eloquent to the poet, he has at least laid 
 the basis and prepared the way for them, by giving 
 to it a local habitation and a name in the intellig- 
 ible world. In Uke manner, it might seem not 
 unjust to say that the religion of primitive man is 
 nothing but a degrading fear of some superior 
 power, and that the idea which we have introduced 
 into our definition of religion, the idea of an ultimate 
 unity which underlies and embraces " all thinking 
 things, all objects of all thought," is entirely beyond 
 his reach. It is beyond his reach in the sense that 
 he never can comprehend it, nor even set it as a 
 distinct object before his thought or imagination. 
 But as, after all, he is a self-conscious being, he 
 cannot but distinguish himself from and relate him- 
 self to the objective world ; and it is impossible 
 that the suspicion, the Ahnung, the dim anticipative 
 consciousness, of an all-encompassing power, which is 
 beyond both object and subject yet manifested in 
 both, should not sometimes visit him. And to one 
 who views his obscure superstitions — his dread and 
 horror of supernatural powers which are near him 
 but which he cannot measure — in the light of a 
 true idea of the relations of self-consciousness to 
 the consciousness of God, they will seem already to 
 contain the germ of those higher forms of belief 
 which gradually arise out of them. 
 
 What I have said may be thus summed up 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 77 
 
 Man, by the very constitution of his mind, has 
 three ways of thinking open to him. He can look 
 outwards, upon the world around him ; he can look 
 inwards, upon the self within him ; and he can look 
 upwards, to the God above him, to the Being who 
 unites the outward and the inward worlds and who 
 manifests Himself in both. None of these possibilities 
 can remain entirely unrealised. Even in the earliest 
 stages of his existence he cannot but be conscious 
 of the outward world : it is the first and most 
 natural effort of his mind to throw itself into the 
 external objects which exercise all his senses, 
 and offer immediate satisfaction to his appetites. 
 By a natural necessity he thus, as it were, lives out 
 of doors and becomes a citizen of the world, long 
 before he learns to dwell at home with himself and 
 to know himself as having an inner life of his own. 
 Yet, though this is true, it is certain that the most 
 unreflecting man has an inner, as well as an outer, 
 side to his mental existence. He is essentially self- 
 conscious ; and this self-consciousness, however little 
 he may reflect on it, inevitably separates him from 
 the things and beings he knows, even while he 
 knows them. The pains and pleasures of his sensu- 
 ous existence, not to mention anything higher, must 
 inevitably send him back upon himself, and make 
 him partly conscious of his isolation from other 
 objects and beings. 
 
78 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 And with this growth of self-consciousness comes, 
 on the one hand, a painful sense of dependence on 
 what is not himself, and, on the other hand, a desire 
 to aggrandise himself, and make the outer world sub- 
 servient to his satisfaction, a desire not merely to 
 appropriate this or that object, but even to appropriate 
 the whole universe to himself Every self, once 
 awakened, is naturally a despot, and " bears, like the 
 Turk, no brother near the throne." The inner world 
 is as great as the outer, and everyone, as even Hobbes 
 in spite of his Sensationalism recognised, has an 
 ' infinite desire for gain or glory ' ; has, in other 
 words, a desire that grows with what it feeds on, 
 till it can be satisfied with nothing less than a 
 whole universe for itself The humorous and elo- 
 quent words in which Carlyle expressed this idea 
 are very well known, but perhaps I may be allowed 
 to quote them once more : — 
 
 " Will the whole finance- ministers and upholsterers 
 and confectioners of modem Europe undertake, in 
 jointstock company, to make one shoeblack happy ? 
 They cannot accomplish it above an hour or two ; 
 for the shoeblack also has a soul, quite other than 
 his stomach, and would require, if you consider it, 
 for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply 
 this allotment, no more, and no less : God's infinite 
 universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy in- 
 finitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. . . . 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 79 
 
 Try him with half a universe, half of an omnipotence, 
 he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the 
 other half, and declares himself the most maltreated 
 of men. Always there is a black spot in our sun- 
 shine; it is even, as I said, the shadow of ourselves." ^ 
 But is this all 1 Are we thus shut in between 
 an outward world which limits us on every side, 
 and a self that we can never satisfy, and which 
 forces us into an internecine struggle with aU other 
 beings for existence and for satisfaction. To this 
 we can only answer by referring to the third element 
 of our consciousness — 
 
 " Unless above himself he can 
 Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man." 
 
 There is necessarily present in us, in virtue of the 
 very fact that our inner and our outer lives stand in 
 constant relation to each other, the consciousness of 
 •A Being or Principle which is above both, and re- 
 vealed in both. And the idea of this Principle or 
 Being, just so far as we can realise it, or, in other 
 words, make real to ourselves the thought of it, lifts 
 us at once above the mere feeling of dependence 
 upon that which is without us, and equally above 
 the feeling of lawless independence, and the limitless 
 greed of appetite, which would make us claim every- 
 thing for ourselves. A human consciousness cannot 
 1 Sartor Besartus, Book II. Ch. ix. 
 
80 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 exist without some dawning of reverence — of an awe 
 and aspiration which is as different from fear as it 
 is from presumption, from slavish submission as it 
 is from tyrannical self-assertion. And it is this 
 reverence, this sense of a subjection which elevates 
 us, of an obedience that makes us free, this conscious- 
 ness of a Power which curbs and humiliates us, but 
 at the same time draws us up to itself, which is 
 the essence of religion, and the source of all man's 
 higher life. 
 
 Now, as I have already said, it is not always 
 easy to detect the germs or imperfect forms of such a 
 consciousness in all the forms of religion which have 
 appeared in different ages and nations. Nor, indeed, 
 would it be possible in many cases for us to detect 
 them at all, if it were not for the light thrown 
 back upon them by the later development of religion 
 which has come out of them. Amid the sensuali- 
 ties of nature-worship, the horrible sacrifices offered 
 to gods who seem to us the very embodiments of 
 cruelty, revenge, and injustice, and the indescrib- 
 able follies of spirit-scaring and witchcraft which 
 we find even in many nations not altogether un- 
 civilised, where, it may be asked, can we find the 
 traces of that reverent awe and aspiration which 
 we have been describing, and which are the natural 
 feelings of man towards God, if God be really the 
 Being, the consciousness of whom is to give unity 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 81 
 
 to our divided and finite existence, and to lift us 
 above its division and finitude ? 
 
 A full answer to this objection it is impossible here 
 to give. I can only refer by anticipation to one 
 point which may be verified by the most superficial 
 Tsnowledge of the history of religion. Eeligions may 
 differ very widely, they may be comparatively ele- 
 vated or they may be what we would call degraded ; 
 but they have this as their common characteristic 
 ■(at least when they rise above the vaguest super- 
 stition), that they give a kind of unity to life. And 
 they do this mainly by at once allying man with 
 nature, and joining him with his fellows in some more 
 ■or less comprehensive society. They round off the 
 world, so far as it affects him, into a whole which 
 is referred to one principle, a principle which is 
 manifested at once within the man and without him, 
 and which binds him in some way both to nature and 
 to his fellowmen. Hence I said in the first lecture 
 that a man's religion, if it is sincere, is that conscious- 
 ness in which he takes up a definite attitude to the 
 world, and gathers to a focus all the meaning of his 
 life. Of course, the man's world may be, and in earlier 
 times is, a comparatively narrow one. He is unable 
 to look beyond the nation, the clan, or, it may be, the 
 family to which he belongs; nor can he at this stage form 
 any conception of nature in general, but only of special 
 powers of nature, which he regards as in some way 
 
 VOL. I. F 
 
82 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 friendly to him. And so long as this is so, the unity 
 given to his life by religion can only be. partial and 
 superficial. His heaven may still admit a multiplicity 
 of gods, who are only imperfectly harmonised or united 
 with each other. Yet so far as it goes, his religion 
 gives him a sense of alliance with nature and man 
 under the protection of a divine power who is above 
 both, and in both. 
 
 Now this is just what we should expect, if reli- 
 gion be always the more or less developed con- 
 sciousness of that infinite unity, which is beyond all 
 the divisions of the finite, particularly the division 
 of subject and object. We may add, finally, that so 
 far as religion does this, it is, in spite of much error 
 and even immorality, a step towards that consciousness 
 of rest beyond the agitations of finite care, of unity 
 beyond the differences of finite life, of eternal reality 
 beyond the show of a passing world, which Hegel 
 expresses so vividly in the introduction to his phil- 
 osophy of religion. "All nations know that it is the 
 religious consciousness in which they possess the 
 truth ; and they have therefore regarded their religion 
 as that which gives dignity and peace to their lives. 
 All that awakes doubt and perplexity, all sorrow and 
 care, all limited interests of finitude, we leave behind 
 us on the 'bank and shoal of time.' And, as on the 
 summit of a mountain, removed from all hard distinct- 
 ness of detail, we calmly overlook the limitations of 
 
THE DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 83 
 
 the landscape and the world, so by religion we are 
 lifted above all the obstructions of finitude. In 
 religion, therefore, man beholds his own existence in 
 a transfigured reflexion, in which all the divisions, all 
 the crude lights and shadows of the world, are softened 
 into eternal peace under the beams of a spiritual sun. 
 It is in this native land of the spirit that the waters 
 of oblivion flow, from which it is given to Psyche 
 to drink and forget all her sorrows ; for here the 
 darkness of life becomes a transparent dream-image, 
 through which the light of eternity shines in upon us." 
 
LECTUEE FOURTH. 
 
 THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE AS DEFINED BY PROFESSOR 
 MAX MtJLLEK AND MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 Essential Unity of the Religious Idea in different Stages of its 
 Development — Statement of the views of Professor Max Milller 
 and Mr. Herbert Spencer — Three Possible Conceptions of the 
 Infinite — Criticism of the Conception of the Infinite as a 
 ' Beyond,' or Negative of the Finite — Criticism of the Conception 
 of the Infinite as the Positive Boms and Presupposition of the 
 Finite — Relation of Mr. Spencer's view to that of Spinoza — That 
 the Infinite, as Presupposition and Principle of the Finite, 
 cannot be unknowable. 
 
 In the last lecture I attempted to give a general 
 idea of religion, and at the same time to meet one 
 or two obvious objections which naturally present 
 themselves, when we attempt to verify such an idea 
 by the actual history of religion. I maintained that 
 the consciousness of God, or at least the principle 
 out of which the consciousness of God arises, is as 
 truly one of the primary elements of our intelligence 
 as the consciousness of the object or the conscious- 
 ness of the self Thus all our knowledge of the 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 85 
 
 objective world and all our knowledge of ourselves, 
 presupposes the idea of God ; though it is equally 
 true that, just because it is the presupposition of all 
 other knowledge, it is the last thing on which we 
 reflect, or which we try to explain to ourselves. This 
 becomes manifest if we consider that our whole life, 
 theoretical and practical, turns on the opposition 
 and relation between objects without and the self 
 within us. To reproduce in our minds the order 
 and system of the objective world, and to realise 
 in the objective world the ends determined for us 
 by our nature as self-conscious beings, is the sum 
 and substance of our earthly existence. But both 
 these movements presuppose an ultimate unity, which 
 reveals itself both in the self and the not-self, and 
 in all the intercourse that goes on between them. 
 Thus, beneath and beyond what we may call our 
 secular consciousness in all its forms, beneath and 
 beyond all our consciousness of finite objects and of the 
 subjective interests and desires that bind us to them, 
 there is always a religious consciousness, the conscious- 
 ness of an infinite or Divine Being who is the source 
 of all existence and of all knowledge, and in whom we 
 and all things " live and move and have our being." 
 
 Eeligion, on this view of it, arises in man because 
 his consciousness of himself in distinction from, and 
 relation to the world without him always implies 
 that he transcends both, and that he looks down 
 
86 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 upon both — upon himself as well as upon that which 
 is not himself — from the point of view of an all- 
 embracing unity. Thus we are not confined to 
 any object of perception that is before us, but are 
 uhU to raise our thoughts above it, and to put it in 
 its proper relation to other objects that are not 
 immediately present to us. Nay, to a certain ex- 
 tent we are obliged,, as rational beings, to do this. 
 We cannot gaze like a dumb animal at the object 
 of sense, as if there were nothing in the world beyond 
 it. Inevitably, in a moment, our imagination or 
 our reason carries us beyond it, and almost without 
 our being aware of any movement of our thought, 
 we have formed some conception of it, which binds 
 it to other things and makes it a link in the 
 general connexion of experience. And it is the 
 same with our own inner life. The feeling of the 
 moment can be nothing to us apart from its relation 
 to the past and the future : we cannot be conscious 
 of it without being carried beyond it, and regarding it 
 as a stage in a continuous life. Nay, we are obliged to 
 view our own lives as parts of a wider and more compre- 
 hensive life. We cannot fix our minds upon ourselves 
 as individuals without regarding ourselves as con- 
 stituents of a greater whole — as members in a society 
 and parts of the system of the world. In apprehending 
 •ourselves, we can, nay, to a certain extent we must, 
 rise above ourselves, and treat our own individual 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 87 
 
 «xistence as if it were no more to us than that of 
 any other being to whom we are brought into 
 relation. To do this thoroughly and systematically, 
 indeed, — in knowledge, to get rid of subjective views 
 and to look at all particular objects from the 
 point of view of the whole, and in practice, to 
 ■devote ourselves to the good of that whole, to 
 make ourselves the instruments of the great organ- 
 ism of which we are members — would be to attain 
 the highest intellectual and moral ideal we can con- 
 ceive. But the capacity for such universal life is 
 the birth-right of every rational being ; and every one 
 who has shown himself a rational being has begun 
 to realise it. It is the strange paradox of the spiritual 
 life, that to be a self is at once to be one finite 
 individual among other finite individuals and things, 
 and to reach beyond the individuality not only of all 
 other things and beings but even of ourselves ; for we 
 can neither know nor act without thus transcending 
 ourselves. But thus to go beyond our own indi- 
 viduality and all mere individuality is already to 
 apprehend in some way that which is universal and 
 divine. Hence, in all his secular consciousness of 
 other objects and of himself, man is necessarily 
 haunted by the idea of something which is beyond 
 them, yet in them — something in opposition to which 
 they are as nothing, in unity with which they are 
 more than they immediately seem to be. 
 
88 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Now the main difficulty in realising the truth of 
 this view is the same which meets us in all appli- 
 cations of the idea of development. It is hard to- 
 trace in the earlier forms of religion anything that 
 corresponds to the idea which we maintain to b& 
 the spring of that development, the idea of an all- 
 embracing power which is at once beyond all objects^ 
 and all subjects, which through all divisions of the 
 finite world " spreads undivided, operates unspent, "^ 
 which remains as the permanent basis of man's life, 
 unchanged through all his conflict with nature,, 
 with his fellowmen, and with himself, and which is 
 ever bringing the struggle and tumult of his finite 
 existence back into peace again. And it will be no 
 small part of our work in the sequel to trace out 
 the various forms in which this idea disguises itself 
 from us in different religions. Here, I can only 
 refer by anticipation to the fact that religion, 
 wherever it shows itself in any definite form, gives, 
 harmony and direction to man's life in two ways — 
 (1) it delivers him from himself and the difficulties 
 of his immediate life by reverence for that which 
 is above him ; and (2) it teaches him to regard that 
 power which he thus reverences as manifested both 
 in nature and in the society to which he as an 
 individual belongs. Wherever we find these two 
 things in a religion, we may safely assert that, in 
 spite of the dark superstitions and immoral practices- 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 89 
 
 with which it may be united, it brings unity to the 
 life of man. And we are prepared to recognise it 
 as a step towards that consciousness of a divine 
 unity beneath all the divisions of finitude of which 
 we have been speaking, or, in other words, as a 
 step in the development of that religious conscious- 
 ness of which even the highest religion is an im- 
 perfect expression. 
 
 The idea of religion we have thus reached may 
 be rendered more clearly intelligible, if we compare it 
 with certain other views of religion, which have been 
 taken by distinguished modern writers. Professor ^ 
 Max Miiller has maintained that the principle of 
 reiigion~Ties in the consciousness of the infinite. This 
 consciousness is, he asserts, the opposite counterpart 
 to the consciousness of the finite as such, for " limi- 
 tation and finitude in whatever sense we use them, 
 always implies a something heyond. . . . Beyond 
 every limit, we must always take it for granted 
 that there is something else. But what is the 
 reason of this ? The reason why we cannot conceive 
 an absolute limit is because we never perceive an 
 absolute limit ; or, in other words, because, in per- 
 ceiving the finite, we always perceive the infinite 
 also." " If we perceive a square, the only way we 
 can perceive it is by perceiving the space beyond 
 the square. If we perceive the horizon, we per- 
 ceive at the same time that which hems in our 
 
90 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 senses from going beyond the horizon. There is no 
 limit which has not two sides, one turned towards 
 us, the other turned towards that which is beyond: 
 and it is this Beyond, which from the earliest days 
 has formed the only real foundation for all that 
 we call transcendental in our perceptual as well as 
 in our conceptual knowledge, though it has no 
 doubt been peopled with the manifold creations of 
 the poetic imagination." Professor Max Miiller goes 
 on to refer to the infinite of time and the infinite 
 series of causation as other illustrations of the same 
 principle, the principle that any limit we take is 
 always in relation to a yet undetermined 'Beyond.' 
 And when it is objected to this view of religion 
 that the idea of the infinite is an abstraction to 
 which primitive man is not capable of rising, Pro- 
 fessor Max Miiller answers that in saying that 
 this is the fundameTdal idea in religion, he does 
 not mean that the religious consciousness has in 
 all ages and nations carried with it the explicit idea 
 of the infinite, as such, i.e. the idea of the infinite 
 as he defines it; but merely that the idea of God 
 has in all times tended to attach itself to objects 
 which cannot be completely grasped in sensuous 
 perception or imagination, to objects which, as it 
 were, strain our apprehensive faculty whenever we 
 try to gather them into the unity of one idea. 
 Hence he declares, with doubtful accuracy, that there 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 91 
 
 are things too limited and too easily apprehended 
 for men to make gods of them. " A stone is not 
 infinite, nor a shell, nor a dog, and hence they have 
 no 'theogonic capacity.' But a river or a mountain, 
 and still more the sky or the dawn, possess theo- 
 gonic capacity, because they have in themselves 
 from the beginning something going beyond the 
 limits of sensuous perception, something which, for 
 "want of a better word, I must continue to call 
 infinite." i 
 
 ' Natural Religion, p. 122 seq. It would be easy to attack 
 the instances here given, and to show that men have wor- 
 shipped every one of the objects to which Professor Max 
 Miiller denies all 'theogonic capacity.' And it might farther 
 be maintained that the worship of dogs and other animals 
 may show a deeper consciousness of the infinite than that 
 which finds the manifestation of it in a mere physical vast- 
 ness that reaches beyond the immediate grasp of sense. 
 
 But there is a still more vital objection. Professor Max 
 Miiller here allows that the consciousness of the infinite is 
 not explicit in the earliest religions; and in doing so, he alto- 
 gether destroys the claim of his own definition. For, if we 
 have a right to consider what is implicit, i.e. that which 
 exists in germ in the lowest religion and is developed or 
 made fully explicit only in the highest, we cannot stop at 
 such an idea of the infinite as Professor Max Miiller gives 
 us, the idea of a mere ' Beyond,' or negative of any given 
 limit. Por this idea, as will immediately be shown, corre- 
 sponds to a stage in the history of religion which is neither 
 the first nor the last, a stage at which the religious con- 
 sciousness has become reflective, but in which reflexion has 
 not yet done its perfect work. And there can be no reason 
 for deriving the definition of religion from such a transition 
 
92 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Looking at these statements and illustrations, Profes- 
 sor Max MliUer would seem to mean that we can become 
 conscious of things only as we limit them, and that 
 we cannot limit them without going beyond the limit. 
 All things determined as in space and time, are deter- 
 mined as against a ' Beyond.' All definition is in 
 relation to a wider undefined. And it is just in this 
 relation that we must find the secret cause of worship 
 or religious reverence, the object of such reverence 
 being always either the infinite, the ' Beyond ' in 
 general, or at least some object which, because it 
 seems to the worshipper to transcend all his measure- 
 ment, is for him identified with the infinite. 
 
 Now before criticising this view, I would like to 
 compare it with another view which, though not 
 identical, is closely akin to it — the view of Mr. 
 Spencer. Mr. Spencer also asserts that the proper 
 object of religion is the infinite or unconditioned. 
 And he maintains farther that this infinite or uncon- 
 ditioned, though in itself unknown and even unknow- 
 able, is yet involved or presupposed in all that we 
 
 stage in its development. On the other hand, if we are 
 bound to base our definition on that which is common to all 
 religions, and which therefore exists explicitly even in the 
 earliest or lowest forms of religion, we should be reduced, as 
 Professor Max Muller allows, to something lower than his or 
 any idea of the infinite. Professor Max MuUer's definition 
 thus gives us neither what is involved in the idea of religion 
 nor what is common to all religions. 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 93 
 
 know. All definite thought, all distinct determination 
 of objects, is within the circle of an unconditioned real- 
 ity, which cannot be directly perceived or thought by 
 us, except as the presupposition of all other perception 
 or thought. Mr. Spencer's first principles, therefore, 
 begin with a theory of the Infinite or Absolute, which, 
 according to him, is the true object of religion. Of 
 this Infinite or Absolute he attempts to prove at once 
 that it is unknowable, and yet that we have a kind 
 of consciousness of it which precludes all reasonable 
 doubt of its reality. It is unknowgiih ; for, as Mr. 
 Spencer repeats after Mansel^to know is to distinguish 
 ^andjojelalfi,. an d ther efoje-th&- object of knowledge 
 . can never be that which is unlimited and unrelated. 
 Yet we are forced to believe in it, because a limit 
 always implies a distinction of parts within a whole 
 which is itself unlimited ; and a relation is a con- 
 nexion of factors, both of which belong to a totality 
 which is itself unrelated. He therefore rejects the 
 view of Mansel that the Infinite and Absolute cannot 
 be present to us in consciousness at all. " The error," 
 says Mr. Spencer, " (very naturally fallen into by philo- 
 sophers intent on demonstrating the limits and con- 
 ditions of consciousness), consists in assuming that 
 consciousness has nothing hut Limits and conditions, 
 to the entire neglect of that which is limited and 
 conditioned. It is forgotten that there is something 
 which alike forms the raw material of definite thought, 
 
94 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 and remains after the definiteness which thought gives 
 it has been destroyed. We are conscious of the 
 relative as existing under conditions and limits ; it is 
 impossible that these conditions can be thought of 
 apart from that something to which they give the form : 
 the abstraction of these limits and conditions is by 
 hypothesis the abstraction of them only ; consequently, 
 there must be a residuary consciousness of something 
 which filled up these outlines, and this indefinite some- 
 thing constitutes our consciousness of the non-relativ& 
 and absolute." Or again : " Our notion of the limited 
 is composed, firstly, of a consciousness of some kind of 
 'being ; and, secondly, of a consciousness of the limits 
 under which it is known. In the antithetical notion 
 of the unlimited, the consciousness of limits is abol- 
 ished, but not the consciousness of some kind of being. 
 It is quite true that in the absence of conceived limits 
 this consciousness ceases to be a conception properly 
 so called" — in other words, it ceases to be knowledge 
 in the full sense of the term — " but it is none the less 
 true that it remains a mode of consciousness." i Hence 
 Mr. Spencer denies that the idea of the absolute and 
 infinite and unconditioned is negative, and maintains 
 that, on the contrary, it is the positive basis of all our 
 consciousness of the relative, the finite, and the con- 
 ditioned. It is, so to speak, the blank background on 
 which we draw lines of division, or from which we cut 
 ' First Principles, p. 90 seq. 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 95 
 
 off parts, when we try to determine the finite ; it is / 
 the empty space in which we describe our figures. In 
 this consciousness of an unknowable reality, which is 
 out of all limits and conditions, and which accompanies 
 and underlies all our other consciousness, we have the 
 permanent basis of religion, the element which gives 
 
 aU the truth they have to the religions of the world, 
 and which alone will survive when science has 
 destroyed the illusions and superstitions by which 
 they are overgrown. 
 
 From this short abstract of the views of these two 
 writers, it appears that there is a general basis of 
 agreement between them, but also a difference of no little 
 importance. Professor Max Milller and Mr. Spencer 
 agree in conceiving the infinite as the correlate or coun- 
 terpart of the finite, but the former thinks of it as a 
 Beyond, to which the mind always reaches out from 
 the limits of the finite, while the latter rather thinks 
 of it as the presupposition from which all determination 
 of the finite starts. To the former the infinite is the 
 posterius of all positive knowledge, like the indeter- 
 mined space which stretches beyond every limit we 
 attain ; to the latter it is the pri^^s of all positive 
 knowledge, like the indetermined space which is pre- 
 supposed in the definition of special figures. To the 
 former the infinite is never given, except as the nega- 
 tive of everything that is positively known ; to the 
 latter it is always given, in a primary positive con- 
 
96 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 sciousness which we must have ere we can know any- 
 thing else. The former takes his stand on the finite 
 as the affirmatively determined reality, which, however, 
 in its limited character always implies something 
 beyond that we cannot so determine ; while the lattei 
 takes his stand on the infinite as the affirmative basis 
 of all our knowledge — knowledge, that is, conceived as 
 a process of limiting the infinite by negatives. 
 
 Now, in this and the following lecture, I shall 
 attempt to show that Professor Max Muller and 
 Mr. Spencer have each taken hold of one half of 
 the truth, but have destroyed its virtue by rending 
 it from the other half Or, what is the same thing 
 in another aspect of it, they have each taken the 
 idea of God or of the infinite at a particular stage 
 of its development, and have refused to follow the 
 movement of thought any farther. Let me first 
 put generally and abstractly what afterwards will be 
 more fully explained. Professor Max MiLller's in- 
 finite is the bare negation of the finite. It is 
 therefore only another finite ; for it is limited by 
 that which it denies, and in relation to which alone 
 it has any meaning. Mr. Spencer seems at first to 
 escape from this immediate self-contradiction by 
 taking the infinite as the affirmative basis of the 
 finite, the ihdetermined Being which has no limits 
 in itself, but only receives them from without, from 
 our intelligence. But this pure affirmative basis 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 97 
 
 turns out on examination to be a blank unknow- 
 able, of which we can only say that it is, and of 
 which we can say so much only in contrast with 
 the negative nature of the finite. In truth, whether 
 we take the infinite as the negative of the finite, 
 or as the affirmative basis on which the finite is 
 determined by negation, we arrive at the same result. 
 The only difference is that in the former case we add 
 the infinite to the finite, while in the latter case we 
 add the finite to the infinite. In both cases the 
 addition is merely external, and in both cases our 
 infinite becomes itself a finite, because it is only 
 the correlate of the finite. Meanwhile, we lose the 
 true idea of the infinite, of which I began to speak 
 in the last lecture, as the unity which reveals itself 
 in all the differences of the finite, especially in the last 
 difference of subject and object, and which through 
 all these differences remains in unity with itself. 
 And if, as was there maintained, this is just the idea 
 upon which religion rests, we at the same time lose 
 the clue to the interpretation of the history of religion. 
 Such an abstract statement as this can, however, 
 carry little conviction to those who are not con- 
 vinced already; and I shall therefore attempt suc- 
 cessively to show what is the element of truth and 
 what is the defect in each of these views, and to 
 illustrate what I conceive to be the true idea by 
 contrast with both. 
 
 VOL. I. G 
 
98 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 There are many things which, at first, seem to lend 
 support to the view of Professor Max Miiller that 
 religion rests on or starts from the conception of 
 the Infinite, as the ' Beyond ' or negative of the 
 finite. Such at least may be admitted to be the 
 first reflective form in which the idea presents itself 
 to our minds. We first discover the Infinite in the 
 impossibility of being satisfied with the finite, or limiting 
 our thoughts to it. Just because the idea of an infinite 
 or unconditioned principle of unity which underlies 
 all the differences of the objects we apprehend, is the 
 silent presupposition of all our thought, we are unable 
 finally to rest in any one of these objects as an absolute 
 reality, i.e., a reality which does not need to be referred 
 to anything else as its source or explanation. Hence, 
 even before any general idea of the Infinite makes 
 its appearance, we find traces of the tendency, of 
 which Professor Max Miiller speaks, to select objects 
 of worship which cannot be completely grasped by 
 the senses or the imagination. The physical vast- 
 ness of the heavens, the irresistible strength of the 
 elemental forces of nature, may awe and elevate the 
 soul that is not yet able to attach its emotion 
 except to some outward form. Hence the worship 
 of such objects may indicate a stage of religious 
 experience in which the thought of God is, so to 
 speak, outgrowing the possibility of being confined 
 to any object whatsoever. And when this is the 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 99 
 
 case, the development of religion may be expected 
 soon to bring with it a consciousness that even such 
 forms are measurable and limited, and that neither 
 they nor any other objective forms are fit to receive 
 the stamp of divinity. The divine presence vanishes 
 from the outward world, and the religious consciousness 
 is driven out upon the 'vague and formless infinite,' 
 which is merely the negative counterpart of the finite 
 reality. Thus nothing is left to which the religious 
 sentiment can attach itself but the dim idea of some- 
 thing 'beyond,' to which no form or name can be given, 
 because the moment we attempt to define it, we lose it. 
 Eeligion becomes a kind of divine discontent with all 
 that is attained or attainable, and an endless aspiration 
 after something which, from the very idea of it, never 
 can be reached, the longing for a morrow that never 
 comes, the effort to reach ' a margin ' that " fades for 
 ever and for ever as we move." It becomes a vague 
 yearning for we know not what — 
 
 " The desire of the moth for the star 
 Of the night for the morrow, 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow." 
 
 Now I shall not deny that there is an element of 
 the truth in this view. Eeligion does lift us above the 
 immediate present, and joins our existence to an ideal 
 that is never perfectly realised in it. But, if we 
 make this ideal the mere negative of all that is 
 
100 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 actual, it ceases to have any meaning. The infinite, 
 conceived as a mere 'beyond,' the mere negation of 
 any limit or determination that may be given, is 
 what the Germans call a false or bad infinite. It 
 is, indeed, little more than the bare word " Not " ; 
 and, to any one who realised what it meant, it 
 would be impossible to bow the knee to it. If men 
 ever appear to worship a being, whose only predicate 
 is the absence of all predicates, it is because they 
 take it for more than it is; they intend another 
 infinite than that of which they seem to speak. 
 What causes the illusion is that at first we rise 
 from the finite to the infinite iy negation, and there- 
 fore become conscious of the latter as that which 
 is altogether opposed to the former. Hence heaven 
 is defined, in the first instance, only as that which 
 earth is not ; and men seem to be religious, rather 
 because the world is not enough for them, than 
 because they know what else they want. Eeligion 
 is but an altar reared by unsatisfied and insatiable 
 hearts to the unknown God, who is in some incon- 
 ceivable way to find means to satisfy them — 
 
 "Ah, love, could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of things entire, 
 Would we not shatter it to bits, — and then 
 Remould it nearer to the heart's desire."' 
 
 But, though in this way we at first become con- 
 ' Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam. 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 101 
 
 scious of the infinite merely as that which goes 
 heyond the finite, this is not the true relation of 
 the two ideas. The infinite as a mere ' beyond ' or 
 negation of limits, ultimately carries us back to 
 another idea as its explanation and source, the idea 
 of an infinite which is not merely the negative of 
 the finite but its positive presupposition. In fact, 
 the negative conception of the infinite presupposes 
 a positive conception of it. Por the effort to escape 
 from the limits of the finite is possible only to 
 a thought which in some way apprehends that 
 which is not finite. To know our limits, and to 
 be striving against them, would be impossible, if 
 the infinite we sought were not already in some 
 way present to us : nor could we ever be conscious 
 of the 'world's constraint on our aspirant souls,' if 
 we were really and entirely confined to our prison- 
 house. From this it follows that the idea of the 
 infinite as a mere 'beyond' is an imperfect thought, 
 a thought which does not realise its own meaning ; 
 for, if our consciousness of the finite did not pre- 
 suppose the idea of the infinite, and were not based 
 on it, we could not seek for the latter beyond the 
 former. This pursuit of a shadow that seems to fly 
 before us, is really due to an imperfect consciousness 
 of that which is ever with us and within us, that 
 without which we could not be conscious of any 
 object, or even of ourselves. We are seeking abroad 
 
102 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 for that which we can only find at home, and which 
 we could not even seek, if we did not, in a sense, 
 already and continually possess it. For in the isolated 
 consciousness of the finite, whether it be of ourselves 
 as finite, or of any other object, we are estranged 
 from ourselves, blind to our own real nature, and 
 unconscious of that which yet we imply in every 
 word we say and every action which we do. We 
 are, above all, in want of a Socrates to call our 
 attention to the universal basis of our existence, 
 and to force us to understand ourselves. For, if 
 the infinite is just the all-embracing unity implied 
 in all our consciousness of the finite, it is possible 
 that the attempt to bring it within our knowledge, 
 or to make it the principle of our action, may be 
 surrounded with difiSculties of its own; but, at any 
 rate, in seeking it we are not condemned to strain 
 after something which is far off, still less to pursue 
 a phantom which must always escape from our grasp, 
 but only to return upon ourselves and to recognise 
 what is involved in our simplest consciousness of 
 ourselves, or, indeed, of any other object. We do 
 not need to "go up into heaven," or to "descend into 
 the deep," for " that which is very near us in our 
 mouth and in our heart." 
 
 We have now to ask whether Mr. Spencer in his 
 idea of the infinite supplies the element which was 
 lacking to the view of Professor Max Miiller. In one 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 103 
 
 aspect of his theory he seems to do so ; for he regards 
 the infinite not as the ' Beyond ' or negative of the 
 finite, but as the positive presupposition from which 
 we must start in determining it. In this he seems to 
 be following out one of the most characteristic con- 
 ceptions of the founder of modern philosophy. "It 
 ought not," says Descartes in his Meditations, "to be 
 supposed that we perceive the infinite only by negation 
 of the finite, as we perceive rest and darkness only by 
 the negation of motion and light. On the contrary, 
 we discern that there is more of reality in the infinite 
 than in the finite substance, and therefore that in some 
 sense the idea of the infinite is prior to that of the 
 finite." The infinite is pure af&rmative Being without 
 any mixture of not-being ; hence in becoming conscious 
 of finite things we always presuppose and partly negate 
 the infinite. The ultimate consequences of this way 
 of thinking were shown in the next generation by 
 the greatest of the followers of Descartes. " All deter- 
 mination," said Spinoza, " is or involves negation," and 
 negation corresponds to unreality. To reach the pure 
 reality of God or the infinite, we must therefore undo 
 (or negate) our negations, we must set aside the un- 
 reality which necessarily introduces itself into our con- 
 sciousness of the finite. We must seek for the ab- 
 solute reality in that which, as it is entirely without 
 determinations or predicates, is untainted by any 
 negation, finitude, or imperfection. Spinoza thus 
 
104 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 reaches the supreme reality of God by denying the 
 reality of everything else ; for all the limitations or 
 lines of division by which one finite existence is 
 distinguished from another are regarded by him as the 
 products of an illusive mode of thought, which we 
 must discard in order to reach the truth of things. 
 Hence, in the continually widening vortex of his 
 abstraction, all definite outlines at last disappear; 
 all distinction of material substances is merged in 
 the continuity of one infinite extension, and all 
 distinction of minds in the continuity of one infinite 
 thought ; and even this last distinction of extension 
 and thought, or, as we should say, of object and 
 subject, is declared to be a distinction without a 
 difference : for extension and thought are nothing 
 but forms under which the one substance, in itself 
 without difference or division, is manifested to our 
 intelligence. Hence Hegel rightly answered those 
 who accused Spinoza of atheism, by saying that he was 
 not an atheist but an "akosmist"; it was not God, 
 but the world of finite things whose reality he denied. 
 Now it is easy to see that the logic of Mr. Spencer 
 is identical with that of Spinoza. Like Spinoza, 
 he reaches the infinite simply by wiping out the lines 
 of division between finite things and beings. Like 
 Spinoza, he regards these lines as due to our imperfect 
 ways of apprehending the reality of things. The only 
 essential difference is that he realises, as Spinoza did 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 105 
 
 aot, the effect of his own logic. With a true specu- 
 lative intuition, but with an utter disregard of his own 
 logical principle, Spinoza at once passed from the mere 
 blank of indeterminate being, to which he had reduced 
 everything, to the idea of God as a self-determining 
 principle, who is the source of all the manifold 
 determinations of the universe. Mr. Spencer commits 
 no such sublime inconsequence. He sees that the 
 negation of all the determinations of the finite can 
 bring us only to an abstract being, of which nothing 
 can be said except that it is ; and this result he 
 accepts. He is, therefore, shut up to the hopeless 
 conclusion that there is an irreconcilable opposition 
 between the reality of things and our thought of them. 
 He holds, in other words, that that which alone we 
 can recognise as reality is that of which we can know 
 nothing, while that which alone we can know is a 
 mere product, and for aught we can tell an illusive 
 product, of our own thought. Owing to the limi- 
 tations of our minds we are obliged to divide and to 
 relate that which is above all division and relation ; 
 for otherwise we could not think it at aU. And 
 the glimpse we have of real being is only sufficient 
 to enable us to recognise that we can know nothing ; 
 for the idea of God is nothing but the counterpart 
 of the consciousness of our own limitations, which 
 we can see, but which we cannot transcend. 
 
 Now, in order to discover the defects of this view, 
 
106 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 it is necessary to recognise the element of truth which 
 it contains. It is true that the movement of thought 
 from the finite to the infinite is regressive, and that 
 this regression is caused by a discernment of the 
 negative or unreal character of the finite existence 
 from which we start. It is the illusiveness, the un- 
 certainty, the instability of the things of time and 
 sense which, in the first instance at least, makes us 
 look beyond them to God. It is not because of what 
 the finite is, but mainly because of what it is not, that 
 we seek refuge in the infinite. As it is the illusion 
 of appearance that awakens scientific inquiry to search 
 beneath or beyond it for that which is not to be found 
 in it, so it is the failure of the world to supply what 
 he at first expected to get from it that drives man 
 back upon God. "Thou hast made us for Thyself," 
 says St. Augustine, " and our souls are ever restless 
 till they rest in Thee.'' The necessity of thought to 
 rise from the finite to the infinite lies in the awaking 
 consciousness that the finite in itself is naught, that 
 neither the intelligence nor the will can finally 
 accept it as an absolute reality. The ground sinks 
 beneath us, and forces us to look for a more solid 
 foundation on which we may build our lives, nor is it 
 possible for us to be satisfied till we have found one 
 that cannot be moved. 
 
 This being the case, it is natural that the infinite 
 which is reached by such a regressive process, should 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 107 
 
 in the first instance be defined as that in which all the 
 limits and imperfections of the finite are done away, 
 and that the purely affirmative Being, the supreme 
 reality, should be regarded simply as the negative of 
 an existence which is itself negative or unreal. But 
 the question is whether we can stop at this negative 
 result. If so, then, as Dr. Erdmann says, the idea of 
 the infinite would be like the lion's den in the fable ; 
 all the footsteps of thought would point inwards, and 
 none would be directed outwards. In other words, 
 the ultimate form of religion would be a pantheism 
 which dissolved everything in a God of whom we 
 could say nothing but that Ke or It is. 
 
 Now it will be shown in the sequel that there 
 is a stage of religion which corresponds to this de- 
 scription, a stage in which God is viewed simply 
 as an abstract unity that swallows up all the 
 differences of the finite. But it will be shown also 
 that such religion is the product of an imperfect 
 reflexion, which fixes in hard abstraction moments 
 of thought that should be regarded merely as points 
 of transition. For the negative movement of thought 
 by which we rise from the finite to the infinite has 
 no meaning except as the preparation for a positive 
 movement in which we contemplate the finite from 
 the point of view of the infinite. If we can go 
 back upon the infinite as the presupposition of the 
 finite, this regress must enable us to see the finite 
 
108 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 in a new light. And this means that the infinite 
 itself must be conceived, not merely as that which 
 the finite is not, but as that which includes and 
 explains it ; not merely as an indeterminate back- 
 ground of the finite but as a self-determining 
 principle, which manifests itself in all the determina- 
 tions of the finite without losing its unity with itself. 
 It must be so conceived ; otherwise the negative or 
 regressive movement by which we rise to the infinite 
 would itself be impossible. How could we have an 
 idea of the infinite which enabled us to see the 
 defect of the finite without enabling us to see any- 
 thing more ? A consciousness which apprehends a 
 limit must reach beyond it : it cannot be shut out 
 from the positive knowledge of that which gives it 
 the power to detect and look down upon its own 
 finitude. The consciousness of an impassable limit 
 set to our minds by something of which we can 
 only say that it is, is a contradiction in terms ; for 
 it would involve at once that we could, and that 
 we could not transcend our own finitude. A merely 
 finite being, a being excluded from all contact with 
 the infinite, could not take up any point of view 
 beyond its own limits, still less the point of view 
 of the infinite ; and, on the other hand, a being 
 who could raise himself to such a point of view, 
 still more a being whose consciousness of himself 
 and other things was based upon the idea of the 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 109 
 
 infinite as its first presupposition, could not be 
 excluded from the positive knowledge of the infinite. 
 It appears then that there is a fundamental in- 
 coherence in a view which, though treating the 
 infinite as a positive reality, and, indeed, as the, 
 reality that underlies all other realities, yet reduces 
 it to that of which nothing can be said, except 
 that it is. The first principle through which aU is 
 known cannot itself be unknowable or unintelligible. 
 As we are essentially self-conscious, that which is 
 the presupposition of all our life and thought can- 
 not be permanently hid from us. Our very nature 
 is to return upon ourselves, and such a return can 
 only mean that we become conscious of that which 
 at first we presuppose. To say, as Mr. Spencer 
 says, that aU things are knowable thrmigh the idea 
 of the infinite, but that the infinite is itself not 
 knowable ; to say that our consciousness of it is the 
 condition and limit of all our other consciousness, but 
 that it cannot itself be determined as an object, is 
 simply to deny us the power of reflexion. If we were 
 to adopt such a principle, we could not stop at this 
 application of it ; for, as Socrates showed long ago, we 
 always know the particular through the universal, i.e. 
 we always go upon certain general principles in our 
 consciousness of particular objects ; and, if we could 
 not turn the light of consciousness upon these general 
 principles, if we could not define the universale we use, 
 
110 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 we could never come to know anything. In truth, 
 all knowledge of universal principles involves the 
 same difficulty, for the universal is always infinite 
 in relation to the particulars that fall under it, 
 though it may be particular and finite in rela- 
 tion to a still higher universal. To know is 
 simply to carry back the particular to the universal, 
 and finally to the highest universal through which 
 everything else is known ; and if this highest univer- 
 sal is itself unknowable, then nothing is knowable. 
 If, then, it be true, as Mr. Spencer tells us, that the 
 infinite is not merely the negative of the finite, not a 
 mere ' Beyond ' to which we reach out from the basis 
 of the finite, but that it is rather the basis of all our 
 consciousness of the finite and even of ourselves, it is 
 absurd to think that it is itself beyond the reach of 
 knowledge. In saying that it is so, Mr. Spencer in 
 effect admits the very doctrine he had seemed to 
 reject. 
 
 But if this be so, then the only alternative is that 
 we should cease to regard the infinite after the manner 
 of Mr. Spencer, as identical with the mere abstraction 
 of being, and that we should begin to regard it as a 
 principle which is unlimited and undetermined, in the 
 sense that it limits and determines itself. If this 
 seem an unfamiliar notion, it can only be because we 
 do not reflect on the nature of that regressive process 
 to which all our knowledge is due ; for religion is 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. \\\ 
 
 simply a higher form of that tendency which, in science, 
 leads us to seek the universal beyond the particular, 
 the one beyond the many. Thus in our first natural 
 view of the world, we are apt to take it as a collection of 
 individual things and beings, each of which is centred 
 in itself, or has only accidental relations with the rest. 
 But science, in the strict sense of the term, does not 
 begin till we realise that these supposed independent 
 individuals are nothing apart from their relations to 
 the other objects from which we distinguish them ; 
 that, therefore, their distinction and division from 
 each other is relative ; and that, in order to see them 
 as they really are, we must regard them as parts of 
 a whole, differences in a unity, particular manifesta- 
 tions of a general principle, which is at once the 
 source of their distinction and of their relation to 
 each other. Something like this correction of our 
 first ideas we make every time we rise from un- 
 intelligent perception to scientific knowledge. For 
 it is the main business of science to make things 
 intelligible through some general law or principle 
 that determines their relation to other things. We 
 thus pass from the denial of the independent reality 
 of the particulars to the assertion of the general prin- 
 ciple as the source and explanation of whatever reality 
 they have. But this does not mean that in any 
 case we absolutely lose the particular in the universal. 
 For the same law or principle which is fatal to the 
 
112 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 independent existence of the particular object, also 
 assigns to it its special place and function in the 
 whole to which it belongs. And it could not do 
 the former without also doing the latter. 
 
 To apply this to the case in point. The religious 
 like the scientific consciousness seeks to find the 
 reason or principle of the particular in the universal ; 
 and it dififers from science mainly in this, that it 
 cannot rest except in the infinite unity which under- 
 lies all the differences of the finite. It involves, 
 therefore, to begin with, a perception of the relative 
 and limited character of all finite things and beings. 
 It makes us retract our first belief in the things 
 of the world as stable and permanent existences, 
 which need to be referred to no cause or principle 
 but themselves. It thus forces us, in a sense, to 
 'see all things in God,' or to regard nothing as having 
 any reality apart from Him. But it does not force 
 us to regard God as a mere abyss of being, which 
 has no individuality in itself, and which, therefore, 
 is fatal to the individuality of all other existences. 
 On the contrary, in its ultimate form, it leads us 
 to regard Him as a principle of life and intelligence 
 through whom all things are and are known, who 
 is continually realising Himself in all the infinite 
 difference of the natural and the spiritual worlds, 
 and in whom all natural and spiritual beings find 
 their end. Hence the final form of religion is not, 
 
THE IDEA OF THE INFINITE. 113 
 
 as Mr. Spencer's principles would compel us to think, 
 a quietism which despairs of all finite interests, and 
 dissolves them and itself in the absolute. It is a 
 faith which loses all things in God to find them 
 again transformed, a faith which rises above the 
 immediate disappointments of finite existence, and 
 rekindles the love of life on the altai on which it 
 is consecrated to God. If its first word is that the 
 things of time and sense are naught in themselves, 
 its last word is that in God — as elements in the 
 manifestation or realisation of the ultimate principle 
 of reality — they have a reality and an import which 
 can never be exhausted. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
LECTURE FIFTH. 
 
 ME. SPENCEE'S DUALISTIC VIEW OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS 
 OF THE FINITE. 
 
 Sunvmary of the Views of Prof. Max Miiller and Mr. Spencer as 
 to the Infinite — Mr. Spencer's Vieio as to the Two Forms of our 
 Consciousness of the Finite — That he makes Inner and Outer 
 Experience the Sources of Two Opposite Philosophies — That 
 they are really Two Factors in One Experience — That, though 
 Opposed, they are necessarily Related — That to Separate them is 
 to make them Both Meaningless — Consequences of this as regards 
 their Relation to the Consciousness of the Infinite — Sense in 
 which we 'See All Things in Ood'— Sense in which God is 
 Unknowable. 
 
 In the last lecture I endeavoured to throw some 
 light on the idea of religion by considering two 
 views of it which, though not far removed from 
 each other, yet are in one aspect contrasted and 
 opposed. The view of Professor Max Miiller is 
 that the infin2te,_which is the object of religion, is 
 to be taken as primarily the negative of the finite, 
 as a ' Beyond ' to which we reach out from the 
 firm ground of the finite, but which we cannot de- 
 fine in its_elf. To this conception a twofold objec- 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 115 
 
 tion has been taken. In the first place, if this defi- 
 nition be meant to express that which is common to 
 all religions, it is obvious that, as Professor Max Miiller 
 allows, there are many religions which do not rise to 
 
 4ihe explicit consciousness of this idea of the infinite, 
 and which he can bring under this idea only on the 
 ground that the object worshipped is one which 
 cannot be fully grasped and measured by the senses, 
 an object, therefore, in which the idea of the in- 
 finite maybe supposed to be implicitly present. In 
 other words, he justifies the assertion that the idea 
 of the infinite is essential to religion by attempting 
 to show that it is latent in religion from the first, 
 and that as religion develops, it necessarily becomes 
 explicit. In the second place, the idea of the in- 
 finite as a ' Beyond ' or negation of the finite is 
 itself an imperfect idea, which does not explain it- 
 self, and which can be explained only as a step 
 toward the evolution of a higher idea. But if in 
 defining religion we are to speak of what is im- 
 plicitly contained in religion, we must follow it to 
 the highest form which alone reveals all that is so 
 contained in it ; for, as I showed in a former lec- 
 
 . ture, it is only the last stage in a development which 
 clearly tells us all that was contained in the first. Now 
 the consciousness of the infinite as a mere ' Beyond ' 
 would be impossible, if it were not based on a 
 deeper thought, the thought of the infinite as pre- 
 
116 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 sent to us with and in the finite. We could not 
 be conscious of our own finitude, if we were alto- 
 gether finite. We could not even strive after the 
 infinite, if we did not, in some sense, take our stand 
 upon it in determining our own limits. 
 
 Hence Mr. Spencer seems to present us with a 
 more adequate view of the subject when he speaks 
 of the infinite and unconditioned not as the negative 
 of the finite but as the presupposition of our con- 
 sciousness of the finite, the^ positive basis of our 
 thought of it. As we know by distinguishing and re- 
 lating, i.e. by a process which involves negation, so, 
 he argues, we always go upon the assumption of a 
 primary affirmation, an absolute reality of which all 
 finite things must be conceived as parts or elements. 
 And the one reason why our thought reaches beyond 
 the finite is that the infinite is presupposed in 
 it. From this point of view we might expect him 
 to adopt an idea of God similar to that suggested 
 in our second lecture, the idea of an infinite being 
 who is the unity of all differences, and especially 
 of the ultimate difference of subject and object. 
 And, up to a certain point, he seems to be on 
 the way to realise this expectation. For he treats 
 the infinite as that which is beyond all differences ; 
 and he brings this conception into special relation 
 with the difference of matter and mind, which he 
 regards as including under it all other differences, 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 117 
 
 But when we ask how he conceives this infinite, 
 we find that, though he declares it to be the pre- 
 supposition of all our knowledge, he does not con- 
 ceive it as the unity which is the source and limit 
 of all difference, but only, so to speak, as the empty 
 continuity of a background, on which we draw lines 
 of division. Accepting the principle of Spinoza — that 
 all our determination of things involves the intro- 
 duction of an element of negation into the pure 
 affirmative being of the infinite — he finds absolute 
 reality only in the indeterminate, in the uTreipov of 
 Greek philosophy, which neither determines itself, nor 
 is affected by any determination it receives from our 
 intelligence. Hence the idea gf^ the infinite is said 
 ^to be a " consciousness " which is not knowledge, a 
 consciousness which, though it is the prius of 
 everything, explains nothing. Thus, although the 
 infinite is the presupposition of all our thought, it is 
 not IT principle by which we can explain any of the 
 differences that come into our consciousness, even 
 the primary difference of subject and object, or of 
 inner and outer experience. It cannot throw any 
 light upon the relation of the mind to its object. 
 It cannot tell us why we distinguish the one from 
 the other or oppose the one to the other; nor can 
 it help us to reconcile their division or bring them 
 into harmony with each other. The consequence 
 is that the object and the self fall apart from each 
 
118 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 other in a disunion which admits of no reconcilia- 
 tion. Mr. Spencer's theory thus combines the diffi- 
 culties of Pantheism and Dualism. It is a Dualism, 
 because it asserts that there is an absolute breach 
 between the two modes of the infinite, which it 
 leaves without any possibility of mediation. And 
 it is an abstract Pantheism, because it conceives the 
 infinite, to which it ultimately refers everything, not 
 as a principle which explains or reconciles the 
 differences of these modes, but simply as a gulf in 
 which they are all finally submerged and lost. 
 When we take matter and mind in themselves, 
 they are absolutely divided ; when we bring them 
 in relation to the infinite which is their presupposi- 
 tion, they both alike disappear and dissolve them- 
 selves into it. 
 
 Now this way of thinking is not peculiar to Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer. On the contrary, it is a way of 
 thinking which has prevailed, in a form more or 
 less akin to that in which it appears in him, ever 
 since the dawn of modern philosophy. "We find it 
 already suggested by Descartes, and worked out to 
 its logical result by Spinoza, who held that thought 
 and extension — or, as we might put it, mind and 
 matter — are two parallel but unrelated attributes 
 under which the infinite substance manifests itself. 
 And it has been accepted from Mr. Spencer by 
 Professor Huxley and Dr. Tyndall. It may thus 
 
DUALTSTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 119 
 
 be regarded as the accepted creed of modern Ag- 
 nosticism ; and it is therefore needful to subject it to 
 a careful examination. 
 
 Now we have already discussed Mr. Spencer's 
 statements as to the unknowableness of the infinite 
 in itself; and it remains for us to consider 
 what he says of the two opposite phenomenal 
 modes in which it expresses itself. When we go 
 beyond the infinite, which is the presupposition of 
 all consciousness, there are, he declares, two different 
 ways of looking at the world, each complete in itself. 
 We may regard it either as a material or as an ideal 
 process, either as a series of causally linked states of 
 matter or as a series of causally linked states of mind, 
 according as we consider the objects of our con- 
 sciousness as external objects, or the ideas through 
 which such objects are presented to us. And each 
 of these ways of representing the world-process would 
 naturally lead, if it were taken by itself, to a special 
 philosophical theory — the former to a materialistic, 
 and the latter to an idealistic theory of the world. 
 "FoUow the teaching of the one," says Mr. Spencer, 
 "and you are forced to admit that matter is a 
 mode of mind ; accept the results of the other, and 
 you cannot deny the inference that mind is a mode 
 of matter." When we look outwards, we become for 
 the nonce Materialists: for all that is outwardly 
 presented to us is matter and motion; and, if we 
 
120 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 follow up this mode of consciousness, we ultimately 
 reduce the world to the continuous product of the 
 action and reaction of moving atoms or molecules, 
 which variously attract or repel each other. On 
 the other hand, if we change our point of view and 
 look inwards, we become for the nonce Idealists, 
 and regard the external world and all that is 
 in it as consisting in feelings and their com- 
 plex relations ; for it is through these alone 
 that the external world is presented to us. These 
 alone are the immediate objects of consciousness, 
 and it is their association, according to certain 
 general laws, that gives rise to all the knowledge 
 that we possess. Explanation under this mode of 
 consciousness only consists in showing how primitive 
 shocks of feeling may become associated together so 
 as to give rise to a coherent consciousness of things. 
 Each of these forms of consciousness has thus a 
 primitive element to which we may reduce every- 
 thing, but these primitive elements have no assign- 
 able relation to each other. We cannot pass over 
 the gulf between them, or translate the language of 
 the one mode into that of the other. "When the 
 two modes of being which we distinguish as sub- 
 jective and objective have been severally reduced to 
 the lowest terms, any further comprehension must 
 be an assimilation of these lowest terms to one 
 another; and, as we have already seen, this assimila- 
 
toUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 121 
 
 tion is negated by the very distinction of subject 
 and object, which is itself the consciousness of a 
 difference transcending all other differences. So far 
 from helping us to think of them as of one kind, 
 analysis only serves to render more manifest the 
 impossibility of finding for them a common concept, 
 a thought under which they can be united "... 
 for "that a unit of feeling has nothing in common 
 with a unit of motion becomes more than ever 
 manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposi- 
 tion." ^ Hence we have two principles of explana- 
 tion, to either of which we can reduce the whole of 
 things. We can take for granted mind, or rather 
 feelings as the ultimate units of which mind is 
 made up, and on this basis we can work out a 
 complete idealistic system, explaining matter simply 
 as objectified feelings ; or we can take for granted 
 matter or its atomic constituents, and on this basis 
 we can work out a complete materialistic system, 
 explaining life and mind as modes of motion. But 
 finally we find ourselves balanced between these 
 two opposite principles and systems, without hope of 
 finding our way from the one to the other. The 
 unity is found only in that unknowable of which, 
 though we cannot know it, we still are conscious, 
 as the absolute reality of which both subject and 
 object may be regarded as modes. In other words, we 
 1 Principles of Psychology, I. 168, § 61. 
 
122 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 are suspended between two finite forms of thought, 
 and can regard the infinite only as the absolute reality 
 which is determined and limited in both, but of which 
 in itself we can say nothing except that it is. " See 
 then our predicament," says Mr. Spencer, " we can ex- 
 plain matter only in terms of mind ; we can think of 
 mind only in terms of matter. When we have pushed 
 our explanation of the first to the furthest limit, we 
 are referred to the second for a final answer ; and, 
 when we have got the final answer of the second, we 
 are referred back to the first." ^ 
 
 We may then sum up the whole matter thus. 
 According to Mr. Spencer, we have and can have no 
 knowledge of the ultimate unity beyond all difference 
 except as ' Being ' in the abstract, infinite Being, or, 
 what is the same thing for Mr. Spencer, Being without 
 any determination. We cannot grasp it as a pro- 
 ductive principle which explains difference and at the 
 same time overcomes it. It is the dark in which all 
 colours become grey. When we reach this unity, it 
 only remains for us to lose ourselves in it ; for the 
 ascent to it is by the way of pure abstraction, and 
 pure abstraction as it ascends draws the ladder after 
 it. When we proceed merely by omitting elements, 
 what is left does not afford any clue to what is 
 omitted. So conceived, the idea of the infinite has no 
 dialectic in it to bring us back to the finite ; in other 
 ' Principles of Psychology, I. 627, § 272. 
 
bUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 123 
 
 words, it has nothing in it which could be supposed to 
 give origin to the finite or which could be used to 
 explain it. If, therefore, we return to the finite at all, 
 it must be by a leap from unity to difference, by an 
 arbitrary restoration of the forms of the finite which 
 we had rejected in our upward path. And these 
 forms will remain for us just the same as if we had 
 never gone beyond them at all. "We have thus risen 
 for a moment above our ordinary consciousness of the 
 finite world and our finite selves, but we have brought 
 back no light which can make that consciousness more 
 intelligible. We have, as it were, ascended into 
 heaven, but have stolen from it no Promethean spark 
 to kindle a fire upon earth. For the only result is to 
 leave our " two consciousnesses," to use the strange 
 expression of Mr. Spencer, in such complete discord 
 with each other that they become the parents of two 
 rival philosophies; and these two philosophies must 
 continue their internecine war without end so long 
 as human life lasts, or till its antinomies and incon- 
 sistencies are lost in the unknowable infinite from 
 which for a season they have emerged. 
 
 Now I wish again, before criticising this view, to 
 call attention to the elements of truth in it. In the first 
 place, Mr. Spencer seems to me to be right in regard- 
 ing the idea of God or of the infinite as the primary 
 presupposition of all our knowledge. I agree with 
 him also in thinking that the idea of the infinite is the 
 
124 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 source out of which all religion springs, and that the 
 clear consciousness of it is the last result of the de- 
 velopment of religion. For the highest religion must 
 be that in which the principle of all religion comes to 
 self-consciousness. Further, I accept Mr. Spencer's view, 
 in so far as he regards the final difi'erence of the finite, 
 beyond which lies only the infinite, as being the difference 
 of subject and object, of inner and outer experience. 
 These are, as it were, the pillars of Hercules, between 
 which the current of our life flows, and beyond them 
 lies only the ocean. Nay, I am ready to admit that, 
 if we can find no connexion between these two factors, 
 no unity that transcends the division between the 
 consciousness of self and that of the not-self, then our 
 intelligence must be fundamentally incoherent, and 
 unable to answer the questions which it itself suggests. 
 Thus knowledge will be for ever vexed with an 
 opposition which cannot be overcome, because it is an 
 opposition between two first priTwiples, each of which, 
 from its own point of view, dominates the whole world. 
 For, though there is a principle which is above both, it 
 cannot, if this be the true conception of it, be used to 
 bridge over the gulf, but only makes us conscious of 
 its depth and darkness. 
 
 To this view, however, there is, at the outset, an 
 obvious empirical objection. If it were true, con- 
 sciousness would always need to alternate between its 
 two modes, between inner and outer experience, and 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 125 
 
 it could never bring them together, except in an 
 idea of the infinite which leaves out all that dis- 
 tinguishes either mode. Mr. Spencer forgets that this 
 impossible feat of combining the consciousness of the 
 self with that of the not-self, is performed by us 
 every day and in almost every act of thought ; for we 
 are constantly putting our inner experience in relation 
 to outer experience, and our outer experience in relation 
 to inner experience. The consciousness of our own 
 feelings or ideas and the consciousness of objects are 
 not " two consciousnesses" but rather they are two 
 elements of one consciousness, which are always 
 present together. Our whole intellectual life is a 
 continual return upon ourselves from the outward 
 world; our whole practical life is a continual effort after 
 the realisation of ourselves in the outward world. A 
 theory that divorces these two elements from each other, 
 and maintains that there is nothing to unite them but 
 the abstraction of Being, is at variance with obvious 
 facts of experience ; for experience teaches us that the 
 inner and outer life are two things which are never 
 found separated, two things which we may distinguish, 
 but which are never actually disjoined from each other. 
 Hence it is absurd to say that it is impossible to unite 
 or to relate, what we are always uniting and relating ; 
 or to speak of two separate 'consciousnesses,' when what 
 we have is only one consciousness, though with more 
 than one element included in it. Those who talk of 
 
126 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 an impassable gulf between the inner and the outer 
 world may fairly be asked to produce one of them 
 without the other. And if any theory makes it neces- 
 sary to separate them,, we shall surely say, ' so much 
 the worse for the theory,' and not ' so much the worse 
 for the facts.' 
 
 But, further, not only may we thus meet Mr. 
 Spencer by an appeal to the facts, but also we can see 
 quite clearly the reason why the facts are so. We 
 can see, in other words, not merely that the inner and 
 the outer world are not disjoined in experience, but 
 we can see that it is impossible in the nature of things 
 that they should be so disjoined, and even that there 
 is a contradiction in the very idea of their separation. 
 In fact, if we try in thought to carry out a thorough- 
 going separation of the inner and the outer world, we 
 empty them both of all their contents, these contents 
 lying just in their relations. When Mr. Spencer 
 speaks of two independent ' consciousnesses,' one of 
 which gives rise to a consistent materialism and 
 the other to a consistent idealism, it may fairly be 
 answered that both of these theories — as Mr. 
 Spencer states them — are the results of a false 
 abstraction, by which elements of consciousness, only 
 to be known in their correlation, are torn asunder, 
 and set up as independent realities, each complete 
 in itself without the other. Let me show this by 
 considering very shortly what is the general meaning 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 127 
 
 and purport of each of these supposed rival philo- 
 sophies. 
 
 In the first place, what is Materialism, as Mr. 
 Spencer understands it? It is a theory, we must 
 answer, which takes the world purely as an external 
 world wherein everything is explained by matter and 
 motion. It is a theory which looks upon the objects 
 of the external world — which we know only through 
 perception and thought and in relation to the subject 
 within us — as if they existed in themselves altogether 
 apart from relation not merely to us but to any 
 such subject. Now it would take us too far to enter 
 into the complete proof that such a view is baseless 
 and inconsistent with itself. But it is scarcely 
 necessary to call up the ghost of Kant, or even of 
 Berkeley, to show that the idea of an intelligible 
 world without any relation to an intelligence, leads, 
 if it is carried out to its logical results, to 
 absurdity and self-contradiction. It must, of course, 
 be admitted that in our ordinary consciousness of the 
 world, we do not take note of the fact that an object 
 implies a subject. Indeed, it requires a distinct effort 
 of reflexion to realise that it does ; for, at first, we are 
 so much occupied with the object we are contemplating 
 that we do not turn our attention to the self for 
 which it is. But our forgetfulness or want of reflexion 
 cannot alter the fact — that knower and known are 
 essentially correlative, and that neither of them can 
 
128 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 be conceived to exist without the other. Divest 
 the world of all its relations to a subject, and it 
 sinks into a " thing in itself," a cwput mortwwm of 
 abstraction, of which nothing can be said. It ceases 
 to have either primary or secondary qualities, to be 
 coloured or extended or solid, or to have any one of 
 the characteristics by which we determine it as 
 material : for all these imply relations to a percipient 
 or thinking subject. Even the assertion that it exists 
 has no right to be called Materialism any more than 
 Idealism. For thus viewed apart from all its relations 
 to the subject, it is nothing but the same indetermined 
 being which Mr. Spencer calls the Absolute. Thus 
 Materialism, like every partial truth when treated as 
 the whole truth, commits suicide. The object setting 
 up for itself apart from the subject, ceases to be even 
 an object. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with what Mr. Spencer calls 
 Idealism, the doctrine that all objects are reducible to 
 feelings or ideas, states or data of a subjective conscious- 
 ness. Our inner life is nothing but our return upon 
 ourselves from the outer life, and the consequent reaction 
 of the self within upon the world without. I admit, 
 of course, that when we do thus return upon ourselves, 
 or direct our thought to the subject that thinks, we 
 are apt to oppose ourselves, our own feelings and ideas, 
 to the objects and facts that excite them. At such 
 times we are intensely conscious of the self as distinct 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 129 
 
 from the objective world, and not seldom we exag- 
 gerate this distinction into a contradiction. The lone- 
 liness and isolation from which the individual spirit 
 -cannot escape — the ring, as it were, of adamant that is 
 about each one of us, preventing us from coming into 
 union with any even the nearest brother soul — is a 
 frequent theme of poets and moralists. In each 
 Individual there is a special stream of tendency, a 
 particularity of interest, which he cannot entirely 
 •communicate to any one else. " The heart knoweth 
 its own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle 
 ■with its joy." This sense of isolation is often vividly 
 •expressed by Matthew Arnold, and may be said to be 
 •one of the main themes of his poetry : — 
 
 " Yes, in the sea of life inisled 
 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 We mortal millions live alone. 
 
 Around us spreads the watery plain, 
 Oh, might our margins meet again ! 
 
 " Who ordered that this longing's fire 
 Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled ? 
 Who renders vain this deep desire % 
 
 A God, a God their severance ruled. 
 And bade between their shores to be 
 The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." 
 
 l£ven in regard to the realm of thought and knowledge 
 many writers are fond of dwelling upon the idea that 
 ■each of us lives in a little world of his own, in which 
 
 VOL. I. I 
 
130 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 things are arranged in a way not quite identical with 
 the mental cosmos of any other individual. And one- 
 of the two great individualistic schools of morals — 
 that to which the Stoics belong — is constantly insisting 
 on the lesson that the isolated self-determination of 
 the individual is that in which alone he shows his 
 character as a moral being ; while the opposite school 
 holds that his only possible aim is to seek his own 
 pleasure and avoid his own pain. Such exaggerations 
 of the subjective aspect of our consciousness have their 
 value, and even their necessity, at particular stages in 
 the life of the individual or the race. But they 
 contain only one side of the truth, and if they tempt 
 us to obliterate the other side, and to entrench our- 
 selves in a theory of subjective idealism (such as is 
 commonly attributed to Berkeley), they become self- 
 contradictory and contain their own refutation. The 
 consciousness of self, it must be again pointed out, is 
 always primarily and immediately a return upon self 
 from objects ; and though this return involves a kind 
 of opposition between the self and that from which 
 the return is made upon it, yet it should be remem- 
 bered that a negative relation is still a relation, and, 
 in this case at least, a necessary relation. If there is 
 no consciousness of the object except in relation to the 
 subject, as little is there a consciousness of the subject 
 which is not mediated by a consciousness of th& 
 object. 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 131 
 
 And if it be said that, in the practical life, self- 
 consciousness goes beyond the objective consciousness 
 and reacts upon it, yet this does not permit us to 
 treat the inner life in this sphere as forming a whole 
 in itself, extraneous to and independent of the outer 
 life. For if, in action, we go beyond what is already 
 contained in our consciousness of the objective world, 
 yet, in the first place, we could not have gone beyond 
 it except by means of it ; and, in the second place, 
 we go beyond it only as we set up for ourselves a new 
 end to be realised in it. It is thus the presupposition 
 from which we start, and it determines the form of 
 every end which we can seek to realise. Hence the 
 idea of a pure consciousness of self, shut up in itself 
 without any knowledge of objects, is the abstraction 
 of one element in our life, which, in losing all relation 
 to the other elements, loses all its own meaning. And 
 the same is true of a pure self-determination such 
 as some moralists have imagined, i.e. a determination 
 of the self without any relation to objects, or which 
 is not at the same time the determination of some- 
 thing other than the self. The moral law has no 
 meaning, it is absolutely emptied of all its contents, 
 if we take out of it all relations to the world and 
 especially to the social environment in which the 
 individual stands. The conception of the individual 
 subject as at any time alone with himself, conscious 
 of nothing but his own states, and seeking nothing 
 
132 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 but his own pleasures — or, at best, seeking only the 
 realisation of a purely subjective law — is a fiction 
 which, logically, is as fatal to self-consciousness as 
 it is to the consciousness of the objective world. The 
 Berkeleian Idealism — if this view of the pure subjec- 
 tivity of consciousness is to be attributed to Berkeley 
 — rests on a confusion between the truth, that all 
 objects are objects for a subject, and the error that 
 the only possible objects, or at least direct objects, 
 for such a subject are its own states. The truth 
 is that we are conscious of our own states as such 
 only in distinction from, and in relation to, the 
 objects to which we refer them ; but neither these 
 states nor anything else can be known except in 
 relation to a subject. And the same is true on the 
 practical side. We cannot find ends for our action 
 in our own feelings apart from objects ; nor can 
 we determine ourselves with a view to our own 
 pleasure without reference to any objective end in 
 which pleasure is found. We must seek our pleasure 
 in something, and joy or sorrow can come to us only 
 through the attainment or the failure of ends, which 
 are other than the joy or sorrow itself. For good 
 or ill we are bound to the universe, so that we can 
 neither know our own nature, nor seek our own good, 
 apart from it. And a theory which speaks of inner 
 experience as one thing and outer experience as another 
 and totally different thing, might as well, to employ a 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 133 
 
 homely illustration which Professor Terrier was fond 
 of using, speak of a stick with one end only. It is 
 as absurd in the realm of spirit as in the realm of 
 matter to suppose that we can have an inside without 
 an outside, or an outside without an inside. 
 
 But if this be true, it leads us directly to the re- 
 futation of another part of the theory of Mr. Spencer. 
 If the consciousness of the self is essentially related to 
 the consciousness of the not-self, and cannot by any 
 possibility be disjoined from it, it follows that the 
 consciousness of the unity, which is beyond the oppo- 
 sition of self and not-self, need not remain an empty 
 and otiose abstraction, to which no further determina- 
 tion can be given than that it is. It would be truer 
 to say that our consciousness of objects and our con- 
 sciousness of the self, when we take them in their 
 isolation from the unity, involve such an abstraction ; 
 and that, therefore, we cannot see either in its truth, 
 until we see them both as embraced in or derived 
 from it. Mr. Spencer tells us that, when we lift our 
 thoughts to the infinite, we leave behind us all that 
 characterises either the subject or the object, so that 
 nothing remains but the vague thought of indeter- 
 minate being, which may be said to include every- 
 thing, only because it excludes nothing. In like 
 manner Spinoza speaks of those who forget the finite 
 whenever they turn their minds to God, and again 
 forget God whenever they turn their minds to the 
 
134 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 finite world.^ But, on the principles of Mr. Spencer, 
 such forge tfulness is absolutely necessary; for, on these 
 principles, it is impossible to think of the infinite mce/pt 
 by abstracting from all that determines the finite as 
 such, and especially from the two imperfect modes 
 in which the finite is given to us. On the other 
 hand, if these two modes of the infinite be in vital 
 relation to each other — if there be no element in 
 «elf-consciousness which does not involve a relation 
 to objects, and no element in the consciousness of 
 objects which does not involve a relation to the self 
 — ^it becomes absurd to suppose that, in rising to 
 that principle of unity which is presupposed in both, 
 V7e need to turn our back upon either. Eather, 
 we must say that, in rising to that unity, our in- 
 telligence is, for the first time, taking up the point 
 •of view from which they can be seen as they truly 
 are. It is our divided consciousness, in which we take 
 finite things as if they could be understood in their 
 isolation, in which we rend the self from the world 
 and both from God — it is this consciousness that 
 misleads us. Nor can we see anything in its true 
 meaning and import, till, in a sense, we " see all things 
 in God," i.e. till we see them from the point of view 
 of their unity as parts of one organic whole, as the mani- 
 festations of one principle. The ultimate unity, which, 
 .as Mr. Spencer rightly maintains, is presupposed in 
 ' Eth. II. 10, Schol. 2. 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 135 
 
 %11 our knowledge of objects and of ourselves, is the 
 •end as well as the beginning of that knowledge. And, 
 when we carry our life back to it, we do not submerge 
 ^11 our knowing and being in a gulf of nescience, but 
 only bring it into relation with the principle by which 
 it must ultimately be explained. On the other hand, 
 Mr. Spencer's view involves that, after all the other 
 -questions which we can answer, we come upon a ques- 
 tion which we can never answer, and in the attempt to 
 answer which all our previous results give us no help. 
 If that were the case, we must undoubtedly agree with 
 him in regarding the whole movement of religious life 
 as an effort to determine the indeterminable, to give 
 imaginative form or logical definition to that which by 
 its very nature can neither be perceived nor conceived. 
 And the natural end of the process would simply be 
 the discovery of this incapacity, and the resolve to 
 'cultivate our gardens,' and worship nothing at all. 
 On this view the whole religious history of man would 
 be the process whereby he learns to dispense with a 
 religion : it would be of none but a negative use ; 
 for all that it could teach us would be to recognise 
 the nature of the illusion, which thus at once tempts 
 and baffles us, and to understand why it must do both. 
 It would teach us, in short, that, in the first instance, 
 -we inevitably seek to define the Infinite, because the 
 consciousness of it is ever with us, while we as inevit- 
 ably fail to define it, because it is the infinite, and 
 
136 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 therefore the negation of all definition. We should 
 thus at last discover the nature of the adamantine- 
 wall which hems us in, and we should cease to waste 
 ourselves in vain efforts to break through it. 
 
 Kow, from what has already been said, it appears 
 that this is just the reverse of the truth. For,- if the 
 self and the object are so essentially related as we 
 have maintained they are, then all our progress in 
 knowledge of objects must deepen and widen our 
 consciousness of the self; and all our knowledge of 
 ourselves, won by the whole effort of our theoretical 
 and practical lives, must, in its turn, be an increase 
 in our knowledge of the objective world. Further, 
 it is obvious that when we thus break down, 
 the supposed wall of division between the conscious- 
 ness of self and that of the not-self, we must also 
 break down the wall of division between both and the 
 consciousness of God. And, instead of thinking of 
 ourselves as confined to the finite to the exclusion 
 of the infinite, we must rather recognise that every- 
 thing we can learn of the former is also a step in the 
 knowledge of the latter. The consciousness of the 
 finite is based on the idea of the infinite as its first, 
 presupposition; nor can it become knowledge in the 
 highest sense till it understands this presupposition ; tUl, 
 in other words, it recognises the consciousness of the 
 finite subject and the consciousness of the finite object 
 as elements in the consciousness of God. Eecognised 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 137 
 
 or not, they are such elements ; and the growth of man's 
 religious consciousness is therefore related, not acciden- 
 tally or externally, but essentially and necessarily, to his 
 growing knowledge of the world and of himself. The 
 same development of thought which shows itself in 
 the advance of modern upon ancient ideas of nature 
 and of man, brings with it that deepening and widen- 
 ing of the idea of God which may be traced in Chris- 
 tianity, as compared with Greek Polytheism and Jew- 
 ish Monotheism : a deepening and widening which is. 
 perceptible even in the works of those who deny 
 the very existence of God, and is sometimes the 
 cause of that denial. For a higher idea necessarily 
 brings with it greater difficulties, and its rise is apt to. 
 produce scepticism, till those difficulties are solved. 
 We may doubt God's existence, just because the idea 
 of Him has gained so great fulness for us, that wfr 
 cannot easily satisfy ourselves with imperfect represen- 
 tations of Him. If, on the other hand, there appears 
 at any time to be an advance in man's knowledge of 
 the finite world without a corresponding advance in 
 the religious consciousness, we may explain it by the 
 alternating way in which the process of development 
 necessarily goes on. In the slow secular progress of 
 man's spiritual history, one element may often seem to 
 gain a temporary prominence at the expense of another. 
 The interest of the outward life may for a time throw 
 that of the inward life into the shade; or, on the other 
 
138 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 hand, an intense self-consciousness may for a time 
 cause the individual to withdraw into himself from his 
 natural and social environment. And, in like manner, 
 the finite interests of man's earthly existence may for a 
 time seem to leave no room for the development of the 
 religious consciousness. But if, according to the Ger- 
 man proverb, it is provided that the trees shall not 
 grow into the sky, it is equally provided that they shall 
 always grow towards it ; and the sinking of the roots 
 deeper into the soil is inevitably accompanied or fol- 
 lowed by a farther expansion of the branches. Human 
 development will belie all its past history, if the new 
 light upon man's relations to the world and to his 
 feUowmen, which science is every day bringing to us, 
 does not give occasion to a new evolution or interpre- 
 tation of the idea of God.' 
 
 To overcome an error, we must discern its partial 
 truth. In one way Mr. Spencer's view meets and 
 satisfies the religious consciousness. It was not in an 
 irreligious spirit that the friend of Job asked the 
 question, " Canst thou by searching find out God, 
 canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ? " 
 " Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, God 
 of Israel, the Saviour," said the prophet Isaiah. " Of 
 
 ^ In what has been as yet said, it will be observed that we 
 have to do only with the abstract idea of God as a principle of 
 unity in all our consciousness, not with any further conception 
 of Him such as we may afterwards meet with in special 
 religions. 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 139 
 
 Thee/' said Hooker, " our fittest eloquence is silence, 
 while we confess without confessing that Thy glory is 
 unsearchable and beyond our reach." Such utterances 
 •of the religious consciousness have sometimes been 
 used to confirm the idea that God is, in the proper 
 ■sense, v/nhnowahle. And Mansel, with a strange un- 
 ■consciousness of the meaning of his own logic, tried to 
 show that all revealed religion is founded upon that 
 doctrine. But to say that we cannot know God to 
 perfection, is only to say that we cannot know every- 
 thing ; while to say that we cannot know Him at all is 
 to say that we can know nothing. We cannot know 
 God to perfection, because we cannot know the world 
 or ourselves to perfection ; but all our knowledge is 
 based on the presence of these three inseparable 
 elements of consciousness within us, and all our know- 
 ledge is therefore a part of the knowledge of God. It 
 is true that, just because He is the light of all our 
 seeing, He can never be completely seen ; for the return 
 we make on the ultimate presupposition of our being 
 can never be a final return. It is true that "the 
 margin " of knowledge " fades for ever and for ever as 
 we move " ; but, if we might correct the metaphor, it 
 fades not hefore us merely, but also into us. We are 
 not condemned to chase a phantom which continually 
 flies before us, so that we are as near it at first as at 
 last. Bather, we are pursuing a course of self-develop- 
 ment in which we are continually realising more 
 
140 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 deeply and fully what the world, the object of all our 
 thought and action, is, and what we are, who think and 
 act upon it ; and in which, by necessary consequence, 
 we are continually learning more of God, who is the 
 ultimate unity of our own life and of the life of the 
 world. Our growing knowledge amid seeming ignor- 
 ance may perhaps be illustrated by an imperfect 
 analogy. It is sometimes said that we cannot know 
 the mind of Shakspeare, because we cannot gather to a 
 focus in one inclusive conception all the wealth of 
 thought and feeling which presents itself, when we try 
 to form an estimate of such a many-sided genius. In 
 reality, we know more of the mind of Shakspeare than 
 we know of that of many of our nearest friends ; for 
 the good reason that there is a great deal more to 
 know. In like manner, a deep sense of the impos- 
 sibility of measuring the object which goes along 
 with the idea of God — the feeling that prompts St. 
 Paul, after saying that " we know God," to correct 
 himself and add : " or rather are known of God " — 
 must always be an element in our consciousness of 
 the divine principle of unity from which all our 
 rational life proceeds and to which it tends, and to 
 the growing apprehension of which all knowledge is 
 to be regarded as a contribution. For all our diffi- 
 culties of thought and action must inevitably gather 
 to a climax in our religion, just because our reli- 
 gious view of things, if it be real and sincere, is the 
 
DUALISTIC VTEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 141 
 
 final summing up — the concentrated result — of all our 
 thought and activity. 
 
 A farther reason, why we are specially conscious 
 ■of ignorance in this sphere, may, as I have already 
 suggested, be derived from the fact that human life 
 is a process of development, and that in the order 
 of development the secular consciousness, the con- 
 sciousness of the finite world and of the concerns 
 of our finite life in it, anticipates or is prior to the 
 religious consciousness. Hence the latter passes into 
 a new phase only in order to correspond with the 
 advance and meet the difficulties of the former. 
 Thus in the secular consciousness there are continu- 
 ally arising new questions and wants, new divisions 
 of the elements of our existence against each other, 
 new conflicts of thought and will, which are im- 
 perfectly met in any solution or reconciliation given 
 as yet by religion, and which, therefore, may be said 
 to anticipate a new development of the religious idea. 
 Religion is thus constantly struggling with a growing 
 problem to which no solution is final. In this sense, 
 therefore, it is possible even for the religious man 
 to say that he does not know God, without knowledge 
 of whom, nevertheless, all his religion would be 
 baseless. And we can understand that in the violent 
 antithesis of his rhetoric, St. Augustine is uttering 
 a truth when he says that the divine Being sciendo 
 ignoratur et nesciendo cognoscitur. " When we would 
 
142 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 say we know Him, He is hid from us : when we 
 declare that we know Him not, He is revealed to us." 
 Such verbal contradiction is only a more emphatic 
 way of expressing the fact that in the religious 
 consciousness all our knowledge and all our sense 
 of its defects are concentrated in one — concentrated^ 
 just because it is in this sphere that we cease for a 
 moment to be the victims of abstraction, or to satisfy 
 ourselves with the imperfect and hypothetical modes 
 of thought which are sufficient for ordinary purposes^ 
 just because we are here in direct contact with the 
 absolute reality, which is the beginning and the end 
 of all our rational life. For where we rise most 
 dbme our finitude, there of necessity we are most 
 distinctly conscious of it. But this is something 
 very different from the consciousness of an iron 
 wall of limitation, fixed by our finite nature, behind 
 which the infinite is for ever hid from us. On the 
 contrary, it is the consciousness of a Presence within 
 and without us, which, if it makes " our mortal nature 
 tremble like a guilty thing surprised," is yet " the 
 master-light of all our seeing," and is continually 
 lifting us above the weakness of which it makes us 
 aware. Our ignorance of God is thus, in one aspect 
 of it, the effect of too much knowledge. For it is 
 simply the incapacity of rising to the idea of a unity, 
 which yet is implied in all our knowledge ; or it is 
 the incapacity which necessarily besets every growing 
 
DUALISTIC VIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 143 
 
 intelligence, of fully realising that unity amid the 
 many conflicting interests of our theoretical and 
 practical life. In either case it is consistent with 
 a conviction that man's finite existence is positively, 
 and not merely negatively, related to the infinite : 
 it is consistent with the idea that the divine is 
 "not far from any one of us," and that, indeed, 
 we can know nothing, not even ourselves, except 
 in the light of it. 
 
 While these pages are passing through the press, my atten- 
 tion has been directed (by Professor Paulsen's Einleitung in 
 die Philosophie, p. 319) to certain passages in the concluding 
 sections of Mr. Spencer's Ecclesictstical Institutions which, 
 though capable of being interpreted in conformity with the 
 view of religion given in the First Principles, yet suggest a 
 more positive idea of it. Thus in §§ 659-660, Mr. Spencer 
 argues that though " the very notions, origin, cause, and 
 purpose, are relative notions belonging to human thought, 
 which are probably irrelevant to the Ultimate Reality," yet, 
 " amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious, the 
 more they are thought about, there will remain one absolute 
 certainty, that he is ever in the presence of an Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed." This energy 
 Mr. Spencer farther characterises thus : " The last stage 
 reached," in the development of religion, "is recognition of 
 the truth that force as it exists beyond consciousness, cannot 
 be like what we know as force within consciousness ; and 
 that yet, as either is capable of generating the other, they 
 must be different modes of the same. Consequently, the final 
 outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, 
 is that the Power manifested throughout the world distinguished 
 as material, is the same Power which in ourselves weUs up 
 under the form of consciousness." In the next section, Mr. 
 
144 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Spencer goes on to say that "those who think that science 
 is dissipating religious beliefs and sentiments, seem unaware 
 that whatever of mystery is taken from the old interpretation, 
 is added to the new." Farther on in the same section he takes 
 occasion to remark that " the necessity we are under to think 
 of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives 
 rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic interpretation to the 
 Universe " ; though further thought obliges us " to recognise 
 the truth that a conception given in phenomenal manifestations 
 of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is." 
 Towards the end of the section, Mr. Spencer compares our 
 present knowledge of things to "an undeveloped musical 
 faculty which is able only to appreciate a single melody, but 
 cannot grasp the variously entangled passages of a symphony." 
 " So, by future more evolved intelligences, the course of things 
 now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible all 
 together, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that 
 of the present cultured man, as his feeling is beyond that of the 
 savage. And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but 
 rather to be increased by that analysis of knowledge which, 
 while forcing him to Agnosticism, yet continually prompts him 
 to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma which he knows 
 cannot be solved." In this passage, Mr. Spencer seems for a 
 moment to hesitate between the idea of the absolute unknow- 
 ableness of God, and the idea of an imperfection of knowledge 
 due to the conditions of an intelligence which is in course of 
 development. These statements are all so guarded that they 
 are capable of being reduced to the Dualistic and Agnostic theory 
 of the First Principles, but I think they would lose a great part 
 of their meaning if this reduction were strictly carried out. At 
 least, they show that, if Mr. Spencer still adheres to the doctrine 
 that religion is based on a consciousness of the Unknowable, yet 
 he is anxious to claim for it some of those feelings of reverential 
 awe, which are possible only towards that which we partly know 
 and, therefore, see to be worthy of our reverence. 
 
LECTUEE SIXTH. 
 
 THE IDEA OF GOD AS THE BEGINKTING AND THE END OF 
 KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Mr. Spencei's Way of Reaching the Infinite hy Abstraction — Its 
 Likeness to the Method of the Mystics — Logical Error of 
 Mysticism — Necessity of Combining Synthesis with Analysis — 
 That the Development of Knowledge is Organic, and therefore 
 at once Progressive and Regressive — The Idea of Ood as the 
 Ultimate Principle — Kcmts Three Ideas as at once the Pre- 
 gwppositions and Objects of Knowledge — That Principles are 
 not necessarily Objects of Faith as opposed to Knowledge — 
 Illustration from Ethics — Ood as the First Principle and the 
 Ultimate Object of Knowledge. 
 
 We have now considered the main elements of Mr. 
 Spencer's view of religion, and of the relations of the 
 religious idea to experience. We have seen that in his 
 view, the essence of religion lies in a ' consciousness ' ' 
 of the infinite which can never become knowledge, 
 and that, on the other hand, what we call knowledge \ 
 is for him a double consciousness of the finite which ^ 
 can never be brought into harmony with itself. The 
 finite is thus supposed to be presented to us in two 
 independent modes of inner and outer experience, 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
146 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 which confront each other in irreconcilable opposition, 
 so that it is impossible either to reduce one of them 
 to the other, or to explain both as the forms of a 
 higher principle. In opposition to this view, I endea- 
 voured to show that the two modes of finite experience 
 of which Mr. Spencer speaks, the consciousness of the 
 objective world and the consciousness of our own sub- 
 jective life, are essentially related to each other ; and, 
 indeed, that neither of them has any meaning or con- 
 tent apart from this relation. Consequently, every 
 step we make in the knowledge of either is a step in 
 the knowledge of the other, and also of the principle 
 of unity which is presupposed in both. Thus our 
 intelligence — as indeed is implied in its being a sdf- 
 conseious intelligence — moves in a continual cycle; and 
 all the knowledge it can gain either in the experience 
 of the outer or of the inner life, must ultimately cast 
 new light upon the principle from which it starts. 
 God, or the infinite, is the presupposition of all our 
 rational life, and, therefore, the knowledge of God is 
 the final goal to which it tends. 
 
 In order to give a little further illustration to this 
 theme, which is of fundamental importance in the 
 philosophy of religion, it may be useful again to call 
 attention to the defect in Mr. Spencer's method which 
 leads him to an opposite result, and makes him regard 
 the infinite, which he acknowledges to be the presup- 
 position of all knowledge, as in itself unknowable. 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 147 
 
 Mr. Spencer, as I have already pointed out, accepts 
 the principle of Spinoza that " determination is nega- 
 tion." Under the conditions of human thought, it is 
 impossible to determine what anything is, except by 
 the negative process of distinguishing it from other 
 things, i.e. of saying what it is not; and a negative 
 process, as Mr. Spencer thinks, is necessarily one 
 which is always carrying us farther and farther away 
 from the positive nature, or real being of things 
 Hence it follows that, in order to reach that reaUty 
 which is without negation, that absolutely real being 
 which is beyond and beneath all other being, we 
 must invert this process and get rid of those deter- 
 minations that hide it from us. Our regress upon 
 the infinite is thus a process of abstraction, in which 
 we strip away all the determinations of the finite ; 
 and the infinite upon which regress is made is 
 simply the pure ' being,' the abstraction of bare posi- 
 tion or affirmation, which remains when we have taken 
 away all distinction and relation from its simple unity 
 with itself. As in the dawn of Greek philosophy the ' 
 Eleatics reduced the content of philosophy to the 
 simple principle that ' all is one,' — as if, in the all- 
 embracing intuition of the whole, every difference was 
 lost or submerged ; so Mr. Spencer lets every distinc- 
 tion of the finite, even the last distinction of self and 
 not-self, drop away, and rests in the emptiness of the 
 infinite, as if it alone were the reality of all realities. 
 
148 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Now we should scarcely have expected to find Saul 
 among the prophets, or an apostle of modern science 
 among the mystics. But the great error of mysticism 
 was just this, that it thought to reach the deepest 
 reality, the absolute truth of things, by the via, 
 negativa, the way of abstraction and negation ; in 
 other words, that it tried to approach the infinite by 
 turning its back upon the finite, and not by seeking 
 more thoroughly to understand the finite. Hence the 
 mystics supposed that the highest idea — that which 
 comes closest to the truth of things — must necessarily 
 be that which has least content ; and they treated pure 
 being, the simplest of aU abstractions, as representing 
 something more real than is to be found in any 
 specific form of existence. To them, this simplest 
 of all thoughts seemed to have a depth of mysterious 
 significance which no other thought could claim ; and 
 when they were baffled in the effort to fathom this 
 self-made mystery, they immediately proceeded to ex- 
 plain their failure by the limitations of the human 
 mind, and the unsearchableness of God. In truth, 
 they were " seeking the living among the dead." The 
 astronomer who denied the existence of God, because 
 he had swept the heavens with his telescope and had 
 not been able to find Him, was a wise man compared 
 with those who supposed that He was hidden in the 
 emptiest of all our ideas, and who blamed the weak- 
 ness of their mental vision, because they could not 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 149 
 
 find Him there. For, of a truth, there is no mystery 
 of any kind in the idea of ' being ' in the abstract, 
 (axeft its abstractness, i.e.. its imperfection. But this 
 imperfection or incompleteness is such, that, whenever , 
 we think of it, we are forced to go beyond it, and to 
 give it some farther determination or characterisation, 
 in order that we may bring it nearer to our thought. 
 Strained to this extreme of abstraction, our thought 
 springs back like a bent bow, and seeks to fill up the 
 void with matter. But this means not that ' pure 
 being ' is incomprehensible, but rather that it is only 
 too easily comprehensible : not, indeed, as an independ- 
 ent reality which is complete in itself, but as an element 
 in a greater whole, which we may distinguish but can- 
 not separate from its other elements. To attempt to 
 fix it in abstraction is therefore to deprive it of what- 
 ever meaning it has. And to complain that when 
 we have thus isolated it, we cannot discover in it the 
 fulness of reality — which we naturally expect the 
 highest principle of thought and reality to possess — 
 or to blame the human mind for its incapacity to see 
 such fulness in it, is to shut our eyes and complain 
 that darkness is not visible. It is not the weak- 
 ness, but the strength of the intelligence that prevents 
 it from treating a part as if it were a whole, a relative 
 term as if it existed apart from everything else. 
 
 And this leads me to say that the error of mysti- 
 cism — the supposition that the via negativa, the way 
 
150 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of abstraction, will lead to the highest truth, or 
 indeed to any truth at all — is one of the most perni- 
 cious errors in philosophy. Abstraction or analysis 
 is an element in scientific method, but taken by 
 itself it will produce nothing but a mere external 
 arrangement of things by genera and species — what 
 is called in Logic a 'tree of Porphyry,' the tree that 
 of all others best realises the nursery rhyme: "This 
 is the tree that never grew." Only in so far as the 
 comparison of many facts enables us to detect in 
 them a principle of unity which dominates all their 
 difference and explains it, can abstraction lead to any 
 valuable result. The abstracting or analytic process, 
 by which unity is separated /toto difference, is nothing 
 without the synthetic process, by which unity is dis- 
 cerned in difference, as the principle which at once 
 originates and overcomes it. The true method, there- 
 fore, is a method which combines analysis and syn- 
 thesis in one, and which moves forward by a per- 
 petual systole-diastole, at once towards a higher unity 
 of thought and towards a more complete determination 
 and articulation of all the facts embraced under it. 
 It is, as Mr. Spencer himself has done much to show, 
 a process both of differentiation and of integration ; and 
 its aim is to make knowledge not merely a system, 
 but an organic system, in which every part is seen 
 in its due relation to the other parts, because it is 
 seen to be determined by the one principle which 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 151 
 
 gives life to the whole. In this process abstraction 
 and analysis have undoubtedly a great part to play: 
 for what science and philosophy want is to rise 
 from the particular to the universal ; or, in other 
 words, to reduce to one simple explanation many 
 facts which previously have lain scattered and un- 
 related. But this simplification is valuable only be- 
 cause it enables us to see our way through many 
 details and complexities which have hitherto resisted 
 all the efforts of our thought, but which become pliant 
 and intelligible to him who has grasped the law of 
 their variation. If, after we have reached such a 
 universal or law, such a simple explanation of many 
 complex phenomena, we are sometimes at liberty- to 
 dismiss many of the particular details from our 
 memory, and to regard ourselves as possessing in 
 the law the substance and kernel of them all, this 
 is only because in the law we have a clue to guide 
 us to the particulars which at any time it may seem 
 necessary to verify. For the claim of any law or 
 principle to be regarded as representing the truth 
 of things in a higher degree than any of the par- 
 ticulars that fall under it, lies not in its abstractness, 
 but rather in its concreteness, i.e. in the fact that 
 it is the brief abstract or quintessence of many par- 
 ticulars ; that, in short, it is the fertile source to which 
 may be traced, and by which may be explained, not 
 only the particular effects whence our first knowledge 
 
152 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of it was derived, but an indefinite number of other 
 effects which were not at first present to us. 
 
 Now all this has a definite application to our 
 subject. For, if it be true that the necessary 
 method of our thought is synthetic as well as ana- 
 lytic, that, in other words, its object is to bring many 
 particulars to a focus in one thought, and so to 
 detect the one simple principle that underlies aU 
 their difference, then the universal, the one in the 
 many, cannot be taken as a mere product of our 
 own mind, but must be regarded as the most real 
 of all things, and indeed as the source of all other 
 reality. And this must above all apply to the object 
 of religion, which Mr. Spencer calls by the name of 
 the infinite. If the infinite, as he maintains, is the 
 ultimate unity to which all things must be referred, 
 and if the consciousness of it underlies all our know- 
 ledge, it cannot be right to take it as an empty abstrac- 
 tion or generality, which in itself is indeterminate and 
 incapable in any way of determining itself. If our 
 consciousness is necessarily one with itself in all its 
 difference, and if the factors that make it up, the ob- 
 jective and the subjective consciousness, are necessarily 
 bound together, so that one of them cannot be con- 
 ceived without the other, then the idea which, as Mr. 
 Spencer confesses, is the keystone of this unity, the 
 principle that makes it one consciousness, cannot be 
 'empty and indeterminate. On the contrary, as it is 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 153 
 
 implied in all our other consciousness, and as it is that 
 which gives unity to all our other consciousness, so it 
 must be the most fertile of all principles — that by 
 which aU other principles must ultimately be ex- 
 plained, and without reference to which, no other ex- 
 planation can finally satisfy us. Just because it is 
 the primary truth upon which all our intellectual 
 and practical life is built, it must be that which' 
 casts light upon everything, and upon which every-/ 
 thing reflects back light. If it is the most universal 
 of ideas, it must at the same time be the one which is 
 fuUest of meaning and that which, indeed, is continu- 
 ally fertile of new meanings ; for its universality means 
 not merely that it excludes nothing, but that it in- 
 cludes and explains everything. In a sense such a 
 universal may be beyond knowledge ; not, however, 
 because it is too vague and general for definite 
 thought, but for the opposite reason, that it is m- 
 exhaiistiUe. It hides itself, if at all, not in dark-1 
 ness but in light. It is the ground on which we 
 stand, the atmosphere which surrounds us, the light 
 by which we see and the heaven that shuts us in. 
 It is not only in all, but to all, and through alL 
 
 "Intra cuncta nee inelustis. 
 Extra euncta nee exelumis.'' 
 
 But, just for that reason, everything we know is a 
 contribution to the knowledge of it, and nothing can 
 be really known apart from it. For if it be true that 
 
154 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 our intelligence is organic, it cannot grow but by the 
 evolution of its first principle, and every differentiation 
 of its organs and functions must bring with it, or after 
 it, a new integration ; which in this case means a 
 deepening knowledge of the principle itself. 
 
 Perhaps I may make this point a little clearer 
 by saying that the growth of knowledge, and the 
 development of our intelligence that goes with it, 
 is at once a 'progressive, and a regressive process. By 
 this I mean that the effort which gives rise to all 
 science and philosophy — to find the unity of law 
 under the difference of facts, and the unity of a 
 higher principle under the difference of laws — is an 
 effort to verify and realise in detail that which, by our 
 nature as rational beings, we practically assume from 
 the first. The earliest writer who pointed definitely 
 to this view, though he did not fully express it, was 
 Kant. Kant said that the impulse which stimulates 
 us to seek knowledge, and the principle that guides 
 us in acquiring it, are both ultimately due to three 
 ideas bound up with all our consciousness — the ideas 
 of the world, the self, and God. These ideas are the 
 first presuppositions of our intelligence, and at the 
 same time they mark out the highest ends at which 
 that intelligence can aim. We assume, to begin 
 with, the unity of the world in all the diversity of 
 its phenomena, or rather we go upon the tacit as- 
 sumption of it; for even to the most uncultured in- 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 155 
 
 telligence it is one world, in one space and one 
 time. Yet to demonstrate the unity of the world, 
 to exhibit the necessary interconnexion of all its 
 changing phases, the reciprocal relations of all its 
 parts and laws, is the last goal of science. We 
 assume, again, the identity of the self through all 
 its various and constantly changing stream of thoughts 
 and feelings ; for no rational being can think of 
 there being more than one self, one centre of con- 
 sciousness within him. The very conception of a 
 "varied many-coloured self," as Kant once put it, 
 i.e. of a self which is not an absolute unity through 
 all the diversity of its experience, would involve a 
 scepticism fatal to all thought or knowledge. Yet 
 to work out this apparently simple presupposition of 
 all our life — to show the identity of the self as 
 realised in all the diversity of its powers, and main- 
 tained through aU the changes of its intellectual 
 and moral history — is the never perfectly attained 
 goal of all psychology. Lastly, the iutercourse of 
 the soul with the world always presupposes an 
 ultimate unity, a principle which is revealed in all 
 their difference and which overcomes it; and the 
 consciousness of this unity has underlain all the 
 religious life of man in all ages. Yet to make 
 intelligible in detail the complete correlation of the 
 inner and the outer life, and to show how the ever 
 renewed conflict and reconciliation of the self and 
 
156 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the world become the means to the realisation of 
 that principle of unity, which is continually working 
 in both, would be to attain the highest aim of all 
 Philosophy and Theology ; it would be to perfect 
 religion and bring it to complete self-consciousness. 
 These ideas are thus at once the beginning and 
 the end of our rational life. At first, therefore, they 
 are rather presupposed than distinctly thought of or 
 expressed : or, at least, the thought and expression of 
 them are for a long time very inadequate and incom- 
 plete. At first, they seem too near to man, to be in 
 any proper sense known to him. Just because they 
 are one with the very existence of his intelligence, 
 he takes them for granted without thinking of them, 
 or believes in them on evidence which is altogether 
 insufficient. He accepts them without criticism, in 
 any shape in which they may be presented to him, 
 and without discerning their real character and mean- 
 ing. Yet from the first they show their presence 
 in his spirit by the efforts which they force him 
 to make, to discover some kind of self-consistent 
 explanation of his life and of the world in which he 
 lives, and to connect both with some power which 
 he represents as divine. It is, however, only through 
 a long process of development that the influence of 
 these ideas makes itself felt in restraining and guid- 
 ing the wayward movement of phantasy, by which 
 the first naive answer is given to the questions of 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 157 
 
 the immature intelligence. And a still longer pro- 
 cess is necessary before such imaginative solutions 
 of imperfectly conceived problems caij give place to 
 definite canons of scientific method, and definite 
 efforts of philosophic reflexion, to grasp the ultimate 
 truths of reason. Yet every step toward the con- 
 ception of the world or of any part of it as a 
 system, every step toward the comprehension of the 
 unity of the intelligence in all the variety of its 
 activities, every step toward a rational view of the 
 relation between the intelligence and the intelligible 
 world, is a step toward the verification and, in an 
 etymological sense, the demonstration of the principles 
 of unity presupposed in the whole process. The 
 process of knowledge is therefore, as has been said, 
 at once a progressive and a regressive process. It is 
 an advance towards a completer synthesis of the ever 
 increasing multiplicity of phenomena which are pre- 
 sented to us in experience, and at the same time it 
 is a new return upon the principle or principles of 
 unity which are presupposed even in the simplest 
 perception of these phenomena. Thus every move- 
 ment of scientific or philosophic synthesis, as it is 
 the reduction of a manifold to a simple form, is 
 the recovery of the unity of the intelligence out of the 
 dispersion of facts; and it is therefore a practical 
 verification of the presumption of unity involved in 
 our first apprehension of them. In advancing towards 
 
158 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 a completer view of things, in bringing more and more 
 of the facts of the universe within his thought, man is 
 not, so to speak, losing himself in the object, or taking 
 into his mind an alien matter: he is only providing 
 the appropriate nutriment for his growing intelligence. 
 For the facts which he appropriates in know- 
 ledge are by the same process transmuted into the 
 substance of the mind that grasps them, and so 
 become the means to the development of the ideas 
 which constitute it as a mind. Thus all experience is 
 a process by which we discover what is really meant 
 in, or implied by, the consciousness of the world, 
 of self, and of God — the three ideas which, in their 
 unity and difference, form the circle within which our 
 spiritual life always revolves. 
 
 A farther light may be cast on this subject, if we 
 bring it into connexion with a familiar controversy 
 in relation to the first principles of knowledge. Mr. 
 Spencer's assertion that the absolute or infinite is un- 
 knowable, though the idea of it is presupposed in all 
 other knowledge, may remind us of the old argument 
 of the sceptics that the principles of knowledge must 
 be matters of faith, because we cannot go beyond them 
 / or explain them by anything else. We cannot, it was 
 I argued, Icnow the principles of knowledge, as we know 
 other things by their means. We explain facts by 
 tracing them to other facts as their causes, but how 
 can we ask for any cause for the principle of causality 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 159 
 
 itself? We can say that there must be a reason for 
 any consequent, but how can we speak of a reason for 
 our requirement of reasons ? The effort to prove the 
 principles of knowledge seems necessarily to involve a 
 petitio principii. Hence it is not unnaturally main- 
 tained that these principles are unknowable, and that 
 the intelligence, which in all its action is guided by 
 them, can never turn upon them or seek for any 
 evidence for their truth. 
 
 Now there is an answer which has been sometimes 
 given to this objection, and which is good so far as it 
 goes, but not, I think, quite satisfactory. It may be 
 said — it is already said by Aristotle — that the prin- 
 ciples of knowledge cannot be less truly known than 
 what we apprehend by means of them. The old lady 
 who, being afraid that an insecure bridge would break 
 down under her, got herself carried over in a sedan 
 chair, might give a lesson to those who think that 
 what is known through a principle can be better 
 known than the principle itself The principles of 
 knowledge are not like the tortoise which supports 
 the world, but which requires something else to sup- 
 port itself For there is no space beneath them into 
 which anything could fall. By the very nature of the 
 case they are the boundaries of the intelligible uni- 
 verse. If we cannot know them, it is only in the 
 sense in which we cannot see light, because there is 
 nothing else than light to see it by. If Diogenes 
 
160 THE E VOL UTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 used a lamp at noon-day, at least it was not to seek 
 for the sun. The proof of the principles of knowledge 
 can only be what Kant called a "transcendental de- 
 duction," i.e. it can only be a regressive argument 
 which shows that every other truth depends upon 
 them, and must be proved by means of them. All 
 experience goes on the assumption of them, whether 
 that assumption be made consciously or unconsciously; 
 and, if ihey are not true, there is nothing true. Ko 
 argument from fact can possibly be brought against 
 that on which all facts rest. But as little can a direct 
 argument for them be based on any fact. The sceptic 
 is to be refuted only by showing that there is no place 
 left on which he can erect his batteries. 
 
 This reply is good so far as it goes ; but it is not 
 quite satisfactory. For it would naturally lead to a 
 conception of the process of knowledge as twofold in 
 character ; as consisting, on the one hand, in a process 
 of reasoning hoick to certain principles, and, on the 
 other hand, in a process of using these principles to 
 connect facts, and so reasoning forward by means of 
 them to new results. On this view the method of 
 fhilosophy, which seeks to establish first principles, 
 ; would be essentially different from the method of 
 science, which seeks, on the basis of these principles, 
 to determine the relations of phenomena to each 
 other. Knowledge would be imaged to us as a 
 line with a fixed beginning and no end. Before 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 161 
 
 US would lie an infinite series of results which 
 we might go on gradually bringing within the sphere 
 of our knowledge, but behind us would lie only 
 certain simple principles, and perhaps finally only one 
 principle, of which we could learn nothing more after 
 we had once apprehended its meaning. Now this idea 
 of knowledge is, I think, based on a false analogy. 
 For every increase in our knowledge, at the same time 
 that it opens to us a new prospect, and brings within 
 our view a new field of experience, also throws new 
 light upon the meaning of the first principles on which 
 science is based. Aspice, respice, prospice. Every 
 advance in scientific knowledge, while it involves a 
 new comprehension of the facts present to us in our i 
 experience, involves also, as has often been remarked, 
 a prophecy of the future. But, moreover — what 
 has been less often considered — it involves a retro- 
 spect, or as Plato called it a reminiscence, of some- 
 thing that has been from the beginning. This 
 reminiscence is, however, no mere recollection; for 
 it enables us to see the meaning of the past in a 
 way we did not see it while we were in it ; in other 
 words, it supplies us with a new interpretation of the 
 principles on which we have all along been proceeding. 
 Hence the true image of our growing knowledge of 
 the world and of ourselves is to be found in the 
 development of a germ, which shows what is in 
 itself the more fully and clearly the more material 
 
 VOL. I. L 
 
162 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 it assimilates from the outward world, and which, 
 while adapting itself to its environment, is continually 
 increasing the sphere of its own life. What is implied 
 in an advance of science is not merely that we derive 
 new conclusions from old premises, or that we reduce 
 new facts under the same old principles, but that we 
 come to see the old principles themselves under a new 
 aspect, just because we go back upon them from a 
 widened view of the world. Why do we count a 
 knowledge of the particular laws of nature higher and 
 more valuable than a knowledge of the facts that fall 
 under them ? It is not only because it gives us a clearer 
 apprehension of these facts and a greater command 
 over them, but also because these laws stand nearer 
 to the highest principles of our thought, and throw 
 a more direct light upon them. Thus, all the know- 
 ledge of particular causes which we acquire, is a 
 contribution towards a better knowledge of the 
 principle of causality, and of its place in relation 
 to other principles as an explanation of reality ; 
 and ultimately every discovery of a special law of 
 causation has its main value in throwing light on this 
 higher problem. For, indeed, the settlement of this 
 problem means nothing less than the determination of 
 the limit, if there be a limit, to the mechanical view 
 of the world. 
 
 I This truth, *.«. that the highest end of a science is 
 i the developed knowledge of its principle, may be 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 163 
 
 further illustrated by reference to the science of ethics. 
 For, as Socrates showed, there are certain primary 
 conceptions involved in all our moral judgments ; and 
 these conceptions when analysed resolve themselves 
 into different aspects of the idea of a summum ionum 
 or highest end, for which all rational beings exist and 
 act. Now all our effort to comprehend the facts of the 
 moral life is useful mainly as it helps us to develop 
 this idea, and to bring to a clearer consciousness all 
 the elements that are contained in it. Thus, the ' 
 science of morals returns upon the principle which is 
 involved in the moral consciousness, and its highest j 
 value is just that it enables us to define that principle. 
 Its advance is a cyclical movement, which yet is not a 
 circulus vitiosus, because the circle is a complete one, 
 that does not leave outside of it any fact with which 
 morals is concerned ; but a mind that has consciously 
 traversed the circle stands in an entirely new attitude^ 
 to the principle, and may be said to possess it in 
 quite a different sense from one that has not done so. 
 Although, therefore, the process proves nothing outside 
 of itself, yet it is a real development of thought ; and 
 this, of itself, is the highest kind of proof of the 
 principle in which the development begins and ends. 
 
 Now this truth has its highest application in rela- 
 tion to the idea of God, as the principle of unity in all 
 consciousness; especially if we consider that idea in 
 connexion with the subordinate ideas of self and not- 
 
164 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 self, which constitute its primary difference. In one 
 sense, the boundaries of knowledge remain always the 
 same; for the identity of the self, the manifoldness 
 of the world, and the principle of unity-in-difference 
 which manifests itself in both — these three ideas, in 
 their opposition to, and their connexion with each 
 other — form a circle from which thought can never 
 escape. But, in another sense, each and all of these 
 ideas are new in every age, not only because new 
 material is continually being brought within the circle 
 so described, but because the assimilation of that ma- 
 terial is at the same time the process by which the 
 nature of the circle becomes manifested, and its bound- 
 aries ever more clearly defined. Thus the permanence 
 of the three great limiting ideas by which our whole 
 life, theoretical and practical, is governed, does not ex- 
 clude the vicissitudes of a long process of development, 
 in which each of them takes into itself the most varied 
 content, and becomes in a sense transformed by assimi- 
 lating it. But the transformation is always organic, 
 always held within the limits of the identity of one 
 life ; and its last result is therefore only a more ade- 
 quate consciousness of the meaning and relative value 
 of the ideas by which it was guided and stimulated in 
 all its progress. Thus what, in one point of view, are 
 the starting points and first presuppositions of know- 
 ledge, are in another point of view to be regarded as the 
 ultimate truths in which the whole process of knowing 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 165 
 
 finds its terminus. We cannot say a single rational ,, 
 word without expressing or implying a principle of I 
 unity which manifests itself in and through the difference 
 of self and the world ; and the utmost goal of all our 
 knowledge, nay, we may say of our whole rational life^ 
 is to discover what is contained in that principle.' 
 Sdf, Not-self, God — these three ideas — mark out the 
 sphere within which the movement of our spirits is 
 confined ; and all that we can attain by the utmost 
 effort of our spirits is to realise a little more clearly 
 what we mean by the Self, by the Not-self and by 
 God. 
 
 The general result of what has just been said 
 is that the process of knowledge is not the mechanical 
 building' up"" of" a structure upon foundations that 
 are once for all fixed and secure, but that it is the 
 development of a germ which never adds anything 
 to itself without transubstantiating it or changing 
 ~it into its own form; and which turns the outward 
 conditions of its environment, even those that seem at 
 first to be most unfavourable, into an opportunity for 
 ""the exercise of its own powers, and the expression of its 
 own life. , But such development involves a contiuual 
 new return upon itself, upon the principle of unity 
 that was hid in the germ, so that in all its expansion 
 it may be said to be only becoming more truly itself. 
 
 Now what is the germ in this case, in the case of 
 the conscious or rational life of man ? It is obviously 
 
166 THE ^VOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 nothing else than the principle of unity which shows 
 itself in the opposition and connexion in all the conflict 
 and reconciliation of self and not-self; and that, as 
 we have seen, is just whkt is implied in the idea of 
 God. Of course, as I have already repeated more than 
 once, it is not meant that all religion, or indeed any 
 religion which is not reflective, is clearly or fully 
 conscious of this. The meaning is that it is the 
 presence of this unity in all our consciousness of 
 objects and of ourselves, which contiauaUy lifts men 
 above the finite, or forces them to seek for some- 
 thing stronger, higher, better, something which con- 
 trasts with immediate reality and is regarded as more 
 real than it. It is only the presence of the unity, the 
 totality, the infinite, in man's consciousness that can 
 awaken even a suspicion of the imperfect, the limited, 
 the partial character of his finite existence. But if 
 this infinite, as Mr. Spencer rightly holds, is the 
 beginning of consciousness, the presupposition of 
 everything else, if it is for us the first principle of all 
 knowing and being, then, by the very nature of the 
 case, it must be also the last principle of which all 
 our existence and all the existence of the world to 
 which we belong, is the manifestation, and of which 
 all our thought and science is the interpretation. In 
 this sense it is no mere pious metaphor, but a simple 
 expression of the facts to say, that aU our life is a 
 journey from God to God, and that in Him we live 
 
GOD AS THE END OF KNOWLEDGE. 1C7 
 
 and move and have our being. All our secular con- 
 sciousness can only be the explication or, if we prefer 
 the Spencerian word, the differentiation, of the primi- 
 tive unity presupposed alike in consciousness and self- 
 consciousness, and all that it can achieve by its 
 activity is, so to speak, to furnish materials for the 
 religious consciousness. In other words, the results 
 of the process must be ultimately reinterpreted in the 
 light of the unity which they presuppose ; and they 
 cannot but remain imperfect and abstract till they 
 have received this reinterpretation. Let us state as 
 broadly as we please the facts of man's ignorance, his 
 error, or his sin ; let us darken as we please the pic- 
 ture of his thoughtlessness, his immersion in the finite, 
 his sensuality that enslaves him to the world, his 
 vanity that shuts him up in himself — and we cannot 
 easily exaggerate any one of these things — yet it is not 
 for a moment to be supposed that he can escape from 
 God, or cease to live in Him. How the divine unity 
 can be consistent with the free play of the life of man 
 may be a hard problem, but in our anxiety about its 
 solution, let us not forget the conditions of the pro- 
 blem itself. Man is free, in so far as he is free, just 
 hecause he partakes of the divine nature, i.e. because 
 he cannot be conscious of himself except in relation to 
 God ; and if he could cut the bond of union, neither 
 the consciousness nor the problem of freedom could 
 exist for him at aU. To see all things in God is thus 
 
168 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 not the pious dream of an idealist philosophy. In 
 what other light could we see them, but either that of 
 the unity which is the light of all our seeing, or of 
 some principle which is a secondary consequence of 
 that unity ? To act with God as our end may seem 
 to be a rare and exceptional thing, but in so far as He 
 is the end which is beyond all other ends, and in so 
 far as the satisfaction of the self that is within us can 
 only be found in the attainment of this absolute end, 
 we may fairly say that all action is ultimately a seek- 
 ing for God. As Plato said, there is no man who 
 does not desire the good, and is not unwillingly 
 deprived of it. As St. Augustine said : " Thou hast 
 made us for Thyself, and our souls are ever restless 
 tiU they rest in Thee." 
 
LECTUEE SEVENTH. 
 
 THE MAIN STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF EELIGION. 
 
 Analysis of the Idea of Evolution — How the Ideas of Identity 
 and Difference, Permanence and Change, are combined in it — 
 Two Questions as to the Method of Evolution : (1) How the 
 Eeligious Consciousness Develops out of the Consciousness 
 of the Vuate— Priority of the Objective to the Subjective 
 Consciousness, and of both to the Consciousness of God — Sow 
 far the Different Forms of Consciousness are Separable or 
 reciprocally Exclusive — Criticism of Ooeth^s View of this 
 Question — (2) What are the Stages in the Development of 
 the Eeligious Consciousness itself — What is meant by Objec- 
 tive, Subjective, and Absolute or Universal Religion. 
 
 The last lecture has brought us to an important 
 turning point in our argument. According to the 
 definition previously given, the idea of God\ in its 
 purest germinal form — the form which is at the root 
 of all the other forms of it — is the idea of the unity 
 presupposed in aU the_ differences of the finite, espe- 
 cially the difference of self and not-self, of inner and 
 outer experience. But if this be assumed, we are 
 necessarily led to regard that idea, not only as the 
 beginning or first presupposition, but also as the end 
 
170 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 or last interpretation of our lives. It cannot be one 
 of these without being the other. The first principle 
 which is involved in all our consciousness of things 
 and of ourselves, must needs also be that in the know- 
 ledge of which all our other knowledge culminates. 
 If all our divided consciousness of the finite be only 
 the differentiation of the primal unity of the infinite, 
 then it is obvious that we cannot fully understand 
 the finite till we have carried it back to that unity 
 again. As our life is organic, so our knowledge is 
 not to be represented as an edifice built on definite 
 foundations, which remain beneath it and support it 
 but are not visible in its structure. Kather we must 
 regard it as the development of a germinal principle, 
 which is continually revealing itself more fully in all 
 that arises out of it, and which therefore finds in its 
 own results at once its evidence and its definition. 
 We cannot understand the life of reason in us except 
 as a process in which every step throws new light not 
 only on the objects of the intelligible world, but also 
 upon the intelligence that knows it, and so upon the 
 principle of unity that manifests itself in both. Un- 
 less in this sense God is knowable, nothing can be 
 knowable. If, therefore, we admit that we cannot 
 know God, it can only be in the sense that the con- 
 / sciousness of Him is gradually realising itself in our 
 progressive intelligence, and that the process whereby 
 we come to see things in their relation to God is 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 171 
 
 never complete. In religion our ' highest faith ' and 
 our ' deepest doubt ' meet together, not because the 
 idea of God is empty, but because in it are concen- 
 trated all the problems of our life ; but for that very 
 reason it is only in it that they can meet with a final 
 solution. 
 
 If, however, we adopt this view as to the nature of 
 religion and its relation to the other elements of our 
 consciousness, we are immediately brought face to face 
 with another problem. We have to ask what is the 
 law or method of the development of religion. As a 
 preparation for the solution of this problem, however, 
 it is necessary in the first place to call attention to 
 some elements in the idea of development to which we 
 have not as yet referred. Development is a process 
 which it is difficult to describe in logically consistent 
 language, because in it difference and unity interpene- 
 trate each other so closely and inextricably. Look at it 
 in one way, and we might say that a developing being 
 never changes. He is the same from the beginning to 
 the end of the process of his life ; for aU his changes 
 are conceived as the farther manifestation of his identity, 
 and he can admit into his being no element which is not 
 in some v/ay brought under that identity. Look at it in 
 another way, and we might say that his existence is 
 all change, and even that his changes are so complete 
 that there is nothing in him which remains unaltered. 
 For such a being is an organism ; and just so far as 
 
172 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 he is so, the change of any element in his being neces- 
 sarily involves the correlative change of all the other 
 elements. Like Wordsworth's cloud, he "moveth 
 altogether if he move at all." Hence, of his changes 
 we might say that, more than any other kinds of 
 change, they are revolutions, transitions in which 
 " old things pass away and all things are made new." 
 The explanation of this verbal contradiction is, how- 
 ever, not far to seek. It lies just in this that the 
 attempt to bring the facts of development under such 
 inadequate categories as those of bare permanence or 
 bare change, necessarily leads to a kind of dissection 
 of the idea, which is its destruction. The alteration 
 which is involved in development, is not a superficial 
 change in the qualities of some permanent substratum 
 which remains substantially unaltered beneath it : 
 nor is the identity which is preserved through change 
 merely a capacity for the reproduction of the same 
 quality (in a thing which meantime has shown other 
 qualities) so soon as the original conditions are re- 
 stored. Development is a _process in which identity 
 manifests itself just in change, and returns upon itseK 
 just hy means of change. It is, in the language often 
 used by Mr. Spencer, a process of differentiation and 
 integration, i.e. it is a movement into difference from 
 a unity which is never lost in that difference, but 
 which holds its elements together even in their 
 extremest antagonism, and which therefore in the 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 173 
 
 end restores itself in a higher form just by means 
 of that antagonism. Expressed in the set meta- 
 physical terms of Hegel, what any life or process 
 of development shows us is a Universal which 
 manifests itself in the opposition and relation of 
 particulars, and which just through that opposition 
 and relation, realises itself as an individual whole. 
 This idea has sonietimes~been thought a very mys- 
 terious one, because, though we are familiar enough 
 with illustrations of it, exact analysis betrays in it a 
 complexity which we do not ordinarily recognise in 
 those illustrations. Hence we are tempted to get rid 
 of the difficulty by reducing development to some 
 idea that is simpler and easier to grasp. But, if we 
 insist on explaining development by no higher category 
 than that of physical causation, or by the external 
 
 '"-atjtioffand reaction of independent substances, it will 
 necessarily become mysterious ; for such explanations 
 will always leave an unexplained residuum, an element 
 which escapes from the grasp of our method, and 
 presents^ itself at the end as a problem with which it 
 
 "cannot deal. 
 
 Yet, in one sense, the idea of development is of all 
 ideas that which ought to be most intelligible, illustrated 
 as it is by the very nature of our intelligence, and by 
 the whole course of its life. For, while self-consciousness 
 is in one way the very simplest thing we know, the very 
 type of simplicity and transparent self-identity, and we 
 
174 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 could scarcely find any better word to express clear- 
 ness of evidence than to say, " This is as certain and 
 evident to me as that I am I " ; yet in this apparently 
 simple unity, the diversity of all the mighty world is 
 
 ' mirrored. In the consciousness of self we have subject 
 and^ object as essentially diverse, and yet essentially 
 identical, and every movement of the life of a self- 
 conscious being is a movement out into what seems an 
 irreconcilable difference, and back into unity again. 
 
 jThe the.oretical and practical life of this apparently 
 simple unit is one in which it continually goes out of 
 itself to that which is most opposed to it; yet in all its 
 travels it never meets with anything from which it 
 cannot return to itself; it never wanders so far that it 
 is not with a moment's self -recollection at home. And 
 all that it finds in its wanderings it can make part of 
 itself, and weave into the web of its own life. If, 
 therefore, the idea of organic development seems, when 
 we analyse it, to be very complex ; if it even, on 
 the first view of it, appears to contain an insoluble 
 contradiction, this is not because it is something far 
 from us, but rather for the opposite reason, that 
 the greatest of all illustrations of it is so near to 
 us that its complexity is hidden from us, and its unity 
 is apt to be regarded as mere self-identity. The inner 
 life of the intelligence is like a sea whose trans- 
 parency hides from us its depth. Hence we are more 
 apt to recognise the full bearing of the idea of de- 
 
ST A GES IN THA T E VOL UTION. 175 
 
 velopment in less adequate but more palpable illustra- 
 tions of it. Thus, e.g. we are familiar with the fact 
 of history that the most highly developed civilisation 
 is that in which there is the greatest division of 
 labour, and at the same time the greatest unity and 
 co-operation ; and it is not difficult to see that one 
 of these could not exist without the other. We are 
 also familiar with the fact that the highest animal 
 is that which has the greatest variety of organs, and 
 passes through the greatest variety of changes, and 
 which, nevertheless, through all this difference and 
 change remains one with itself, so that its whole life is 
 the expression of one principle. And, if we recognise 
 man as higher than any other animal, it is because, by 
 the variety of his perceptions and of the powers of his 
 intelligence, he has the most extensive and manifold 
 experience of the world, while yet the unity of his 
 consciousness is able to reduce all this experience into 
 the continuity of one life. In each of these cases, 
 therefore, we are able clearly to see that,d^Y§lQES§St_ 
 is a process at j>n ce of d ifferentiation and integration, 
 i.e. that it is a process in which difference continually 
 increases, not at the expense of unity, but in such 
 a way that the unity also is deepened. 
 
 Now, when we attempt to use the idea of develop- 
 ment, in the sense in which we have analysed it, 
 as a key to the history of religion, we find that the 
 problem we have to solve takes two forms, which 
 
176 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 we cannot entirely separate, but which it is necessary 
 to distinguish. In the jirst place, we have to ask how_ 
 the religious consciousness develops out of the con- 
 sciousness of the finite or in connexion with it. - And 
 in t6e~seKm^"place, we have to ask howJihe-religi ous 
 consciousness itself advances from one form to another, 
 from the lowest awe of the supernatural which we can 
 call a religion, to the highest form of Christian faith. 
 
 I shall begin with the first of these questions. 
 It is obvious that in the different elements of our 
 consciousness there is a certain orde/r of priority. 
 " What is first in nature," as Aristotle said, " comes 
 last in genesis." The unity which underlies our 
 divided consciousness of the object and of the self is 
 involved in all that we think and all that we do : in 
 the theoretical process by which we seek to know the 
 world, and in the practical process, by which we 
 endeavour to carry our ideals into reality in the 
 world. But this unity, just because it is the first 
 presupposition of all our consciousness, is the last 
 thing we know. We rise to the infinite from the 
 finite, just because the infinite is naturally prior to 
 the finite, and the last thing thought does is to turn 
 back on its first principle. In a similar way, the 
 consciousness of the subject underlies the conscious- 
 ness of the object, but we come to know it last. Just 
 because the object presupposes the subject, it is from 
 the object that the subject returns upon itself; and 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 177 
 
 the theoretical apprehension of the world goes before 
 the practical reaction by which we seek to realise 
 ourselves in it. The general order of the elements of 
 our consciousness is, therefore, the following. The . 
 ■consciousness of objects is prior in time to self-;- 
 ■consciousness, and the consciousness of both subject' 
 and object is prior to the consciousness of God. -^ 
 
 But this time-priority must not be taken to mean 
 that there are three processes in our life which follow '; 
 in a certain order, so that the one must be completed 
 before the other begins. Such a view is obviously 
 ■contradicted by facts. We do not begin to act after 
 "we have finished knowing, nor do we begin to be 
 Teligious after the highest form of morality has been 
 •achieved. All these forms of consciousness — theoret- 
 
 ical, practical^_j£d_jsligiQH&:-:3exj^ together, and we 
 seem to find them all existing together from the very 
 dawn of human life, or, at least, from the earliest period 
 in the history of the individual and the race in which 
 we can find distinct evidence of the existence of 
 any one of them. The priority is not like that of 
 bud, flower, and fruit, in which the later supplants 
 the earlier. The exclusive occupation of consciousness 
 by one of its forms is only apparent. It has, indeed, 
 been noticed that the child at first prefers to speak of 
 himself in an objective way, as if he were conscious of 
 himself only as he is conscious of other objects : and 
 the philosopher Fichte is said to have made a feast to 
 
 VOL. I. M 
 
178 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 celebrate the moment in which his child first said " I "i 
 as if then first the child had distinctly compassed 
 the act of self-consciousness, and asserted his claim, 
 to the rank of an independent spiritual subject. In 
 like manner, it would not be difficult to show that 
 there is some interval between such assertion of the 
 self against the object, and any utterance of the child 
 that gives distinct evidence of a feeling of reverence 
 for a being higher than itself. And the same thing 
 holds good for the childhood of the race. On a rough 
 general view of the facts of history, it might seem that 
 in the earliest stages of man's life on earth, he was 
 hardly toTe called self-conscious, and he was not 
 conscious of God at aU. The savage, like the boy, 
 seems to live almost entirely outside of himself, and 
 his passions appear to act upon him like natural 
 forces, without his ever distinguishing himself from 
 them, or considering whether he shall yield to them or 
 not. And when self-consciousness begins to arise in 
 him, it shows itself at first in an unmeasured self- 
 assertion, which is checked not by a consciousness 
 of law within, but only by the perception, or the fear,, 
 of a^greater power without him. In other words, 
 he seems to "Be" incapable of rising above a sense 
 of dependence on what is external, except to indulge 
 in a self-will that respects nothing. When he breaks 
 his slavery to the object, it is only to fall under a. 
 worse slavery to his own caprice. If, in some degree. 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 179 
 
 the case is otherwise with the young who are brought 
 up under the influences of a civilised society, this 
 seems to be the effect of an external training, which 
 forces upon the individual at an early age what other- 
 wise would not have come to him till a much later 
 stage of his development. Hence the savage, who 
 jiever seem s to submit to limitation except from an 
 external force, or to become free^xcept in the way of 
 throwing off all law, would fairly be taken as the true 
 type of the natural man ; and, if so, then it might 
 reasonably be said that the natural man is capable of ■ 
 fear and of presumption, but never of reverence; that 
 he can be superstitious or profane but never religious. 
 In other words, he does noFreally look wp to the power 
 before which he trembles, or, in any sense, conceive it 
 as a better self, with which he can identify himself 
 even while he bends before it. And this means that 
 he does not in the proper sense worship at all ; for he 
 does not rise to the idea of any being who deserves 
 the name of God, as being higher than the self and 
 yet not a mere object or not-self 
 
 A striking expression of this view of the religion or 
 superstition of savages may be found in Goethe's Wan- 
 derjahre, where he is speaking of the necessity of teach- 
 ing religion to children. " Well-born, healthy children," 
 he declares, " bring much with them into the world : 
 nature has given to each of them all that he needs in 
 the struggle for existence. This it is our duty to develop, 
 
180 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 though often it develops itself better without any 
 interference. But there is one thing which no one 
 brings with him into the world, though it is that 
 which is all-important, if he is ever to show himself to 
 be truly a man." What is that ? It is reverence. 
 " No one has ib to begin with." It may, indeed, be 
 said that "the fear of uncivilised races, excited by 
 overpowering natural forces or by mysterious and 
 threatening events, has supplied the germ out of 
 which a purer feeling has gradually arisen." But 
 Goethe answers that there is a distinction of kind 
 between such fear and religious reverence. " Though 
 fear is natural enough, reverence is not in the same 
 sense natural. Men tremble before a mighty being, 
 known or unknown. The strong man seeks to 
 combat, the weak man to escape it : both wish some- 
 how to get rid of it, and feel themselves fortunate 
 if they have succeeded even for a time in putting 
 it aside, and have thus in some measure recovered 
 for themselves the freedom and independence of their 
 nature. The natural man repeats this operation a 
 thousand times in the course of his life. From fear 
 he strives to attain to freedom, from freedom he is 
 again driven back into fear, and all this swaying from 
 one side to another never leads to any progress. To 
 / fear is easy, though it brings with it dispeace : to 
 ', cherish reverence is hard, though it puts us in 
 harmony with ourselves. Unwillingly does man de- 
 
ST A GES IN THA T EVOL UTION. 181 
 
 termine himself to reverence, or, rather, he never does^ 
 determine himself to it. It is a higher sense which 
 must be given to his nature, and which is spontane- 
 ously developed only by a few specially favoured 
 beings, who therefore have at all times been regarded 
 as saints, or rather as gods." 
 
 To this, as a popular description of the facts, a 
 description only meant to show their broader out- 
 lines, there can be no objection. But, if it were 
 to be taken quite literally, in the sense that man 
 nemr learns reverence, tiU it is put into him from 
 without by some kind of external discipline, it would 
 involve a division which cannot be admitted to 
 exist, between the different stages of man's life as a 
 conscious being: for it is not possible that the con- 
 sciousness of objects should exist entirely apart from 
 the consciousness of the self, nor either entirely apart 
 from the consciousness of the unity, which is beyond 
 both, yet presupposed in both. Hence also it is 
 impossible that the feeliug of dependence on objects 
 without us should be absolutely separated from the 
 feeling of independence in relation to them ; or either 
 of these feelings from the feeling of reverence for that 
 which is above both us and them. It is undoubtedly 
 important to make a distinction between these different 
 feelings : nay, it may be admitted that there are crises 
 in our intellectual and moral life, in which we seem to 
 ourselves to exchange one of these attitudes of mind 
 
182 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 wholly and entirely for another. The transitions of 
 our development by which one element of our con- 
 sciousness is brought into prominence and another 
 sinks into the background, often seem to us, at the 
 moment of experiencing them, to be complete revolu- 
 tions of thought and life, revolutions in which nothing 
 in the first stage has prepared us for the last, and 
 nothing in the last recalls the first. But, on closer 
 ,consideraition, we find that such appearances are 
 illusive. ; If the soul of man is not divided into 
 Sfiifferent and independent compartments, in one of 
 ■which is contained the consciousness of the object, 
 jin another that of the self, while a third is left for 
 Ithe consciousness of God, neither can its life-history, 
 I the life-history either of the individual or of the race, 
 be conceived as a process in which external additions 
 I are made to what existed before, or one kind of 
 consciousness is substituted for anoth^r.j On the 
 contrary, man's spiritual history is, in a deeper sense 
 than even the growth of a plant or an animal, a 
 development. And as we have already indicated,^ the 
 ■ essentia l characteristic ofjleyelopment is that nothing 
 arises_jn it de TOO??o,„which is not in some way pre- 
 formed and anticipated from the beginning. Growth, 
 3S, Kant said, is "not addition but intussusception"; it 
 is a process in which new elements are taken u^ only_ 
 ^as^Jihey.^ are assimilated, and in which, therefore the 
 •widening of the circle of existence never ceases to 
 
ST A GES IN THA T E VOL UTION. 183 
 
 Tie controlled by the self-identical nature of the being 
 whose life is thus enlarged. Hence it is only in so 
 far as the consciousness of objects already contains 
 in it implicitly the consciousness of the self, only so 
 far as self-consciousness is already implicitly the con- 
 sciousness of God, that the latter can develop out 
 -of the former. A clear analysis of the phases of our 
 life which follow and make room for each other, 
 teaches us to recognise that the transition is never 
 that revolutionary change which, on the first view of 
 it, it seems to be. Even in geology the catastrophic 
 view of the earth's changes had to be abandoned ; 
 Decause closer examiuation showed that the causes 
 that produce the greatest effects are those that work 
 slowly, silently, and gradually. StiU less is it possible 
 to maintain a catastrophic view of the history of man, 
 in view of the organic identity that binds each man to 
 himself, and the whole race of men to one another, 
 in all their stages of development. 
 
 The bearing of this upon the argument is obvious. 
 •Our immediate consciousness of objects seems at first 
 to be a mere presentment of them to the passive 
 subject, to a self that is not in any way occupied 
 with itself, or even conscious of itself at all. The out- 
 wardly directed gaze seems simply to admit the object, 
 and not to react, still less to be aware of itself as 
 reacting, upon it. But, in the first place, we have 
 learned to recognise that, whether we are conscious of 
 
184 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 it or not, there is always a reaction, an analytic and 
 synthetic activity of thought, even in our simplest per- 
 ceptive consciousness ; for, without this reaction, no 
 idea of any object as distinct from, and related to, 
 other objects could ever arise to trouble the self- 
 ' involved sleep, .^^sense. Apart from such reaction, 
 we might say that the sensitive subject would remain 
 for ever confined to itself, were it not that in that 
 case there would properly be no self to be confined 
 to ; for where there is no outward, there is, of course, 
 no inward life. It is thus the mental activity of the 
 subject that creates for him a world of objects, or, to 
 put it more simply, that enables him to become 
 conscious of the world of objects in which he exists. 
 He cannot be an inhabitant of the intelligible world, 
 unless, by the activity of his own intelligence, he 
 makes himself so. In the second place, not only ia 
 the subject active in perception, but he necessarily 
 and inevitabIy~Eas an inchoate consciousness of him- 
 self as a subject, in distinction from the objects 
 which that activity enables him to apprehend. For 
 to apprehend an object, as such, is to distinguish it 
 from, and relate it to the self that is conscious of 
 it. It is to refer an idea or feeling to that which 
 is other than the self, to reject it from the self and 
 to objectify it ; and such a rejection or repulsion 
 necessarily involves, on the other side, a withdrawal 
 of the self from the object. The simplest outward- 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 185 
 
 looking gaze, which seems to lose itself in the object 
 to which it is directed, yet recognises that object as 
 other than itself or its own state ; and, indeed, all 
 its absorption in the object may be said to be its 
 effort to heal the breach, of which, in the very act of 
 perception, it has become conscious. Hence we come 
 to the result that /even in its utmost apparent passivity 
 of perception, the mind is active; and even in its 
 utmost absorption in the object, it is conscious of the 
 self in distinction from it. It is true that the sub- 
 jective aspects of the consciousness of objects are at 
 first latent, or they are present only in an imperfect 
 and inchoate form. Attention is not specially directed 
 to them ; and in any description which the individual 
 would give of his own consciousness, they would 
 generally be omitted. But they are always there. 
 For it is notjossiblejin the nature of things, that 
 thereshould_bg__aa_^Qbject^^XQept^Jor_a. suhj-ect, _or_ 
 without that . subject_ distinguishing_ the object from 
 itself, and itself frem the object. In this sense there 
 can Jbe, no consciousness of objects without self- 
 consciousness. Even, therefore, if the word " I " be 
 delayed for a little, the inchoate thought of it cannot 
 be wanting to one who is conscious of objects as 
 such. 
 
 And the same is true of the idea of God, as the 
 unity which is presupposed in the division of the 
 self from the not-self, and in all other divisions of 
 
186 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 consciousness. Even in the extremest opposition of 
 the subject to the object, their unity cannot be 
 entirely lost ; for every distinction is necessarily a 
 relation, and implies an identity within which the differ- 
 entiation takes place. The implication that there is 
 such a unity may lie in the background of the mind; 
 nevertheless, it cannot but influence it even from 
 the first. It is the basis and presupposition of our 
 rational life, the atmosphere in which it moves, the 
 bond which holds it together. A man cannot escape 
 its power by not attending to it, any more than he 
 can escape being a self by attending only to objects. 
 And, like the idea of self, the idea of God must at a 
 very early period take some form for us, though it may 
 not for long take an adequate form. Man may hide 
 his inborn sense of the infinite in vague superstitions 
 which confuse it with the finite ; but he cannot alto- 
 gether escape from it, or prevent his consciousness of 
 the finite from being disturbed by it. 
 
 The progress of consciousness is thus the explica- 
 tion of a confused totality in which the three factors 
 are at first merged and mingled, but it is never the 
 sudden emergence of any quite new factor. Por, 
 though a rational being may exist in which many 
 of the elements of the rational life are as yet un- 
 developed, no rational being can exist in which any of 
 these elements is altogether absent. The advance to a 
 new consciousness is in every case the discovery of 
 
ST A GES IN THA T E VOL UTION. 187 
 
 deeper meanings or implications in an old one. Or, to 
 put it in a way already suggested, it is a progress 
 which is also a regress. While, therefore, it is true 
 that the general order of advance in man's life is from 
 consciousness of objects to self-consciousness and from 
 that to the consciousness of God, yet this must not 
 be understood as if it meant that one consciousness 
 passes away and another consciousness comes in its 
 place, or even that new elements are externally added 
 to those already given. On the contrary, even in the 
 earliest stage of his being, when his thought is most of 
 all concentrated upon the interests of the outward 
 life, self-consciousness, and the consciousness of God 
 are not wanting. Thus, almost from the first, he is 
 conscious not only of dependence on objects but of 
 a relative independence in relation to them; and he 
 is conscious also of relation to a power which is 
 not himself, and yet not a mere object like other 
 objects around him. He is capable, therefore, not 
 only of fear of that which is other and stronger 
 than himself, or, on the other hand, of a presumptuous 
 self-confidence, which makes him defy every external 
 authority and power, but of reverence, — the fear which 
 is the beginning of wisdom, because it involves a sense 
 of unity with that to which as natural and finite 
 beings we look up. 
 
 But, if this view of the relation of the three 
 elements in consciousness be adopted, it casts an 
 
188 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 important light upon the second question which we 
 had to answer, as to the method of development of 
 the religious consciousness itself. If the priority of 
 the consciousness of objects to the consciousness of 
 self, and of the consciousness of self to the conscious;:^ 
 ness of God, does not mean that any one of these ever 
 exists without the others, what does it mean? It can 
 only mean that in successive periods each of these 
 elements in turn determines the form of our conscious 
 life, and so becomes the mould in which all our ideas and 
 ideals are cast. What we find in any one stage of 
 man's history is not the isolated presence of any one 
 element of life; but, though all the elements are 
 present, one is emphasised, and it tends to give the 
 law to air the rest. It becomes, so to speak, the key- 
 note with which all the others have to bring them- 
 selves into correspondence. Thus it may, I think, be 
 proved that the priority of the consciousness of objects 
 to the consciousness of self, and of the consciousness of 
 self to the consciousness of God, shows itself not in the 
 isolation of any one of these ideas from the others, but 
 rather in the way in which each of them becomes for 
 a time predominant and forces the others to take 
 on its own shape and to speak its own language. 
 Hence we can distinguish three stages in the develop- 
 ment of man, in which the form of his consciousness 
 is successively determined by the ideas of the object, 
 of the subject, and of God as the principle of unity 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 189 
 
 in both; and ^each of these stages brings with it 
 a special modification of the religious consciousness. 
 It will remain for future lectures to work "out this 
 thesis more fully. At present I only wish to illustrate 
 it so as to make its meaning clear. 
 
 Our first step is the easiest. It will scarcely be 
 denied that the earliest life of man is on£ in which 
 the objective consciousness rules and determines all 
 his thoughts, or that in this stage both his conscious- 
 ness of himself and his consciousness of God are 
 forced to take on an objective form. Man at first 
 looks outward, and not inward : he can form no 
 idea of anything to which he cannot give a ' local 
 habitation and a name,' which he cannot body forth 
 as an existence in space and time. Even of himself 
 he can think_only as^ an object among other objects, 
 ancT he sees nothing of the peculiar character that 
 is given to his existence by his being a subject for 
 which all objects exist. He has none of that keen 
 sense of individual personality — that consciousness 
 of an isolated inner life, from which everyone else 
 is excluded — which arises in men at a later period. 
 He scarcely even distinguishes himself from his body. 
 But if, in this way, the consciousness of self is imperfect 
 or latent, if it is forced to take on an objective disguise, 
 still more clearly is this the case with the conscious- 
 ness of God. Gqd_necessarily at this time must be 
 .represented as an object among other objects, a mere 
 
190 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 external force or power before which man trembles 
 with a sense of weakness. And Goethe's description 
 is so far true that it is very difficult to trace in this 
 fear anything but man's abject terror for that which 
 is stronger than himself. For just in so far as God 
 is conceived as merely an object, the worshipper must 
 feel towards Him as a slave, who obeys without a 
 consciousness of anything ia himself that lifts him 
 into unity with the power to which he submits. 
 
 But while this is the general tendency of a merely- 
 objective view of God : yet we must remember that 
 even in this stage the real nature of the relation is 
 continually reacting against its imperfect form, and 
 making it impossible to regard God simply as an 
 object like other objects, i.e. as an object that exists 
 outside of them and of the subject, as they exist out- 
 side of each other. On the contrary, there is always 
 some effort imaginatively to exalt the object selected 
 as divine above other objects, and to assign to it attri- 
 butes which are inconsistent with its externality, or its 
 mere individuality as an object in space. Poetry soon 
 begins to idealise it, and lift it beyond the ordinary 
 level of finite existence. And whUe, in the earliest 
 time, the tendency is rather to select the objects 
 which are farthest from hu man ity as most divine, and 
 so to deify~rather stones and trees and animals or the 
 |teavenIy~bMies;T;Ws~ graxliially yields to the tendency 
 to humanise the gods or to deify men. Anthropomor- 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 191 
 
 phism changes the powers of nature at first wor- 
 shipped into ' the fair humanities of old rehgion ' ; or, 
 where this is impossible, it dethrones the earlier gods 
 to make room for a new humanised dynasty. And at 
 a very early date ideas of transmigration, transforma- 
 tion, and possession are brought in — to deliver the god 
 from the chains of the objective nature attributed to 
 him, and to turn him into an all-pervading presence. 
 
 If what I have said is true, man's life in this 
 earliest stage of it, will necessarily be vexed with an 
 inner contradiction, owing to the necessity of express- 
 ing all the content of a human life in the lowest form 
 of consciousness — the consciousness, that is, of mere 
 objects as such, and even of material objects. The 
 consciousness of the self and of God must be dwarfed 
 and distorted by the mould into which they are forced. 
 They must present themselves iu a shape which at 
 once disguises their real nature, and disturbs the order 
 of the objective world into which they are intruded. 
 
 Again, it is possible to find in the history of the 
 race, and even in a slightly different way in the his- 
 tory of nations and individuals, a_period in which the 
 jQxm,-&f-se]^:£onsmmisness prevails and determines both 
 the consciousness of objects and that of God. In such 
 a period, the interest of life becomes predominantly 
 moral, or at least subjective, and the outward world 
 loses its power over the human spirit. Man begins to 
 rise to a sense of his freedom and of his independence 
 
192 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of the world about him. His mind, his inner life, is 
 now ' his kingdom'; and the self-determined aims of his 
 will, the realisation of his happiness or of his isolated 
 moral destiny, have become all-important to him. He 
 is freed from the superstitious dread of outward things, 
 and begins to take a cool and prosaic view of them, as 
 instruments of his life. But, at the same time also, 
 the poetic halo vanishes from nature. A glory has 
 passed away from the earth, and ' great Pan is dead ' : 
 
 " From haunted stream or vale, 
 Edged with the poplar pale, 
 The parting genius is with sighing sent." 
 
 The manifestation of the divine is no longer found in 
 nature but in m an ; and even in man not as 'a natural 
 existence, but only as a self-conscious, self-determined 
 subject. Man alone is supposed to be made in the 
 image of God, and the image of God in him is purely 
 spiritual and inward. God is therefore conceived as 
 a spiritual will which stands apart from nature, and 
 reveals itself to man mainly in the inner voice of con- 
 science, the ' categorical imperative of duty.' Man's 
 relation to God may, indeed, as in the Jewish religion, 
 be conceived as that of a subject to a monarch before 
 whom he trembles ; but even so, he feels that he can 
 obey or refuse to obey. He, like the God he worships, 
 is an independent individual; and, as such, he is con- 
 scious of essential separateness from other individuals 
 and even from God. Such an individualistic religion 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 193 
 
 we find arising, though with many differences of form, 
 among many nations at a certain stage of their culture. 
 The philosophic faith of the Stoic and the other individ- 
 ualist schools that arose in the decay of the religions of 
 the classical peoples is a good example of this kind of 
 subjective religion ; and we find a revival of the same 
 spirit, somewhat modified by Christianity, among the 
 Puritans and others of the Protestant sects. In quite 
 modern times it rises to a philosophical form in Kant. 
 But the great religious example of it is the later 
 Judaism, which, as I shall attempt to show in a future 
 lecture, gradually breaks away in the prophets and 
 psalmists from the forms of a national worship, and 
 becomes an inner religion of the individual heart, — 
 thus preparing the way for the universalism of 
 Christianity. 
 
 I have said that, as in the earlier forms of religion, 
 the consciousness of God is reduced to the form of the 
 consciousness of an object, so in this stage it is re- 
 duced to the form of self-consciousness. In other 
 words, God is conceived as a subject, and, as a subject, 
 He is brought under the limitations, or some of the 
 limitations, of a human individuality. Hence the 
 relation between God and man is represented as, in 
 the first instance, an external and exclusive one. 
 Yet here, as in the other case, the real nature of 
 the relation between the infinite and the finite neces- 
 sarily reacts against the imperfect form in which it at 
 
 VOL. I. N 
 
194 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 first presents itself. How can man, conceived as iso- 
 lated from God, be free before Him ? If he is made 
 in the image of God as a self, he is infinitely removed 
 from Him as a creature ; and the awe of the individual 
 for an absolute Being, who is regarded as outside of 
 him yet so oppressively near to him, may deepen till 
 it overshadows all life with the sense of weakness and 
 sin. Acting as " ever," to use the characteristic ex- 
 pression of Milton, " in his Great Taskmaster's eye," 
 his view of life becomes stern and severe ; he is bur- 
 dened with the sense that, when he has done aU, he 
 can only be an unprofitable servant. His reverence 
 is tinged with an awe that verges on superstitious 
 terror, and it may easUy associate itself with a formal 
 obedience which fears to swerve in the smallest thing 
 from the letter of the law. Yet, with all its defects, 
 this religion marks a great step of advance towards 
 spiritual freedom. It lifts man above the fear of the 
 powers of nature, and purifies him as by fire from the 
 pollutions that so easily mingle with every form of 
 nature-worship. If it narrows his life by the sense 
 of overpowering responsibility, and darkens it with the 
 awe of a ' Searcher of hearts,' it yet gives him a sense 
 of nearness to the Being he worships. And out of 
 this must necessarily spring a longing for closer union 
 with Him, a longing which is inconsistent with a 
 merely negative conception of His relation to man, 
 and which in the long run must give rise to a higher 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 195 
 
 idea of that relation. For he who fears God, and 
 nothing but God, is not far from the love that casteth 
 out fear. 
 
 '\The third, or final form of consciousness is that in 
 which the object and the self appear, each in its proper 
 form, as distinct yet in essential relation, and, therefore, 
 as subordinated to the consciousness of God, which 
 is recognised as at once the presupposition and as the I 
 end of both) Here, for the first time, the religious 
 consciousness takes its true place in relation to the 
 secular consciousness, and God is known in the true 
 form of His idea. For, as has been explained in 
 previous lectures, the idea of God is one with the 
 unity which is at once the presupposition, the limit, 
 and the goal of our divided consciousness of the world 
 and of ourselves. Consequently, so long as God is 
 conceived under the form of abstract objectivity or 
 abstract subjectivity. He is not conceived as He is 
 in truth. To know God as God, is to know Him 
 as the Being, who is at once the source, the sustaining 
 power, and the end of our spiritual lives. On this 
 idea, however, I shall not here enlarge. I shall only 
 repeat, what I have already said in an earlier lecture, 
 that this is the only form which religion can take for 
 the modern_world^ It is impossible for any one who 
 has breathed the spirit of modern science, modern litera- 
 ture, and modern ethics to believe in a purely objec- 
 tive God : to worship any power of nature or even any 
 
196 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 individualised outward image, such as those of Apollo 
 or Athene. Still less is he able to worship a multitude 
 of such images, and so to compensate for the defect 
 of one imperfect form by introducing others to sup- 
 plement it. His God must be universal; and if he 
 tries to picture Him in an outward form, he will 
 soon find it impossible to rest in any one object, 
 and will repeat in his own experience the dialectic 
 by which Polytheism disappeared in the abstract 
 unity of Pantheism. Again, though our own religion 
 is developed out of Judaism, it is impossible for 
 modems to recall the attitude of the pure Monotheist, 
 to whom God was only a subject among other 
 subjects, though lifted high above all the rest. We 
 cannot think of the infinite Being as a will which 
 is external to that which it has made. We cannot, 
 indeed, think of Him as external to anything, least 
 of all to the spiritual beings who, as such, 'live 
 and move and have their being in Him.' This idea 
 of thejmmanence of God underlies the Christian con- 
 ception ; and, if we look below the surface, we can 
 see that it is an idea involved in all modern 
 philosophy and theology. We may reject religion, 
 or we may accept it, but we cannot accept it except 
 in this form ; and even where we reject it, the 
 ground of our rejection will generally lie in the 
 difficulties that seem to exist in this form of it. 
 Thus Mr. Spencer takes refuge in the unknowable, 
 
STAGES IN THAT EVOLUTION. 197 
 
 just because it seems to him that the conception 
 of a God who is neither purely objective nor purely 
 subjective must be an empty conception. And Comte 
 in like manner, substitutes humanity for God, because 
 he thinks that the conception of an absolute and 
 infinite Being, who is at once the Father of spirits 
 and the unity to which the whole universe must 
 be referred, involves many contradictions, and that, 
 even if it did not do so, it is beyond all possibility 
 of proof or verification. For such reasons they find 
 it impossible to accept that idea, to which Wordsworth 
 points in his weU-known lines on "Tintem Abbey," 
 the idea of God as a Being who is above the contrast 
 of subject and object, yet revealed in both, " whose 
 dwelling" is not only "the light of setting suns and 
 the round ocean and the living air," but also the mind 
 of man : 
 
 " A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through aU things.'' 
 
 Such an idea is rejected, in short, because it is 'too 
 good to be true ' ; either because it is supposed that 
 its elements will not admit of being united without 
 contradiction, or, because we are supposed to be 
 so confined to the phenomenal that we can never 
 verify it. 
 
 If, on the other hand, it could be shown that the 
 idea of God as the unity of all knowing and being, 
 
198 THE EVOLUTION OF^RELIGION. 
 
 of the inner and the outer life, of the subject and 
 the object, is not really beyond verification ; if it 
 could be shown that this idea does not break down 
 in contradiction, but, on the contrary, is the pre- 
 supposition without which all other ideas must so 
 break down, the principle of unity which holds the 
 intelligible world and the intelligence together ; if, 
 finally, it could be shown that this idea, whatever 
 difficulties it may contain, is yet capable of being 
 rationally applied and developed, and, indeed, that 
 every step in our knowledge of the world or of 
 ourselves helps us so to apply and to develop it, 
 then it may be assumed that no one would be willing 
 to set it aside. What is too good to be true, is what 
 everyone would wish to be true ; and the assertion 
 that anything is unreal for such a reason involves 
 a kind of discord between our intellectual and moral 
 ideals and the reality of things. I cannot believe 
 that any such discord exists, or at least, that, so far 
 as it exists, it is insoluble; and I have already given 
 some grounds for rejecting that way of reasoning, 
 which leads to the supposition of its existence. In 
 the sequel I hope to give some farther positive proof 
 of the opposite view. 
 
LECTUEE EIGHTH. 
 
 THE OBJECTIVE FORM OF THE EAELIEST EELIGION. 
 
 Gradual Development of Religion — How to explain Anticipations 
 of the Highest Religious Ideas, which appear very early in the 
 History of Religion — What is implied in the Objective Form of 
 Man's Earliest Gonscioiisness, and especially of his Religioxis 
 Consciousness — Its Sensuous and Materialistic Character — In 
 what sense the Earliest Religion is Anthropomorphic — What is 
 meant by Fetischism — How Imagination gradually Elevates 
 and Idealises the Objects of Worship. 
 
 In the last lecture I attempted to carry a step 
 farther the analysis of the idea of development, and 
 to show that it excludes anything like an absolute 
 break between one stage and another. The identity of 
 a being that lives and develops is shown above all in 
 the fact that, though it is continually changing in 
 its whole nature, yet nothing absolutely new is ever 
 introduced into it. This is a point which is very 
 apt to be neglected by men who are themselves 
 the subjects of such development, especially in any 
 important crisis of their intellectual or moral history: 
 perhaps, we may say that it is almost certain to be 
 
200 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 neglected by them. Those who live through any 
 revolution which affects the deepest life of man, such, 
 e.g. as that which took place at the first preaching 
 of Christianity, or at the Eeformation, are apt to 
 exaggerate the violence of the transition which they 
 have experienced, and to think that all old things 
 have passed away, and that all things have become 
 new. Yet the most violent revolution to which 
 human nature can be subjected can never be more 
 than the emergence into light of something that has 
 been growing for a long time beneath the surface ; 
 what seems at first an absolute change is never 
 other than the summed up result of a series of 
 variations ; and the final touch which makes the 
 elements crystallise into a new form can be re- 
 garded as its real cause only by superficial observers. 
 Let me once more point out how this applies to 
 our present subject. Those who describe the be- 
 ginnings of religion are apt to speak of the religion 
 of savages as a mere brutal terror of powers which 
 are too great for the individual to deal with ; and to 
 suppose that, at some definite period or stage, such 
 terror gave way to a real reverence for beings who 
 were conceived as intellectually or morally superior. 
 But a closer view of the facts always discloses that 
 Jtmman thoughts and motives are too mixed and 
 complicated to admit of such simple „ divisions or 
 transitions. The element of superstitious terror does 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 201 
 
 not cease all at once at a special point. It clings 
 for generations and even for ages to religions which, 
 on the whole, may be described as religions of 
 reverence ; and, on the other hand, the element 
 of reverential awe for something higher, greater, 
 better than themselves, tinges even the darkest 
 superstition of mankind, and at times elevates 
 the sacrifices which they make to it to the 
 rank of herdism. And the reason is, that reKgion 
 is essentially a consciousness of the infinite pre- 
 supposed in aU the divisions of the finite, a con- 
 sciousness which, however little it be understood by 
 him whom it inspires, however coarse and imperfect 
 the form in which it presents itself, is yet an integral 
 element of man's mind, of which he can no more rid 
 himself than he can get rid of the consciousness 
 of the object or of himself And the true nature of 
 this idea, as it is implied in the very constitution 
 of our intelligence, continually reacts against the 
 imperfect form in which it is presented. In this way, 
 it is not unnatural that even at the lowest stage of his 
 life man should be visited with occasional glimpses of 
 the highest he can ever attain. The human spirit is 
 one in all its differences, and, in a sense, the whole 
 truth is always present m it, if not to it. In the 
 consciousness of the simplest and most uncultured 
 individual there are contained all the principles that 
 can be evolved by the wisest philosopher of the 
 
202 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 most cultivated time ; and even the rudest religious 
 systems have represented in them — though, no doubt, 
 in a shadowy and distorted way — all the elements 
 that enter into the highest Christian worship. As 
 the child often utters words of strange depth and 
 richness of meaning which all the wisdom of man- 
 hood finds it difficult to fathom, or raises pro- 
 blems that might puzzle the greatest philosopher; 
 so, among the earliest recorded utterances of men, 
 and in connexion with a general state of in- 
 telligence and morality which was very immature 
 and defective, we often discover strange anticipations 
 of the most elevated ethical and religious ideas. The 
 golden rule of Christianity, not to war with evil 
 against evil but to overcome evil with good, is 
 found imprinted on Egyptian monuments of unknown 
 antiquity, and it had been maintained by Chinese 
 moralists before the time of Confucius : it is implied 
 even in the generosity that mingles with the 
 sensuality and cruelty of savages. It is difficult to 
 say when or where we may not find some traces of 
 the ideas of a divine justice and a Father in heaven, 
 crossing and interfering with the coarsest superstitions 
 and the crudest and most materialistic conceptions of 
 supernatural powers. If we are willing to take single 
 utterances of pious feeling, or isolated moral maxims, 
 as evidence of the effective presence of moral and 
 religious ideas, it would not- be difficult to construct 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 203 
 
 a plausible argument for the thesis, that there has 
 been no real progress in morality or religion from the 
 earliest period "dfrecorded history, and that humanity 
 has always possessed^bound up with its consciousness 
 of itself, all the flight on Jhese subjects which it is 
 capable of reaching. In fact, it was by evidence like 
 this that (Buckle liome time ago attempted to prove, 
 that the moral consciousness of man is stationary, and 
 that therefore progress has depended solely on man's 
 increasing knowledge of the laws of nature. 
 
 Now I think we should at once avoid both the 
 temptation to explain away these facts, and the 
 temptation to treat them as evidences that man's 
 earliest stage was one of comparatively elevated 
 views of morality and religion, from which the 
 savages have fallen back. Isolated expressions of 
 moral and religious ideas are no evidence of the 
 general level of thought and life of the people 
 among whom they were first uttered; and their 
 preservation in tradition cannot, therefore, be taken 
 as evidence that that people has retrograded from a 
 higher stage. Before we can tell what they prove in 
 any particular case, we need to see what consequences 
 are drawn from them and what place they hold in the 
 consciousness of the people in question, in relation to 
 their other ideas and customs. Taken by themselves, 
 all that such expressions show is that ' a man's a 
 man for a' that,' that humanity lives already ia the 
 
204 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 most immature, as it maintains itself in the most 
 degraded condition of men. They show that any one 
 who has a human consciousness, and who lives in 
 society with his fellow-men amid all the changes of 
 human life, cannot but occasionally be touched with 
 the mystery, and elevated with the greatness of human 
 destiny. The soul of man even at its worst is a 
 wonderful instrument for the world to play upon ; and 
 in the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its 
 highest chords at times touched, and an occasional 
 note of perfect music drawn from it as by a wander- 
 ing hand on the strings. The waves of emotion, of 
 hate and love, of triumph and despair, called forth 
 by all the tremendous risks and struggles of mortal 
 existence, are surely sufficient to explain a few antici- 
 pations of the highest truth from the lips of the savage 
 or the chUd, as they are sufficient to explain a casual 
 sympathy with noble thoughts and deeds in the most 
 degraded of men. But the idea of development en- 
 ables us to understand how these things should be, and 
 should " overcome men like a summer cloud " without 
 ' any special wonder,' without calling for any other 
 explanation than the general identity of. the human 
 spirit in all ages. The evidence of a real progress 
 or development, consistent with this general identityj_ 
 is to be sought, not so much in the appearance of dis- 
 tinctly new elements, of which we find no previous 
 trace, but rather in the change of the relative place 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 205 
 
 in consciousness of the elements which, in some form ; 
 or other, are always to be detected there ; a change by j 
 which what was at first only the casual manifestation \ 
 of an exalted sensibility becomes raised into the cen- 1 
 tral principle of a new order of thought and life. ' 
 
 Now, in accordance with this view, I endeavoured 
 in the last lecture to reach some general ideas as to 
 the method of the development of man's consciousness, 
 especially in its religious aspect. And I pointed out 
 that there are three stages in that development, 
 stages which are indicated to us by the very form 
 of that consciousness itself, with its leading ideas 
 of the object, of the subject, and of the principle of 
 their unity: or, if we prefer so to put it, of the world, 
 the self, and God. For though we can never separate 
 these terms, yet we can see that, in the order of time, 
 the consciousness of the object must become explicit 
 before the consciousness of self, and the consciousness 
 of self before the consciousness of God. And the con- 
 sequence of this is that the higher elements of con- 
 sciousness, those that become explicit later, are forced 
 at first to appear m ihe, form of the lower element. 
 [Thus the consciousness of self and the consciousness of 
 God are both at first constrained to disguise them- 
 selves in a shape which is adequate only to the con- 
 sciousness of the object;] and when the consciousness 
 of self has been freed by the advance of reflexion from 
 this subjection, it still in its turn imposes the imper- 
 
206 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 fections of its own form upon the consciousness of God. 
 Hence the consciousness of G-od passes through a series 
 of changes from less to more adequate forms, and is 
 latest of all in assuming its proper shape. To know 
 God as God,, without confusing Him with the object 
 or the subject in their abstraction, is the highest 
 and~niost difficult attainment of the religious con- 
 sciousness. Nay, we might even say that it is the 
 highest goal of all human development ; for, as we 
 have seen, it is the highest result of development to 
 return upon its own principle ; and, in the case of 
 man, this means, to become conscious of the unity 
 presupposed in all his divided, finite life. A religion 
 which expresses the consciousness of the infinite in 
 its own form, can alone solve the great problem of 
 doing full justice to the secular consciousness, 
 allowing it all the room that is needful for its 
 complete differentiation, and yet overcoming or re- 
 conciling its divisions by carrying them back to the 
 divine unity from which they spring. It alone can 
 ' see all things in God,' without losing a clear con- 
 sciousness of the order of nature, or of the moral 
 order to which, in the social and political life of 
 man, it is subordinated. 
 
 To appreciate exactly the nature of the progress 
 which I have now described in general terms, it 
 will be necessary for us to examine the three stages of / 
 it a little more closely. We begin, therefore, by con- 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 207 
 
 sidering the first of those stages, that in which the idea 
 of the objmt is predominant, and determines the form 
 of all our consciousness. 
 
 Man, as I have said, looks outward before he looks 
 inward, and he looks inward before he looks upward. 
 As a consequence, his first consciousness of that which 
 is within as well as of that which is above him, is 
 thrown into t he m ould of his consciousness of that 
 which is without. All that exists for him in this 
 stage is the outward, the visible, the tangible, the 
 sensible. Into this, indeed, as into all consciousness, 
 the mind brings its own forms of thought and percep- 
 tion; but of these it takes no direct account. It is to 
 it as i/^ all objects, and even itself, were purely given 
 from without through the senses to the passive spirit. 
 Hence Hegel called this the sensuous consciousness, , 
 not meaning that sensation can fully explain it, but that 
 it does not itself recognise anything else than sense as 
 the source of its knowledge. It is a consciousness for 
 which, so far as it is itself aware, the only connecting 
 links of experience are time and space. Not, of course, 
 that even time and space are by themselves made ob- 
 jects of thought, but that the only unitj or connexion 
 yet_dearlyjecognised~as existing^_ between things is 
 that they coexist in space and foss through successive 
 ~cEanges in time. For the sensuous consciousness, 
 therefore, the world is a world of pure externality, 
 ostensibly governed only by the least ideal of relations, 
 
208 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the relations of juxtaposition, of coexistence, and of 
 succession ; and these are not yet taken as involving 
 any real connexion, but rather the absence of con- 
 nexion. Things are hesidc each other, events are after 
 each other, and nothing seems to be necessarily or 
 vitally related to anything else. All things^re_taken 
 as_isQlatedJndividuals, and the causality of any one of 
 them in relation to the others, if thought of at all, is 
 thought of as something arbitrary and accidental. Of 
 course, there is as yet no reflexion on the fact that the 
 subject, as being conscious of all objects, is more than 
 merely one of them. The world is conceived only as 
 an aggregate in which each thing or being has its 
 nature apart from the others, or only liable to casual 
 invasions from them ; and the self seems not to stand 
 on any other level than the objects it knows. Still 
 less can reflexion at this stage be expected to rise to 
 any direct conception of the principle of unity between 
 object and subject, as distinct from either, yet bind- 
 ing them both together as one. For such a unity 
 cannot in any way be brought within reach of the 
 sensuous consciousness without at once converting 
 itself into an object which takes its place alongside of 
 other objects of experience. In this primitive con- 
 sciousness then, it is necessary that everything should 
 be materialised ; for, to it existence_and_ materiality 
 are one. JN"o idea can approach it without being tran^ 
 substantiated into matter.. What is to exist for it, 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 209 
 
 must be felt and seen ; hence the universal can exist 
 for it, if at all, only in the form of the particular. To 
 us, to whom abstraction has become easy, almost 
 fatally easy, who are familiar with the distinction 
 between facts and laws or general principles, and who 
 from childhood have been accustomed to an almost 
 dualistic way of opposing soul and body, ideal and 
 material existence, it is difficult even by the strongest 
 effort of imagination to throw ourselves back into the 
 mental attitude of those whose thoughts so persistently 
 clung to the form of external perception, who so ab- 
 solutely merged mind in matter, the universal in the 
 particular. The gross materialism of the primitive 
 consciousness, its coarse sensuous realism, its incapacity 
 to rise above immediate appearance, or to grasp a whole 
 except as a collection of parts, make its movements 
 obscure and enigmatic for us ; for there is nothing 
 harder than to conceive beings with a mind like our 
 own, yet in which so much is merely potential and 
 latent that is actual and explicit with us. We are 
 alternately tempted to cut the knot, on the one hand, 
 by reducing the savage to an animal, or, on the other 
 hand, by giving him credit for ideas that are altogether 
 beyond his reach. We can escape the fallacies of both 
 views only by a clear realisation of the fact that tlie— 
 human mind is from the beginning moulde d by ^jdeas^ 
 ^~which~it''CT5rTi ecomedirectly conscious ^nly; J)^ a_ 
 slow-aad gradi]aLpTOcess,-and_whjch^ th erefore , must in 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
210 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the first instance present themselves in an inadequate 
 form. We may, to some extent, help ourselves in this 
 difficult task by considering how much our own thought 
 is still dependent on sensuous metaphors, and how 
 great is the risk of its being drawn down to the meta- 
 phors it uses. As Selden said that transubstantiation 
 was ' rhetoric turned into logic,' so we may safely 
 assert that much false theory is simply the logical 
 development of the sensuous analogies, under which 
 the truth at first necessarily presented and expressed 
 itself. These analogies are good within certain limits, 
 but when drawn out to all their consequences they 
 become entirely misleading. Their value lies in their 
 general verisimilitude; but when they are literally 
 taken and pressed home, when they are consistently 
 worked out, as if they were identical with the idea they 
 are intended to convey, they hide, rather than manifest 
 the truth. Now if, even at a later day, when the dis- 
 tinction of ideal and material has long been familiar, 
 philosophers like Locke have been misled by some of 
 the ordinary metaphors in which the idea of the re- 
 lation of the mind to its object is conveyed (such as 
 that involved in the word "impression"), and have 
 thereby had their view of that relation distorted, how 
 much more might we expect this to be the case in an 
 earlier time, when men's thoughts were as yet chained 
 to the outward and the sensible, and when ^hey were 
 under the necessity of representing in sensuous pic- 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 211 
 
 tures everything which they sought to bring before 
 theiFminds at~all The^^flrgT' stage of thought is in- 
 evitably a stage of 'levelling down.' For though men, 
 as men, cannot avoid having in their thought a content 
 ^hich is not sensuous or material, that content must 
 take the form of the consciousness into which it comes. 
 They can and must think of what is not merely out- 
 ward and physical; but they are obliged, in the first 
 instance, to represent it as if it were outward and 
 physical. They are Hke the members of a rude 
 nation who have none of the precious metals to use 
 for money, and who, if they chance to come into 
 possession of a diamond, are obliged to represent 
 its value in copper. (The highest has to be expressed 
 in terms of the lowest — the inward, the ideal, the 
 spiritual, in terms of the outward, the sensuous, the 
 material ; and it is only by the slow and persistent re- 
 action of the meaning upon the expression, of the con- 
 tent against the form, that the former liberates itself 
 from the latter. ] 
 
 This assertion may seem to contradict a very com-j 
 mon view as to the earliest form of human thought. It 
 has often been maintained that man at first is neces- 
 sarily anthropomorphic in his conception of the world, 
 i.e. that he represents all the objects around him as en- 
 dowed with a nature like his own, and that it is only 
 by the slow process of experience that he comes to re- 
 cognise that there are many objects which are without 
 
212 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 life, more which are without sensation and appetite, 
 and stUl more which are without reason and will. 
 " Man gazes," says Turgot, " upon the profound ocean 
 of being, but what at first he discerns is not the bed 
 hidden beneath its waters but only the reflexion of hi^ 
 own face." He interprets the objects without, by what 
 he feels and experiences within, and makes their mo- 
 tions and changes intelligible to himself by imputing 
 to them the same kind of motives by which he knows 
 that his own actions are determined. 
 
 ISTow there is an element of truth in this view, 
 but it is misleading, if taken literally. In a sense, 
 it may be granted that primitive man, just because 
 he does not distinguish the subject as such from 
 the object, is disposed to transfer to the object 
 feelings and desires like his own ; but this con- 
 fusion must not be taken to imply that he first 
 looks into his own soul, and then interprets what 
 is without on the analogy of what he has already 
 found within. For it is rather the reverse that hap- 
 pens. Man, as I have already said, looks outward 
 before he looks inward, and it may even be said that 
 he can find within only what he has first discovered 
 /without. What is meant is only that, while man knows 
 himself only as he knows objects, yet he knows objects 
 only as he finds something of himself in them. For 
 if self-knowledge comes to him only as he is reflected 
 back upon himself from the world, yet knowledge of 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 213 
 
 the world can never be other than the recognition in 
 it of that which mirrors and reflects the self that 
 knows it. In this sense, all our knowledge is an- 
 thropomorphic, even of that which is least like man. 
 For, though nothing in the world reflects perfectly ' 
 the spirit in man except his fellowman, all things 
 reflect something that is in him, and they are in- 
 telligible only because they do so. On the other 
 hand, we know ourselves only through this reflexion; 
 we are conscious of ourselves only as the world 
 comes to self-consciousness in us. 
 
 " Nor dotli the eye itself, 
 That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, 
 Not going from itself ; but eye to eye opposed 
 Salutes each other with each other's form : 
 Tor speculation turns not to itself, 
 Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there 
 Where it may see itself." 
 
 All our consciousness of the world, in this higher 
 sense, may be said to be anthropomorphic — the re- 
 flexion of ourselves from, or the discovery of our- 
 selves in, the objects and beings around us — pro- 
 vided it be at the same time remembered that it is 
 only in and through this jreflexion that we come 
 to a consciousness of what we ourselves are. But, 
 in the earliest stage, the picture reflected back to 
 man from the world is one which has no distinc- 
 tion or articulation in it. It is a picture in which 
 all beings and things are, as it were, confused to- 
 
214 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 gether; in which there is as yet no distinct division be- 
 tween things organic and things inorganic; or between 
 the different stages of organic being, between life 
 and sensation, or between sensation and conscious- 
 ness. Eiver and tree, animal and man, are not yet 
 recognised as having any essential difference of 
 nature. "We may call this view, in a special sense, 
 anthropomorphic, because it draws up everything to 
 the level on which man seems to stand. But it 
 would be quite as accurate to say that it draws 
 man down to the level of the beings and even the 
 things around him; for, on this stage, he has the 
 same confused view of himself as of the objects 
 around him. All things are gifted with a kind of 
 Jife^-JmL therej_s„as yet no distinction of kinds; and 
 even life itself is not clearly distinguished from motion. 
 The point of these observations may be realised 
 more definitely, if we compare the savage animism — 
 that is to say, the savage belief in spirits — with the 
 developed mythology of Greece which really does 
 attempt to anthropomorphise nature, or, in other 
 words, to explain the world by drawing all its 
 powers up to the lev«l of humanity. The savage 
 has no definite idea of the characteristic qualities 
 of man which he could transfer to other things. 
 But in the confusion of his consciousness, for which 
 there is no clear idea of the distinction between 
 intelligence and sense, or even between dead and 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 215 
 
 living matter, it is natural enough that we find 
 what is dead invested with the qualities of the 
 living, and what is living with those of the dead. 
 It is by thus thinking away the distinctions of 
 later thought that we can come nearest to that 
 which it is all but impossible for us fully to 
 realise, viz., the first consciousness of man, as it 
 is indicated in some of the phenomena of savage 
 life, and of the infancy of the individual. What 
 most perplexes us in attempting such realisation 
 is just the undistinguishing character of that con- 
 sciousness, and the facility with which it passes 
 up and down what is to us the scala naturae, 
 without any sense of the lines of division which 
 separate one kind of being from another — lines 
 which to us have come to be so deeply marked. 
 The civilised observer of savages is continually 
 bafiied by the distinctness of his own categories of 
 thought; because every idea which he finds them 
 expressing, carries for him all sorts of consequences, 
 and, in particular, all sorts of exclusions, of which 
 they have never thought. And if he has any 
 favourite theory of his own to maintain, he is sure 
 to find some fact to support it amid the chaotic 
 6f/.ov iravra ■^(p^fiaTa of the savage mind. For the 
 difficulty is just that we are disposed to stick to 
 one conception at a time, and to work it out con- 
 sistently, while to the savage all conceptions are, 
 
216 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 as it were, _fiuid^ and pass into each other without 
 warning. Take this description given by Waitz of 
 the superstitions found among the negro races : — 
 
 "The negro carries animism, or the belief that 
 there is soul in nature, to the utmost extreme. But 
 as his understanding is too uncultivated to grasp or 
 retain the conception of one universal animating 
 principle, his imagination is carried by this idea 
 into endless trivialties of superstition, suggested by 
 the particular circumstances of his life. Thus a 
 spirit may be conceived to dwell in any sensible 
 object ; and often, indeed, a great and powerful 
 spirit is supposed to take up his habitation in an 
 object which has otherwise no value or significance. 
 The negro does not think of this spirit as unalter- 
 ably bound up with the material thing in which it 
 dwells, but only as having its usual or chief abode 
 there. Not seldom he separates in his thought 
 between the spirit and the sensible thing of which 
 it has taken possession, sometimes even he opposes 
 them to each other. Usually, however, he combines 
 them as forming one whole, and this whole con- 
 stitutes what Europeans call his 'fetisch,' the object 
 of his religious veneration. 
 
 " On this view, it is not difficult to see what is 
 meant by the fetischism of the negroes. On the 
 one hand, the fetisches are a kind of gods, though 
 only inferior or half-gods ; for they create nothing, 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 217 
 
 but rather themselves are constantly in need of a 
 material body. On the other hand, they are for the 
 most part nothing better than the commonest sen- 
 sible things, which, however, are believed to possess 
 supernatural powers ; they are supposed to be sacred 
 to some higher being, to be his favourite abode, or 
 in some way or other to be brought into a closer 
 relation with him than is the case with other things. 
 All these conceptions remain undistinguished from 
 each other in the consciousness of the negro. The 
 fetisch is the god himself and yet at the same 
 time some object consecrated to him or possessed 
 by him (in both senses of the word), it may be a 
 tree, an animal, a pot, an offering, a place of offer- 
 ing, an inspired priest or seer, a temple ; it is at 
 once thought of as the god himself, and as something 
 upon which he has bestowed miraculous powers, a 
 medicine, an amulet, a lucky or unlucky day, a 
 prohibited food, or a poison used as an ordeal. The 
 so-called ' medicine ' of the natives of America, the 
 Taou of the South Sea Islanders, are substantially 
 identical in conception with the Mokisso of Congo 
 and the Fetisch of the negro. In all these cases 
 we find the same confusion of religious ideas, the same 
 obscure transjtions^ of _thought by which aU concep- 
 tions of the divine flow together into one. And 
 the low stage of religious culture at which the 
 negroes stand is shown far less by the fact that 
 
218 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 they pay veneration to particular sensible objects 
 than by this inextricable mixture of different ele- 
 ments in their thoughts of deity."i 
 
 This passage relates to the religious conceptions 
 of a particular class of savages, but we may take it 
 as an expression of the general point of view of 
 the sensuous consciousness.^ It is, indeed, just what 
 we might expect, if it be true that, in the first in- 
 stance, man looks outward rather than inward, and, 
 that in doing so, he makes no clear distinction 
 between the different grades of being. For, as a 
 necessary consequence of this, the form into which 
 everything tends to be forced is that which is most 
 external and materialistic. At this stage immediate 
 sensuous realisation is necessary for everything that 
 is to be regarded as real at all ; and it is only 
 because the boundaries of the natural world are 
 yet supposed to be so elastic that room can be 
 made in it for any reality which is not sensuous. 
 No doubt, the reaction of the non-sensuous con- 
 tent against the form in which it has to be ex- 
 pressed is seen in the strange mingling of high and 
 low, spiritual and material, which so much confuses 
 and perplexes us in the uncivilised thought ; but 
 
 'Waitz, Anthropologie der Natwvblker, ii. 1'74. 
 
 2 1 do not, however, maintain that fetischism is the beginning 
 of religion except in the very wide sense explained in this 
 lecture. 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 219 
 
 this reaction is as yet only sufficient to confuse the 
 man's consciousness of the lower kind of reality, but 
 not to separate the higher from it. 
 
 This, however, leads me to observe, that, as the 
 savage is after all a rational being, it cannot but be 
 that, in some form or other, the elements that belong 
 to a rational consciousness should present themselves 
 to him. Not only is it the case that the objects pre- 
 sented to him in the outward world are at different 
 stages in the scale of being, and that therefore the ex- 
 perience of them is ever reacting against the levelling 
 individualism of his first consciousness; but we have 
 to remember that the savage always is more than he 
 knows. ^As he is a rational being, his thought is ruled 
 by categories on^ which he has never^^eflected,. but 
 which nevertheless express themselves in the very 
 structure of his language. He could not know 
 objects as in space and time, if he were himself 
 merely an object in space and time. fJEe, could not 
 go out of himself and rise to a point of view from 
 which he regards himself as one individual existing 
 along with other individuals as parts of the same 
 world, unless there were present in his consciousness, 
 as an element of its very constitution, the idea of an 
 absolute unity which embraces all differences and 
 grades of being. '. As we have already sufficiently 
 shown, the division of the self from the not-self, and 
 the unity that transcends that division, are involved in 
 
220 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the simplest perceptive determination of objects ; and 
 all these elements must in some way be present to 
 every conscious being, if not directly, yet in some in- 
 fluence which they exert on his consciousness, — either 
 by transforming its objects or by introducing among 
 them objects which otherwise would not exist for it at 
 all. The confusion of the primitive consciousness, 
 therefore, lies not merely in the fact that the grades 
 of external being are imperfectly distinguished from 
 each other, but in this : — that the inchoate con::_ 
 sciousness of self and of God which goes with every 
 consciousness of objects, tends to break down the 
 
 ^limits of finite reality by the intrusion of a reality, 
 of a different order. Yet, on the other hand, this 
 higher reality is forced by the necessity of the case 
 to mask its true nature under a disguise which dis- 
 figures it. 
 
 This may become clearer if we look at it in a 
 slightly different point of view. We have seen that 
 
 v' the religious consciousness is posterior in genesis to 
 the_ consciousness ~6f objects and the consciousness of 
 self, though it refers to a principle of unity which is 
 presupposed in both. Further, we have seen that 
 whenever the consciousness of self and of the object 
 ^becomes fixed and definite, the consciousness of God 
 jiaea- iu- opposition to them, and, it mighty even be 
 said, as their negation. This was the element of 
 truth which we found in Mr. Spencer's view of 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 221 
 
 religion. Eeligion was thus described as arising 
 from a perception of tEe imreality of the finite, 
 whicE~ itself implies or leads to apperception of the 
 reality of the infinite. Discerning the transitoriness, 
 the shifting and uncertainty, the imperfection and 
 illusion, of the phenomenal world, such as it is to the 
 eyes of sense and understanding, we are by that very 
 consciousness carried beyond it to that which is eternal 
 and absolutely real. Thus by a negative movement, 
 we seem to rise from the finite to God, seeking in 
 Him that which we at first sought in the world 
 or in ourselves, but which we were able to find 
 in neither. Now, though this view does in the 
 main represent truly the logic of religion, it is a 
 logic which cannot be distinctly discerned in the 
 earliest forms of it. For it presupposes a more 
 definite idea of the finite than we can find there. 
 When the secular consciousness, the consciousness of 
 the world as a connected system of objects going 
 through definite and related changes, becomes clearly 
 defined, the religious recoil from such a world of 
 time and change must inevitably follow. But, in the 
 first instance , there is n o.definite secular consciousness 
 to rise above, and, therefore, no clear distinction of the ^ 
 religio^^cDTiscioiisness from it. What we have at 
 first is rather a confused consciousness of things, 
 which we can neither call distinctly religious nor 
 distinctly secular, still less a reconciliation of the 
 
222 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 two ; far such a reconciliation presupposes that the 
 secular or the religious have been first divided from 
 and opposed to each other. The divine is not yet 
 sought for in that which is higher than any or 
 all objects, though manifested in them. Neverthe- 
 less, the trace of the opposition may be found in the 
 fact that, while the idea of divinity, so far as it is yet 
 attained, tends to attach itself to some finite object, 
 it is at first connected -rather with the objects T^igh 
 are farthest from man than with those that are nearest 
 to him. It is rather a stone or a mountain, a plant or 
 an animal, that is at first deified, than a man; though 
 in the confused stage of thought which is characteristic 
 of the savage, the limits of different existences are not 
 preserved, and the wildest and most absurd metamor- 
 phoses are readily admitted. I shall not here, how- 
 ever, attempt to give any classification of savage beliefs 
 or superstitions, or to exhibit the order in which they 
 arise out of each other; for what I wish at present 
 is only, in the first place, to throw some light upon 
 the characteristic form, which such primitive beliefs 
 have taken as the deification of particular objects 
 of sense; and, in the second place, to show how 
 the inner movement of the religious consciousness 
 must gradually alter and finally do away with that 
 form or way of representing the divine. 
 
 If man is a ' mean thing,' unless he can " exalt 
 himself above himself,' still more truly we may say 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 223 
 
 that he is a mean thing, if he cannot exalt himself 
 above the finite objects he sees and handles. The 
 development of man's higher life is dependent upon 
 two things : in the first place, on the separation of 
 the secular and the religious consciousness, and, in 
 the second place, on their reunion. For it is only 
 by that separation^ that either consciousness can take 
 a definite form, and it is only by their reunion 
 that the religious can be made the means of 
 elevating the secular consciousness. But, for the 
 savage, the divine takes and must take the form of 
 finite objectivity, because that is the only form in 
 which reality can as yet be presented to him; and 
 the farther we go back in development, the less do 
 we find the object or objects selected for worship 
 distinguished in any way from other objects, or at 
 least distinguished in any way that really lifts them 
 above the rest. If the being or thing, to which 
 mysterious reverence is paid, stands out in separation 
 from other things and beings, it seems to be only 
 as having a somewhat greater or at least less 
 measurable power, but not as possessing any ex- 
 cellence which is essentially different in kind. It, 
 or he, (for at this stage it is difficult to draw the 
 line between the two pronouns) does not seem to 
 be regarded as in any way nobler or purer than 
 bis worshippers, or as setting up any ideal for 
 them to follow; but only as having somewhat 
 
224 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 more favour for them than for others. Hence the 
 partial truth of Goethe's description of early re- 
 ligion as 'fear without reverence.' We must not, 
 indeed, transfer the demands of a higher morality 
 to those early times, and say that there was 
 nothing for the savage to look up to in a god 
 upon whom we necessarily look down. But even 
 making all allowances, it is often difficult to detect, 
 in the character of the deities worshipped by un- 
 civilised peoples, the grounds for that element of 
 reverence which must be present as a saving salt in 
 any religion that binds men together. ' If,' we are 
 disposed to say, ' men bowed down to such monsters, 
 ib must have been merely from terror, and not be- 
 cause they found in them a higher self to aid them 
 in their war against their own fears and passions. 
 If they worshipped, it must have been to secure 
 the god as an ally in averting danger and accom- 
 plishing their own wishes, and not because they 
 wished to dedicate themselves to his service. It 
 was a worship of slaves who sought to propitiate or 
 flatter a being, for whom in himself they cared 
 nothing, or whom they secretly hated; and not a 
 surrender of will to a guardian and guide who set 
 before them a higher end than their own caprice.' 
 And it might be added that a further evidence of 
 the degraded character of such superstitious worships 
 is to be found in the fact, that the abject terror of 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 225 
 
 the savage easily changes into presumption; and the 
 prayer and sacrifice, by which he tries to enlist super- 
 natural powers on his side, into the magic or witch- 
 craft, by which he seeks to master or control them. 
 The savage would, if he could, get the better of his 
 god, and reduce him to the condition of the ' gyns ' 
 of the Arabian Nights, who are obliged to serve the 
 possessor of some magic lamp or ring. Thus the god, 
 at a turn of the hand, converts himself into a fetisch 
 or a spirit subjected to a fetisch. For the essen- 
 tial point of what is called fetischism, if we use 
 that name for any general phenomenon of religion, 
 is just this, that the worshipper has no thought of 
 really devoting himself to ends which are represented 
 as belonging to his god, but desires only, by pro- 
 pitiation if propitiation is necessary, by magic if 
 magic will avail — either, in other words, by begging 
 and bribing or by fraud and force — to use the god 
 for his own purposes. In this sense the spirit of 
 "fetischism is the dark shadow which accompanies re- 
 ligion in every stage, from the savage who makes 
 presents to the medicine man of his tribe up to 
 the Christian, who prays, not that God's will may 
 be done but that God may be got to do his will. 
 
 Now, I shall not here inquire whether there is any 
 religion, savage or civilised, in which this element is 
 the whole, and in which, therefore, the god is inerely 
 an object of selfish fear or hope, and not identified 
 
 VOL. I. p 
 
226 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 with any cause or aim to which the individual is 
 willing, or at least is called upon, to devote himself. 
 But I maintain that, just so far as the god is con- 
 ceived as a mere object among other objects, standing 
 on the same level with them, and external both to 
 them and to their worshippers, these are the only- 
 feelings which he can inspire. On the other hand, 
 just so far as the divine object is raised above other 
 objects, and conceived as the representative of some 
 general social aim — as the permanent centre round 
 ,1 which the life of the tribe or the family or the nation 
 '''\ revolves — ^just so far will fear be changed into rever- 
 ence and selfish hope into self-devotion. But if this 
 Change takes place, the object worshipped will ipso facto 
 become idealised, i.e.. it will be filled with a meaning 
 which does not belong to it as a paHicular object : it 
 will be lifted out of the rank of other finite existences, 
 and wiU have a higher value attributed to it. Hence 
 the form of it, as a particular object, will be partially 
 set aside whenever it comes into collision with the 
 function thus ascribed to it. In other words, the 
 form of objectivity which is necessary to the religious 
 consciousness in this stage of its development, will be 
 constrained to carry a content, which properly could 
 only be given to that which is above all finite objects. 
 It wUl be treated as the^ embodiment of a universal 
 principle. On the other hand, in so far as the form 
 masters the content or limits it, the worship will 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 211 
 
 necessarily degenerate into a degrading superstition 
 which does not deserve the name of religion. 
 
 Now I wish, in the meantime, to postpone the 
 consideration of the special nature of the objects 
 worshipped, and to look merely at the general form 
 of objectivity common to aU such religions. To re- 
 present God as a mere object is, as we have seen, 
 to express the divine in an inadequate form, in a 
 form that, at least, cannot be made fully adequate 
 to the idea; for the principle of unity in all objects 
 and subjects cannot be properly represented as one 
 object among others. But, at the same time, it is 
 also true that in some sense the whole is involved 
 in every part of the universe, and therefore any part 
 of it may for a time be taken as a type of the 
 whole. Hence in that early time when a universal 
 principle cannot for itself be realised in thought — 
 when nothing, indeed, can be brought within the 
 reach of the mind, unless it be pictured as an external 
 object — it is of the highest importance that the object 
 selected, be it what it may, should be lifted above 
 other objects, and freed from the limitations that 
 belong to objectivity. When the spiritual cannot yet 
 be separated from the natural, it is of the highest 
 importance that the natural object which represents 
 the spiritual should be, as it were, transfigured by 
 the imagination, so that it may, so far as possible, 
 symbolically take the place of the spiritual. Eor the 
 
228 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 first deliverance of man from, the, sensuous conscious- 
 ness is necessarily the imaginative deliverance, hy 
 which the general form of that consciousness is not 
 changed, but by which, nevertheless, it is made the 
 vehicle of a meaning that does not properly belong 
 to it. 
 
 Now this process of transfiguration of the sensuous 
 consciousness and its objects, this struggle of the 
 spiritual to express itself through the natural, begins 
 with the dawn of religion ; and it goes on continuously 
 till it produces the highest poetic or imaginative 
 representation of the divine, the highest representation 
 of the divine which is possible in a merely sensuous 
 or natural form. It then turns away from the 
 naturalistic or objective form altogether ; Jhe attempt 
 to represent the god as an external object is^ 
 abandoned, and a subjective religion of thought 
 takes its place. Thus the wine of spirit at first 
 fiils~the bdttTes' of sense and then destroys them : 
 imagination first elevates the outward in order to 
 make it a fit expression of the inward meaning, and 
 then, as the meaning still grows, it casts away the 
 outward altogether, and proclaims its inadequacy. It 
 is this process which in rapid outline we have to 
 analyse. 
 
 The savage consciousness, the consciousness of un- 
 civilised man, is rarely 'poetical, though it cannot be 
 said that it is prosaic. It is lawless and arbitrary 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 229 
 
 withLQUt-Jjeing^firee^^ When it gets beyond the coarsest 
 sensuous realism, it wanders without a rein, distorting, 
 the simplest natural facts, confusing the shapes of all 
 things, and satisfying itself with the crudest and most 
 inconsistent hypotheses. Where there is no proper , 
 nature, there can be no proper supernatural ; and the 
 vague sense of something higher than himself, and 
 higher than those nearest objects which alone he 
 comprehends, may attach to anything and wander 
 from it to anything else. Thus in the lowest stage of ! 
 civilisation, it seems often to be a mere chance that 
 directs the feeling of reverence to one thing rather 
 than others, or brings one object rather than another 
 into close connexion with the rehgious life of a 
 tribe. Going a step higher^^we find the beginnings 
 of a poetic mythology connected with the selection 
 and idealisation of special classes of objects. The 
 universal does not yet separate itself as an object 
 of thought from the particular, but objects are selected 
 which have some special significance or suggestiveness ; 
 or, in other words, they are selected for their aesthetic 
 qualities — like the spotless animals which were con- 
 secrated in Egypt. A fartherstep is indicated by 
 the Sphinxes of Egypt, and the composite animals of 
 Assyrian art, in which new combinations are invented 
 to express the growing consciousness of a mystery 
 which is not felt to be adequately symbolised by any 
 natural shape or form. The savage stories, full of 
 
230 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 coarseness and childishness, which served in the in- 
 fancy of man to express his first ideas as to the 
 nature of things, and which show little more than 
 that he had early become aware that there was an 
 enigma in the world to be solved, are gradually 
 softened and refined. Eecent researches in myth- 
 ology have led us to recognise the long struggle by 
 which the poetic imagination gradually triumphed over 
 this crude material. For they have shown that under 
 the highest and most beautiful myths of India or 
 Greece there are to be discovered traces of absurd and 
 almost brutal legends, similar to those which are still 
 found among the savage tribes of Africa or Polynesia. 
 Such discoveries have been regarded as involving 
 something that is degrading to religion and to human 
 nature ; but this is a one-sided view of them. They 
 may destroy some idyllic pictures of the earliest state 
 of man or of particular races. But they are anything 
 but discouraging, when we consider the light which 
 they throw on human progress, the evidence they give 
 of the slow but irresistible effort, continued through 
 generation after generation and century after century, 
 whereby man triumphs over the animal within_hiin 
 and mates it the servant of the spirit. They show, 
 indeed, that the consciousness of a divine power is 
 bound up with his very Ufe, and that, even in his 
 earliest and most childish stage, he is compelled to 
 express it in some simple, and, we may admit, some 
 
THE EARLIEST FORM OF RELIGION. 231 
 
 coarsely sensuous way. But they show farther that, 
 this expression being reached, he does not long remain 
 satisfied with it, but is continually reacting upon it, 
 changing and remoulding it by new efforts of 
 imagination and thought. Thus, in spite of many a 
 failure and many a recoil, man is on the whole 
 steadily advancing toward a fuller and clearer 
 manifestation of the idea, by which he never ceases 
 to be haunted. The lower and cruder we conceive 
 man's first thoughts to have been, the coarser the 
 earthen vessel into which he has at first to put the 
 treasure of his spiritual life, the more powerful 
 becomes the witness of his development to the 
 might of the spiritual principle which urges him, 
 forward in his unhasting, unresting course. The worst' 
 that can be said of. human nature we know already, 
 apart altogether from the teaching of history ; for> 
 we know that the raw materials out of which the j 
 web of our life is woven are the sensations" and 
 appeH?^ of the_ animal. And we know that the' 
 struggle of the awaking spirit with those sensations 
 and appetites is enough to explain any amount of 
 confusion and sensual disturbance in the earliest stages 
 of human existence. But the turbidity of the waters 
 only proves that the angel has come down to trouble 
 them, and the important thing is that when so dis- 
 turbed they have a healing virtue. The significant 
 fact in regard to human history is, not what man 
 
232 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 begins with — for, as a developing being, he must begin 
 with his lowest, the lowest that is possible to a 
 spiritual being in its first immersion in sense — but 
 what he ends with : how, by continual reaction on 
 the product of his first endeavours to manifest and 
 realise what is in him, he turns it into a more and 
 more adequate expression, and so rises on stepping 
 stones of his dead self to higher things. The religious 
 consciousness finds at once the exhibition of its nature j^ 
 '~}^ and the proof of its validity in the very history of its 
 own transformations. 
 
LECTUEE NINTH. 
 
 CONNEXION OF RELIGION IN ITS EARLIEST PHASES WITH 
 MORALITY. 
 
 Relation of Religion and Morality — Thai Objective Religion 
 conceives God as a Father — In what Sense the EaHiest Religion 
 is Ancestor-Worship — The Opposition of Gods and Demons — 
 Social Character of Early Religion and Morality — The Develop- 
 ment of Objective Religion — (1) The Growth of Polytheism and 
 the Effort to reduce the Many Gods to One — Eenotheism — (2) 
 Importance of the Stage in which the Heavens or Heavetdy 
 Bodies came to be worshipped — The Vedic Religion — Why it 
 ends in Pantheism. 
 
 In the last lecture, I showed that religion in its 
 first expression must necessarily take the form of the' 
 sensuous consciousness ; i.e. that the god or gods 
 who are worshipped must be represented as mere 
 objects, existing among other objects and on the same 
 terms with them. And I went on to point out how 
 this objective form of the first religious consciousness 
 is in conflict with the fundamental idea of religion, 
 and how this conflict leads to a progressive improve- 
 ment of that form itself. In this stage it is impossible 
 
234 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 for man to escape from the bonds of sense. He is 
 obliged to represent his god as an external object 
 of perception. But, consistently with this general 
 mode of thought, it is possible for the imagination 
 gradually to elevate the object worshipped above other 
 objects, and to give it a completeness and independ- 
 ence, an ideal perfection, which makes it a fitter 
 representative of the divine. It is the essential 
 function of art and poetry to subserve in this way 
 the higher education of man, by teaching us to see 
 the universal in the form of the particular; or, in 
 other words, to make particular objects represent to 
 us something that is not really identified with their 
 limited existence. The painter has done nothing, 
 unless he has shown us not merely the photographic 
 lineaments of that which he presents to us, but also 
 the beauty that " never was on land or sea " ; and 
 the poet has done nothing, unless he has made 
 his theme the vehicle of a meaning which is not 
 confined to the theme itself, but connects it with 
 ideas, or at least with emotions, which are universal. 
 Hence the agency of art and poetry is just what is 
 needed to meet the wants of the religious mind in its 
 earliest stage, when it is as yet confined to the 
 objective way of thinking, and is obliged to find 
 room for all it would express in this inadequate 
 form. 
 
 But before following out this line of thought any 
 
EARL Y RELIGION AND MORALITY. 235 
 
 farther, we must turn to another aspect of religion. 
 Eeligion is not only a theoretical consciousness, but 
 is always intimately connected with the practical life 
 of man. For, as we have seen, it is always the 
 consciousness, in some more or less adequate form, of 
 a divine power as the principle of unity in a world, 
 of which we are not only spectators but parts. 
 Indeed, the presence of this unity as an element or 
 presupposition of our consciousness is the only reason 
 of man's being religious at all. The idea of it, 
 therefore, not only controls our view of objects in 
 their relations to each other, but also our view of their 
 relations to ourselves, and of our relations to them ; 
 and the most important of all the objects to which we 
 stand in relation are our fellowmen, especially those 
 who are members of the same society. If it is through 
 the objective world, the not-self, that we are conscious 
 of the self, and if it is through the double relation 
 of each to the other that we are conscious of God, yet 
 we must not regard all objects as equally concerned in 
 the development of this higher consciousness. It is 
 not in collision with stones and trees and animals that 
 the light of intelligence and the consciousness of a 
 separate individuality is kindled. It is the tension of 
 conflict with another self that awakes the joy of 
 independent selfhood and the pain of a finite divided 
 / life. " Iron sharpeneth iron : so a man sharpeneth 
 '\ the countenance of his neighbour." But also "as in 
 
236 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 water face answereth to face, so the heart of man 
 to man." The same cause which makes keen the 
 sense of division and antagonism, also gives rise to 
 a perception of the need of union, and to the con- 
 sciousness of the existence of a principle of unity, 
 which is deeper than the division and can overcome 
 it. Thus our consciousness of self is predominantly 
 a consciousness of our distinction from and relation 
 to other men, and our consciousness of God is 
 developed mainly in connexion with this distinction 
 and relation. To take a religious view of life there- 
 fore, is, not only to see a divine agency in the 
 world : it is to recognise that agency as a power 
 which, in lifting us above ourselves, unites us to other 
 individuals and them to us. Eeligion is the acknow- 
 ledgment of a principle, in uniting himself to which, 
 man is at the same time brought into alliance not 
 only with nature but also with his fellowmen. And, 
 though at first it is rather in nature than in human 
 nature that the form is sought under which this divine 
 principle is expressed or represented, yet this does not 
 prevent the being so worshipped from being regarded 
 above all as a principle of unity in the social 
 organism. Man's relation to God is inevitably con- 
 ceived as the ground of a social relation between him- 
 self and other beings like himself, which determines 
 at once their practical obligations to him and his 
 practical obligations to them. 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 237 
 
 In this sense, then, we may say that, as is a 
 man's religion, so is his morality. As he conceives 
 of his relation to the power which determines his 
 place in the world — and especially his place in j 
 relation to other men who with him are the members 
 of one society — so also he conceives of the duty 
 which he owes to them. Those who have denied > 
 that in early times religion had anything to do 1 
 with morality, really meant that it does not produce / 
 what we call moral conduct. And to this it is suffi- 
 cient to answer that their religion is not what 
 we call religion. But it would be absurd to 
 say that at any time man's relation to the beings 
 he conceived as divine has not had a determining 
 influence on his view of his relations to his fellow- 
 men, and of the conduct therefore incumbent on 
 him. And this would least of all be true of the 
 earliest period of human history. Perhaps we might 
 even go farther and say that, then and always, 
 religion and morality are necessary correlates of 
 each other, and that it is impossible to elevate one 
 of them without also elevating the other. Of these 
 reciprocal influences it would not be difficult to 
 find many proofs, but we must confine ourselves to 
 one or two salient points. 
 
 In the first place, I may refer to one very 
 important effect on the conception of man's social 
 relations, which is produced by the objective form 
 
238 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of our first religious consciousness. In the absence 
 of special counteracting causes, the fact that the 
 god who is the priuciple of unity in a society, 
 is conceived as an ohje.ct, carries with it the con- 
 sequence that the connexion of the members of that 
 society with each other and with their god is con- 
 ceived as an external and natural connexion. And, 
 conversely, if the social bond be regarded as merely 
 based on natural relationship, the god who is the 
 principle of unity in the society will be repre- 
 sented as an external object, a merely natural 
 existence. In other words, if the religion be 
 naturalistic and objective, the morality will neces- 
 sarily take the same form, and the social bond will 
 be represented as simply the tie of common blood. 
 And, on the other hand, if the sense of moral 
 obligation does not separate itself from, or reach 
 beyond, the natural ties of kindred, the god who is 
 the principle of unity manifesting itself in that 
 bond of union, will necessarily be represented in 
 some merely natural form, and the connexion of his 
 worshippers with him will be regarded as one of 
 actual physical descent. 
 
 It is, therefore, only what we might expect that 
 in early times such descent should be taken as the 
 limit of the social bond, within which alone any 
 duties to others are acknowledged ; and that the 
 god who preserves and sanctifies the bond of kin- 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 239 
 
 ship should be regarded as the ancestor of all who 
 partake in it. This, however, does not imply that, 
 as Mr. Spencer among others has maintained, the 
 beginning of rehgion was in ancedor-worshvp ; for 
 this would involve that the god worshipped was 
 always, in the first instance, a human being. Now, 
 under the system of Totemism, which is at least 
 one of the earliest forms of social union, we find 
 that the god is an animal, a plant, or, indeed, almost 
 anything rather than a man. And, though a kind 
 of anthropomorphism appears very early — because the 
 sense of the distinction of different grades of being 
 is very weak — yet a clear selection of the form of 
 man as that which is primarily or exclusively divine, 
 comes very late. The consciousness of the opposi- 
 tion between the finite and the infinite first betrays 
 itself in the tendency to seek God in that which is 
 far off from humanity, rather than in that which is 
 nearest to it. And anthropomorphism in its full 
 development is found only where, as in Greece, 
 the human mind is on the point of turning away 
 from all objective forms to seek deity in the sub- 
 jective. While, therefore, I do not deny that an- 
 cestor-worship appears among the earliest forms of 
 religion, yet I am inclined to think that, in the 
 majority of cases at least, it is not that the 
 being worshipped is conceived by his worship- 
 pers as a god because he is an ancestor, but rather 
 
240 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 that he is conceived as an. ancestor because he is 
 believed to be their god. For the god is yet re- 
 presented as a mere object, and the only way in 
 which men can as yet think of an objective power, 
 which is not themselves, as being friendly to them, 
 is by supposing it to be of their own blood. In 
 this way the god cannot be brought near to his 
 ■ worshipper, except by regarding him as a father or 
 remoter ancestor who is still watching over his 
 family. The difficulties of thinking of a plant or 
 an animal as the progenitor of a race of men are 
 disregarded, difficulties of course not very great to 
 those who have as yet no firm hold of the conception 
 of law, and who are ready to believe that anything 
 may come from anything. This is the only rational 
 way in which we can explain how plants and 
 animals, rocks and rivers, and what not, should be 
 at once worshipped as gods and represented as 
 ancestors, while the explanations of those who make 
 ancestor-worship the basis of all religion, are neces- 
 sarily entangled in aU the difficulties of Euhemerism.^ 
 On the other hand, as it is the simplest fact of morals 
 that the natural tie of blood is the form under which 
 
 ^ Cf. Principles of Sociology, Vol. I. Part I. Chap. 22 seq. 
 See especially §§ 170-171, where Mr. Spencer tells ua that the 
 animal names given to gods, such as wolf, fox, and the like, 
 were originally nicknames given to the illustrious forefathers 
 of the race, because of their ferocity, cunning, or other pro- 
 minent characteristics. 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 241 
 
 the consciousness of spiritual relation between man 
 and man first develops and matures itself, so it 
 is only the other aspect of that fact that religion, 
 as the consciousness of the spiritual basis of unity 
 which expresses itself in such relations, should take 
 the form of filial piety. And this holds good even 
 of a time when the idea of humanising the gods, 
 or of recognising humanity as essentially kindred 
 with divinity, is as yet far off. 
 
 If these remarks have any truth, they may enable 
 us to realise two points that are of no little import- 
 ance in the history of religion. In the first place, we > 
 can see how it is that in all religious Particularism, 
 i.e. in all systems of religion in which the god is 
 identified with a particular object in the natural 
 world, and is conceived as the head or father of a 
 particular clan or kinship or nation, we have a 
 polytheism or plurality of gods, at least in the sense 
 that the family, tribe, or nation, while it worships its 
 own god, does not deny the existence of other gods ^ 
 who preside over other families or nations. In the 
 second place, we are enabled to understand why, 
 under these conditions, religion and morality stand on 
 the one side contrasted with, but easily passing into, 
 superstition and immorality on the other. For, at 
 
 ' Judges xi. 24 : " Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh 
 thy god giveth thee to possess ? So whomsoever the Lord our 
 God hath dispossessed before us, them will we possess." 
 
 VOL. I. Q 
 
242 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 this stage, morality simply means the solidarity of the 
 little society, as expressing itself in the faithfulness of 
 its members to each other ; and religion means simply 
 their loyalty and devotion to the friendly power, which 
 is represented as the forefather of the family or kin- 
 ship. But the society, or kinship, is surrounded by 
 other similar societies which are unfriendly to it, and 
 serve other gods. Every victory of his own society 
 thus becomes to the member of it a victory of Ms 
 god, and every defeat a victory of other gods. And, 
 as at this stage he can scarcely conceive of the 
 difference between good and evil powers, except as the 
 difference between a power that is friendly and one 
 that is adverse to the society with which aU his life 
 is identified, so it may be said that the gods of other 
 societies are his demons, and that his god is a demon 
 to them. Thus the war of good and evil is for him 
 a war at once in heaven and in earth, a conflict of 
 natural and also of supernatural powers. And a blow 
 at the existence of the kinship or tribe to which he 
 belongs is for him a victory won by the powers of evil 
 over the powers of good ; or, in other words, a victory 
 won by superstition and immorality over religion and 
 morality. If the circle of beings with whom nature 
 and custom have made him one — the little friendly 
 world in which he has moved and had his being, 
 I to which all his higher life is attached, which has 
 been continually working for him, as he has been 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 243 
 
 working for it — be broken up, he becomes an outcast 
 without rights and without duties, and his gods have 
 been dethroned by hostile supernatural powers which 
 he must now seek somehow to evade or appease. As 
 Homer says, he is cKppijTwp, ade/xia-TOi, avecmo?, 
 without kin, without law, without a hearth on which 
 he can burn incense to the gods of his fathers. He 
 is cut off at once from the charities of heaven and 
 those of earth ; and his unprotected state, as it leaves 
 him open to the constant fear of outrage from men, so 
 it makes him ready to crouch in slavish terror at any 
 appearance which he can regard as the threat of an 
 angry god. On the other hand, any tribal triumph or 
 deliverance becomes to him the sign that his god is 
 stronger than other gods, and at the same time knits 
 him in closer union to the kinship that has thus 
 received the blessing of heaven. The sense of the 
 privilege and honour of belonging to such a society, 
 and of the duty of living for it, becomes strengthened, 
 and he conceives of the gods of his conquered foes as 
 only defeated demons, who can do nothing against 
 him. The consciousness of belonging to a victorious 
 race brings with it a growing sense of personal dignity 
 and increased readiness to sacrifice himself for the life 
 of the community which is the source of his pride. 
 And this pride is at the same time purified and 
 elevated by the conviction that in serving the com- 
 munity he is serving his god. Thus religion and 
 
244 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 morality, the consciousness of solidarity with the 
 community and the consciousness of unity with the 
 god whom he worships, combine to redeem his life 
 from the fear of unfriendly powers, natural or super- 
 natural, and to educate him to that higher fear or 
 reverence which is the ' beginning of wisdom.' 
 
 It appears then that religion combines itself with 
 a distinct morality and so disengages itself from super- 
 stition, just in so far as in it the alliance of the mem- 
 bers of a kinship with each other is consecrated by 
 their alliance with a divine being who is conceived 
 as at once their god and their father. Farther, as 
 this divine being is often, if not always, represented as 
 some natural existence other than man, the alliance 
 between man and man is also an alliance between 
 man and nature, or at least some part of nature.^ And 
 both alliances are conceived on the only type then 
 comprehensible, i.e. on the type of blood relationship. 
 Such an alliance raises a man above his natural self, 
 by making him regard himself solely, or at least mainly, 
 as the member of a society, devotion to the service of 
 which is also devotion to God. Outside of this circle 
 he finds only hostile or indifferent powers, and in the 
 case of defeat or disaster to the society, his religion 
 sinks into spirit-scaring and magic. Indeed, if we go 
 back to the earliest stage — if that stage was anything 
 
 ' Cf. Robertson Smith, Lectures on tlie Religion of the Semites, 
 First Series, p. 117 seq. 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 245 
 
 like what we find among the lowest savages — the divi- 
 sion between religion and superstition is very uncertain 
 and fluctuating ; and, as a consequence or necessary 
 correlate of this, the social bond is only strong enough 
 to save life from being what Hobbes called it, a 
 ' war of all against all.' But, on the other hand, as 
 we nowhere find an entire absence of social unity, 
 so we nowhere find a mere demon-worship, in which 
 there is no being worthy to be regarded as a god, no 
 favouring power which can be reverenced as well as 
 feared. Of course the line is not easy to draw ; for, 
 with the savage, the consciousness of the friendliness 
 of the god is imperfect and easily disturbed. His own 
 ferocity constantly tends to turn the object of his 
 worship into a cruel and arbitrary being, whose favour 
 can be won only by dreadful sacrifices and pro- 
 pitiations. On the other hand, the god, just because 
 he is a natural object, or the personification of a class 
 of such objects, is still partly a fetisch, — if we may use 
 the word fetischism to indicate that the being wor- 
 shipped is still regarded merely as one finite thing 
 or object among others. And, just so far as this is 
 the case — so far as the object is not lifted by 
 imagination out of the ranks of other objects, so that 
 practically it ceases to be treated as a mere object — 
 the fear of it and the hope of favour from it cannot 
 pass into a real religious reverence and devotion. 
 At the same time, while it is hard to detect the 
 
246 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 early steps of the process by which light and dark- 
 ness, religion and superstition, morality and im- 
 morality, are first separated, we can see that from the 
 beginning the advance is in the direction already 
 indicated. Eeligion at first grows and develops in 
 close connexion with social morality. At a later 
 time there may, indeed, arise an individualistic 
 morality, a morality which does not, directly at least, 
 rest on the sense of community with others ; and 
 also a religion which connects itself with a moral 
 ideal which is purely subjective : we shall have in the 
 sequel to consider more closely what is the origin and 
 nature of such morality and religion. But in an 
 earlier age it may safely be said that morality must 
 base itself upon the consciousness that man as an indi- 
 vidual is only the organ and servant of some narrower 
 or wider community, — be it the community of family, 
 of tribe, or of nation ; and upon the readiness of 
 the individual to act in the spirit of this belief, and to 
 surrender his individual interests, not indeed to the 
 egoism of others, but to the greater ego of the com- 
 munity. And such morality has always gone with a 
 corresponding religion ; for the greater ego, to the 
 service of which life was devoted, was always con- 
 ceived as having an existence not merely in the 
 changing collection of individual beings, who at any 
 time constituted, so to speak, the lody of the com- 
 munity, but in an ideal and divine being who was its 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 247 
 
 soul. Thus the worship of a family god consecrated 
 the life of the family as something for which the indi- 
 viduals, who in successive generations made up the 
 family, had to live and die, and from which they 
 derived all the worth and dignity of their individual 
 lives. The theory of existence, so to speak, was that 
 one life flowed out from one centre in the god, who 
 was the head and original parent of the family ; that it 
 manifested itself in the family as one body, all whose 
 members were continually nourished from the one 
 divine source of its life ; and that it was ever flowing 
 back to that source in the failing and death of the 
 individual members, only to reappear in the new 
 generation that took their place. The importance 
 attributed in early times to the persistence of the 
 family or the gens in new representatives, who should 
 keep up the domestic or gentile sacra, so that there 
 should always be ' a seed to serve ' the god of the kin- 
 ship, shows how closely these ideas hung together: 
 the ideas of the solidarity of the kinship, of 
 the subordination of the life of the individual 
 to its life, and of the common worship of a god who 
 was the permanent centre round which it revolved 
 and in whose name it fought and conquered. Such 
 devotion to the community in the earliest times was 
 made somewhat easier by the very narrowness of the 
 little society, by the instant necessity for union as the 
 condition without which neither it nor its members 
 
248 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 could survive, and by the consequent impossibility 
 of individual interests entering into an effective rivalry 
 with those that were common. Under this state of 
 things it was not so much that the independence of 
 the individuals was suppressed, as that it never got 
 time or opportunity to develop itself. The society 
 was socialistic, not because of the self-surrender of 
 its members, but because its members had not yet 
 acquired any sense of a right and honour belonging to 
 them as separate persons. Hence the only danger to 
 the unity of the society lay in the caprices and 
 passions of the natural man, a danger which all the 
 influences of custom, tradition, and religion were em- 
 ployed to counteract; and which they could counter- 
 act the more easily that no moral idea or sense of 
 right was enlisted on the other side. If individuals at 
 this stage resisted social pressure, it was not in the 
 name of any individual right which they conceived 
 themselves to possess. The defective differentiation 
 of early society was thus one of the safeguards of 
 its unity. But, at the same time, it lowered the 
 character of the social unity, the necessity of which 
 was not yet mediated by the freedom of its mem- 
 bers ; for there can be no altruism in any high 
 sense where there is so little room left for egoism, 
 [and to be truly unselfish man must know in all 
 ; the fulness of its meaning what it is to be a self. 
 And the defectiveness of the moral bond of man to 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 249 
 
 man in such a society of course carries with it an 
 equally defective stage of religion ; for where man is 
 not free in relation to man, there he cannot stand in a 
 spiritual relation to God. 
 
 From this it follows that the natural bond of 
 the family or kinship must separate itself from, and 
 subordinate itself to, the comparatively artificial and 
 ideal bond of the state, whose unity lies in the laws 
 on which it is based, ere we can have, in the full 
 sense of the word, a spiritual morality and religion. 
 Yet, at the same time, in spite of this defect, the family 
 is not only the first society but the type of all society ; 
 for it is the true socialistic community, in which the 
 differences of individuals are dissolved, and egoism and 
 altruism are, as it were, identified by affection. And, 
 for similar reasons, it may fairly be said that in the 
 earliest society, in which the tie of blood is the 
 fundamental basis, and in which that tie is conceived 
 as uniting the members at once to each other and to 
 their God, we find a prefigurement or anticipation of 
 the highest kind of community to which man can rise, 
 — a community of man with man in the service of a 
 God who finds his highest manifestation just in this 
 community, a kingdom of this world which is also a 
 kingdom of heaven. Without, however, looking for- 
 ward so far, we may observe that it is this same 
 principle, — showing itself on a wider scale, and supple- 
 mented by other principles of which we cannot yet 
 
250 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 speak — which we see manifesting itself in the civic 
 and religious life of Greece. Thus it was the ideal 
 unity of the Athenian state, as worshipped in the 
 goddess Athene, which held all the citizens together in 
 one community in the present, and bound the present 
 of Athens to the past and the future. And in spite of 
 the wide division which, as we shall see, separates the 
 religion and morality of Israel from those of other 
 nations, it was undoubtedly, in the first instance, con- 
 nected with the idealisation of a domestic and tribal 
 unity, which expressed itself in the worship of the 
 God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and which united 
 all the members of the nation together by binding 
 them to one Lord. In short, whatever more we may 
 find in these later and more developed religions, we 
 invariably discover this primitive type at the bottom ; 
 a type in which an organised social life, with a tradi- 
 tion of the past and a hope for the future, is based on, 
 and sustained by, faith in a divine principle, which is 
 at once a power over nature and the abiding centre 
 of the changeful life of man. 
 
 This is the general type of religion to which almost 
 aU the religions of the ancient world may be referred, 
 though it is no doubt variously modified in different 
 ages and nations. In the history of its development 
 two points seem especially to deserve notice : on the 
 one hand, the growth of polytheism, and, on the other 
 hand, the effort to recover the divine unity either by 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 251 
 
 generalisation or by a monarchical subordination of gods. 
 [It does not seem to be the case that the earliest religion 
 is distinctly polytheistic, nor that it is distinctly mono- 
 theistic. As the god is then necessarily conceived as 
 an object among other objects, though of a higher 
 character than belongs to them, so the idea of his 
 existence does not exclude the existence of other gods. 
 Nay, we might even say it implies it, since the god is 
 represented as the head of a little kinship, which 
 stands in a relation, sometimes friendly but generally 
 hostile, to other similarly organised kinships. Again, 
 it was inevitable that in course of time a process of 
 aggregation and segregation of such social units should 
 take place. Kinships which formerly had only a small 
 number of members, and which, therefore, were held 
 together by the strongest inward and outward necessity, 
 grew into larger groups of families or tribes which had 
 no such intense feeling of solidarity. And every such 
 partial division tended to give rise to some difference 
 of worship. Or again, in the struggle for existence, 
 social units which formerly were separate, were forced 
 into unity by conquest, or by the necessity of resisting 
 a common enemy; and the different gods which had 
 been worshipped by the different sections came to be 
 treated as concurrent powers, which divided the divine 
 authority between them. Again, as men's ideas of 
 nature widened, there was a tendency to supplement 
 the deficiency of a god who represented one department 
 
252 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 or aspect of nature, by introducing other gods who repre- 
 sented other departments or aspects of it. The same 
 impulse which at a later time led to a multiplication 
 of the attributes or names of the divinity, at an earlier 
 stage was satisfied in a simpler way by the multipli- 
 cation of divinities themselves. The facility with which, 
 under this phase of thought, men were ready to in- 
 crease the number of their gods, cannot easily be under- 
 stood by those with whom, as with us, monotheism has 
 dried up the springs of mythology. But a book like 
 Sir Alfred Lyall's Asiatic Studies vividly brings before 
 us the fact that there are still many races in that stage 
 of development when any new circumstance, event, or 
 person, may become the occasion for the apotheosis of a 
 new divinity. Half conscious that what he is seeking 
 is the infinite, though still bound by his imagination 
 to the finite, the polytheist has a secret dissatisfaction 
 with his own religion; and this drives him continually 
 to add new divinities to his Pantheon, as if by the 
 multiplication of finites he could reach the infinite. 
 
 On the other hand, this tendency to differentiate is 
 met by an opposite tendency to unity. The idea of 
 God, which is bound up with man's consciousness of 
 himself — i.e. the idea of God as the infinite principle 
 of unity which is beyond all the differences of the 
 finite, though implied in them all — is continually 
 working against a mere external polytheistic system 
 which ranks the gods together as independent powers ; 
 
EARL Y RELIGION AND MORALITY. 253 
 
 it is continually breaking down the boundaries which 
 have been set up between their separate spheres, and 
 extending without limit the attributes of any god that 
 is at the moment the object of worship. Thus is pro- 
 duced the phenomenon to which Professor Max Miiller 
 has given the name of Henotheism, i.e. a polytheism, in 
 which the gods are, as it were, continually melting into 
 each other ; or in which any one of them may be 
 stretched to the infinite so as to leave no room for the 
 operation of- the others. The very attitude of worship 
 is an attitude of devotion, of absolute self-surrender, 
 which in the intensity of its feeling excludes all 
 reservation, and so tends to Hft its object beyond all 
 the limits which at other times may be recognised for 
 it. Thus the chaos of Polytheism is never without' 
 some beginnings of a cosmos ; or, perhaps we should 
 rather say, the religious instinct, with its controlling 
 tendency to the one and the infinite, is continually 
 striving to gain the mastery over the multiplicity of 
 forms which in this stage of thought are forced upon 
 it by sense and imagination. 
 
 It is not here necessary to speak of the mani- 
 fold shapes of mythology which have appeared in the 
 long struggle of religion with the first inadequate form 
 of its expression. Perhaps, at the present stage of 
 inquiry, it is impossible, if it ever will be possible, 
 ^to state exactly the steps by which mythological con- 
 ceptions were gradually elevated and finally abolished. 
 
254 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Here I shall confine myself to pointing out one oi 
 two of the most prominent crises in the long struggle. 
 The first of these is that which has given rise to what 
 is called roughly the solar theory of mythology. In 
 many nations — among the Peruvians and Mexicans 
 in America, and again in different ways in Egypt, 
 in China, and in early India — we find a worship of 
 the heavens or the heavenly bodies, of the great 
 elemental powers of sky and earth, rising above 
 the undergrowth of domestic and tribal worships, 
 limiting and dominating though never destroying 
 them. And this religious progress seems to go 
 along with the development of a wider national 
 unity, both as its effect and its cause. The absurd 
 extension at one time given to the solar mythic 
 theory has of late produced a reaction which has 
 in the main been wholesome, in so far as it has 
 led to the rejection of one exclusive interpretation 
 of myths. But the main vice of that theory was 
 that it referred to the earliest period of religious 
 history a mode of conception which really indi- 
 cates a considerable advance in civilisation. Some 
 childish myths about the sun and the heavenly 
 bodies, indeed, appear to be as early as anything 
 we can trace in the history of mythology ; but the 
 marked predominance of such ideas, and the separ- 
 ation of them from the crowd of other mythic 
 fancies, appears to be the characteristic of a par- 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 255 
 
 ticular stage in the development of man, — a stage 
 in which he has attained to a certain width and 
 freedom of view as to the nature of the world 
 in which he is placed, partly as the cause, and 
 partly as the effect, of a wider national conscious- 
 ness. The physical universalism of the heavens, 
 if we may use the expression, is thus the first 
 form in which the idea of a universal God, a God 
 who is above, though not as yet exclusive of aU 
 others, presents itself to the spirit of man. Aris- 
 totle, in speaking of the Eleatics, the first school of 
 philosophy that laid hold of the idea of the unity 
 of the world as an abstract principle, says that 
 Xenophanes, the founder of that school, " looking 
 to the universe as a whole, declared that God is 
 the One." It was by a similar process of thought 
 that, at a much earlier date, the Chinese, the 
 Egyptians, the Indians, the Persians, — in short, almost 
 all the nations with whom civilisation may be said 
 to have originated, — were led to raise their eyes 
 above the special forms of nature to the over- 
 arching heaven, and to seek in those heavenly 
 bodies which stand in general relations to the 
 whole life of nature and man for the main em- 
 bodiment of their idea of the divine. And the same 
 lifting of the spirit, which thus separated the 
 celestial god or gods from the totems or family and 
 tribal divinities of an earlier age, awakened at the 
 
256 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 same time the consciousness of a national life! 
 reaching beyond the bonds of family or tribe. The 
 races that thus literally raised their eyes and 
 their spirits to heaven, became the aristocracy, the 
 conquering and civilising races of the early world, 
 just because they claimed direct descent from, or 
 relationship to, natural powers, which were regarded 
 as universal in their dominion. The Vedic hymns 
 preserve for us the authentic expression of this 
 early phase of the spiritual life of man, the poetic 
 revelation of the thoughts and feelings of those who 
 first recognised that they had ' a citizenship in 
 heaven.' The proud sense of belonging to a race 
 of higher birth and higher powers than other races, 
 the fearless outlook upon nature and upon human 
 life, the freedom from grovelling superstition, and 
 the soaring strength of an imaginative sympathy 
 which forces all nature to become an instrument for 
 expressing the emotions of the human soul — these, 
 which are the characteristics of the poets of the 
 Veda, are only the natural indications of the in- 
 spiring power of this new idea upon a people that 
 was fit to be its recipient. No wonder that, by its 
 consciousness of alliance with powers that controlled 
 all nature, the Aryan race was lifted above all i 
 fear of disaster either from envious gods or mortal 
 enemies, and that it carried into the struggle with 
 other races an energy of spirit which speedily made 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 257 
 
 it the first conqueror of India. Animated by such 
 
 a faith and by the higher sense of national unity, 
 
 the early Aryans came upon other races like superior 
 
 beings whom it was useless to resist. We might say 
 
 of them in relation to other peoples what is said of 
 
 Coriolanus in relation to Eome, they took them 
 
 " as the osprey does the fish, 
 By sovereignty of nature." 
 
 Now, the principle of this religion and morality is 
 the same as that of which we have already spoken. 
 Its social bond is still a kinship of men to men, based 
 on their common kinship to a god or gods. The gods, 
 moreover, are still conceived as outward objects, and 
 the tie that binds them to their worshippers is still 
 thought of as a natural tie of blood. But subject to 
 these general limitations, it is obvious that a great 
 advance has been achieved, and that we have here 
 reached, at least in one aspect of it, the culminating 
 point of objective, religion. For the objects selected for 
 worship are as unlimited as objects can be : they are 
 objects to which it is difficult to conceive any indi- 
 vidual or race as standing in an exclusive relation. 
 And, indeed, the very conception of such an exclusive 
 relation begins with this religion to disappear ; for the 
 Vedic hymns already trace all races back to the same 
 divine origin, though in various ways they claim a more 
 direct and honourable relation to the di-vine power for 
 the Aryan race than for any other. Again, as it is an 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
258 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 objective religion, the Vedic religion is still polythe- 
 istic. Por not only does it leave room 'beneath it for 
 an undergrowth of family and gentile worships, but 
 even the unity of the heavenly power is with it 
 broken into many differences ; and beside Varuna, the 
 most comprehensive name under which the divinity is 
 worshipped, we have Mitra, Agni, Indra, and a host of 
 forms which represent one or other aspect of the great 
 power of nature. But the separate personality or 
 individuality of the gods, though it stands out vividly 
 in the poetic representation of them, is yet very 
 easily thrown aside when it has served its imme- 
 diate purpose. The ' many ' sinks back into the 'one '; 
 or, by the henotheistic process to which I have 
 already referred, each divinity in turn absorbs all the 
 others. Thus the polytheism of India soon begins to 
 betray that pantheism which is latent in it, and the 
 multiplicity of gods yields to the conception of one 
 universal Power which is present ia all finite forms 
 of gods and men alike, which produces and consumes 
 them all in turn, which through all their variety 
 "spreads undivided, operates unspent," and which 
 alone is, while they only seem. The physical univer- 
 sality of the heavens was the stepping-stone upon 
 which the religious mind of India rose to the abstract 
 universality of thought, the Absolute Being in which 
 everything else is lost. This pantheism is the final 
 outcome of polytheism, the fatal gulf that must 
 
EARLY RELIGION AND MORALITY. 259 
 
 ultimately swallow up all merely objective religions. 
 For religion, so long as it seeks the infinite and divine 
 in objects without us, must, time after time, discover 
 that the objects it has selected are finite and therefore 
 not divine ; and even when it turns its eyes to the 
 all-embracing heaven, it has to learn that the ' heaven 
 of heavens cannot contain ' God, any more than a river 
 or a tree, an animal or a man. Eehgion is, therefore, ; 
 reduced to the worship of an abstract infinite Being, 
 in which all that is finite is submerged and lost. It 
 can save itself from such a euthanasia, such a gradual 
 loss of all positive content or meaning, only by aban- 
 doning the purely objective representation of God, and 
 by recognising that in the inner life of the self or 
 subject, there is a higher revelation of Him than can 
 be found in any object as such, or even in the whole 
 world of objects. 
 
LECTURE TENTH. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF GEEECE. 
 
 The movement through Pantheism to Subjective Religion in the 
 Upanishada — The Oreek Phase of Objective Religion — How its 
 Anthropomorphism, mediates the Transition to Subjective Re- 
 ligion — That it (1) Humanises the Nature-Powers ; and (2) 
 Substitutes a Relation to Man for the Relation to Nature — 
 Characteristics of Oreek Art — Tendency to Unify Oreek 
 Polytheism,: (1) by setting Pate above the Oods ; and (2) 
 by introducing the Monotheistic Idea — Herodotus and the 
 Tragedians. 
 
 In the last lecture I attempted to deal with the 
 general characteristics of what I have called objective 
 religion, i.e. the religion in which God, who is properly 
 conceived as the unity beyond all differences, espe- 
 cially the difference of subject and object, is repre- 
 sented as one object among others. I pointed out 
 that, while the object selected as divine need not be 
 man, and in the earliest times is generally not man, 
 yet that object, whatever it be, is commonly regarded 
 as the ancestor of the family or tribe that worships 
 it ; because blood-relationship is as yet the only type 
 under which the alliance of man with man, and there- 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 261 
 
 fore also the alliance of man with God, can be con- 
 ceived. In this way, the god is viewed as an ancestor 
 whose blood flows in all the members of a kinship, 
 and whose office is to protect it against other kinships 
 and their rival gods. Such a system is necessarily 
 polytheistic, in the sense that it acknowledges a multi- 
 plicity of divine powers, who are opposed to each 
 other as are the kinships they protect. Polytheism, in 
 the sense of the worship of many gods, seems often to 
 arise by the coalescence of many kinships into a wider 
 society, or by the conquest of one kinship by another. 
 Now I pointed out that a culminating point in 
 the development of such polytheism is that in 
 which we have a heavenly god or gods raised to a 
 position of superiority over the other gods. Such a 
 worship has in many nations been the indication of 
 the rise of a wider national consciousness. Of this 
 process the sun-worship of Peru, the heaven-worship of 
 China, the Egyptian worship of the celestial powers 
 that produce the vicissitude of night and day, summer 
 and winter, are different instances. But the highest 
 example of it is found in the Vedic hymns, wherein 
 the early Aryans expressed their consciousness of a 
 divinity which manifested itself in the heavenly and 
 elemental powers, and which also was the source of 
 the nobler stream of life that ran in their own veins, 
 as contrasted with the other races of India against 
 whom they were fighting. 
 
262 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 The Vedic, like the Egyptian religion, was a kind of 
 polytheism,; for the different heavenly forms deified 
 were regarded as separate powers which in a manner 
 supplemented one another. But, on the other hand, 
 the worship of such powers itself carried with it a 
 kind of physical suggestion of universality and unity 
 which was never quite lost sight of The result of 
 this was the phenomenon which Professor Max Miiller 
 has called Henotheism. Each divinity at the moment 
 of worship swells out into a universal power and 
 absorbs all the others, or again the different divinities 
 are easily melted together into one by a new effort 
 of imaginative construction. Finally, as reflexion 
 advances, this wavering and uncertain picture of 'gods 
 many and lords many,' comes to be regarded as a 
 mere show and appearance of diversity, in which the 
 one infinite being masks himself The Indian mind 
 is never very far from an abstract pantheism, and 
 before the Vedic collection of hymns was completed, 
 it had reached and expressed it with no uncertain 
 sound. Thus, even at this early date, objective religion 
 was attempting to escape from the finitude which 
 necessarily attaches to objects, as such, into the abyss 
 of a negative infinite. And the outward change which 
 raised a priestly contemplative caste above all the 
 others, and especially above the proud Aryan warriors 
 who still held the supremacy in the early Vedic age, 
 was highly favourable to such a transition. India, in 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 263 
 
 fact, never developed a higher social life than that of 
 the warlike Aryan tribes of the Indus; and these, in 
 the progress of their conquest of India, lost hold of 
 that national consciousness vrhich was just dawning 
 among them before they were severed from each other. 
 And the work of conquest itself, while it maintained 
 their superiority as a caste or castes of nobler origin, 
 produced no higher social organisation than that of 
 an aggregation of subject tribes under a despotic 
 ruler. For the same reason, their polytheism did not 
 develop towards the comparative order of the Greek 
 pantheon ; and the increasing anthropomorphism of 
 later times brought with it only an additional source 
 of disorder. Hence also the growing consciousness of 
 a unity beneath the multiplicity of the gods could only 
 take an abstract form, the form of an undefined 
 Being or Substance, out of which all was supposed 
 to come and to which everything must return. The 
 Brahmanic religion only rose to a pantheism, which 
 was an acosmism, to a unity which was no principle 
 of order in the manifold differences of things, but 
 merely a gulf in which all difference was lost. And 
 the ethics which could spring from such a faith was 
 only the negative ethics of an asceticism which 
 renounced the world and withdrew from it as an 
 empty illusion. The Upanishads, which contain the 
 last philosophic expression of the Vedic religion, 
 celebrate in endless variety of phrase the triumph of 
 
264 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION: 
 
 the soul over the objective world, which it leaves 
 behind in its nothingness, in order that it may lose 
 itself in the Infinite Being. 
 
 In the Upanishads we have also another change, 
 the change from objective to subjective religion; but of 
 that I do not wish as yet to speak. Here I wish 
 rather to deal with another form of what we may still 
 regard as objective religion, though, owing to the char- 
 acter of the object which it selects as divine, it is 
 widely separated from most other religions of this 
 type. In a sense, all the religions of which we 
 have spoken are vaguely anthropomorphic, just because 
 they want a consciousness of the distinction between 
 man and other beiags. Greek religion also is anthro- 
 pomorphic, but it is so with a clear consciousness of 
 that distinction. It is the first religion which 
 definitely conceives man as the highest of natural 
 beiags, and, because he is the highest, regards his 
 nature as that which is most like to the divine. It is 
 the first which distinctly levels nature up to man, 
 instead of levelling man down to nature. It, therefore, 
 not only 'personifies the natural powers which it lifts to 
 heaven but humanises them. Starting from the basis 
 of something like the Vedic worship of the powers 
 of nature, it proceeds to invest these powers with a 
 complete human individuality, which sometimes alto- 
 gether conceals that basis. In the Vedas the heavens, 
 the fire, the winds, the storm are presented as deities 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 265 
 
 in vivid individualised images, but such individualisa- 
 tion is only for the moment of poetic vision : it does 
 not hinder the power so envisaged from returning in 
 the next moment into the vagueness of a mere natural 
 object, which itself is easily merged in the unity of 
 nature. In Greece, on the other hand, each aspect or 
 form of nature which is grasped by the fancy of 
 mythology, once for all takes on an individuality, 
 which is so definite and characteristic that it 
 seems to detach itself altogether from its natural 
 root. In gods like Apollo and Athene the traces 
 of a naturalistic origin remain only, like the fawn 
 ears of Donatello in Hawthorne's romance, as a 
 faint indication of that out of which they have de- 
 veloped. In others, such as Poseidon or Pan, the 
 traces may be more distinct; but all have been to 
 a large extent humanised and liberated from the bonds 
 of outward necessity. This depression of nature into 
 a subordinate place, or, if you like, this rise of man 
 above nature, was the essential change by which the 
 Greek genius broke away from the original Aryan 
 stock, and entered upon its separate course of develop- 
 ment ; and certain parts of the Greek mythology itself, [ 
 such as the legends about the conquest of the earlier j 
 gods by the gods of Olympus, seem to indicate that! 
 the Greeks themselves were not without a conscious- 
 ness of this change. Nor can we be content to regard 
 such myths only as glimpses of truth resting upon 
 
266 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 some half-forgotten tradition of the past. Eather, we 
 must recognise in them the expression of a contrast 
 upon which the Greek mind is continually dwelling, 
 and which furnishes the great theme of its mythology. 
 The idea of humanity — meaning by humanity the 
 peculiar powers of intelligence and will by which man 
 is distinguished from the animals — as victorious over 
 nature, is. over brute force guided only by instinct and 
 passion — is a central thought which reproduces itself 
 in almost every Greek myth : in the war of the Olym- 
 pians with the Titans, in the slaying of the Python by 
 Apollo, in the hunting of Artemis, in the labours of 
 Herakles. In many of these myths, indeed, we may 
 detect au original naturalistic meaning, a solar or 
 elemental significance ; but this, even in the earliest 
 poetry of Greece, has fallen altogether into the back- 
 ground or received a new interpretation. The progress 
 of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac has 
 been lost in the civilising labours of the hero who rids 
 the earth of its monsters ; and the wild animals that 
 surrounded the Ephesian goddess of production have 
 been changed into the conquered victims of the " queen 
 and huntress, chaste and fair." The gods of Greece 
 are powers that make, perhaps we may not say strictly, 
 ' for righteousness,' but certainly for civilisation. They 
 are man's forerunners in the work of taming and sub- 
 duing nature into his servant ; and it is his glory that 
 he can follow them in their labours. If the Greek 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 267 
 
 regards himself as superior to the men of other races, 
 it is just because he conceives himself to be specially 
 gifted with this ordering intelligence, which does not 
 rush blindly to its aims, but with wise self-restraint 
 and subordination of impulse, considers deliberately 
 the means whereby they are to be attained. Aristotle, 
 when he tells us that the barbarians have only reason 
 enough to obey a rational authority which is placed 
 without them in another, but that the Greeks alone 
 possess the reason that can originate and command, 
 is only expressing in a less naive manner a thought 
 that is already present to Homer, when he makes the 
 Greeks advance to battle in ordered and silent 
 ranks under wise commanders inspired by Athene, 
 while the Trojans stream out in a confused and 
 shouting mob, driven forward by Ares, the god who is 
 the embodiment of animal ferocity and reckless passion. 
 We can detect two steps in the process of humanis- 
 ing which the Greek gods undergo. Of the first of 
 these we have already spoken, and it was in great 
 part completed even at the time of Homer. The gods 
 of Greece, even while they were still conceived as 
 nature-powers, become more and more distinctly 
 humanised and individualised ; whereas in most 
 Asiatic religions, and particularly in the Vedic system, 
 they are only personified; and their fictitious person- 
 ality easily melts away into the natural power or 
 principle from which for a moment it has been 
 
268 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 detached by the poetic effort after realisation. The 
 reason is that the eye of the Asiatic poet was 
 really upon nature and not upon man. He might, 
 indeed, attribute human faculties and relationships 
 to the gods, but he did not seek in any further 
 way to bring them near to himself. But the Greek 
 was not satisfied with this; he sought to realise 
 every trait of character and outward appearance, till 
 the god became as definitely individualised for the 
 imagination as any earthly hero. Indeed, in the clear 
 atmosphere of the Homeric muse, where the heroes 
 are exalted by reverence above the ordinary level of 
 humanity, and the gods are drawn down towards it 
 by the need for imaginative realisation, the only 
 distinction left seems to be the freedom of the 
 gods from decay and death, from the limit of mortality 
 to which the heroes are still subjected ; and even that 
 limit could be crossed, and was supposed to have been 
 crossed in one transcendent instance. As Aristotle 
 says: men become gods, 8l apeTrj^ xnrep^oXriv, by 
 transcendent merit. "The gods are immortal men 
 and men are mortal gods." If, therefore, we still 
 regard the Greek divinities as nature-powers, yet 
 this means only that every natural agency is ex- 
 plained, and, we might even say, explained away, by 
 an idealised human figure, through whom its obscure 
 meaning is raised into the articulate language of 
 human passion and human will. 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 269 
 
 And this necessarily goes along with another change. 
 Not only are the gods humanised, but in the case at 
 least of many of the most prominent figures of Greek 
 mythology, the connexion of the god with nature 
 becomes loosened, and a new connexion with human 
 life is substituted in its place. The change by which 
 the life of the country, the pastoral and agricultural 
 life, dependent on incalculable natural powers for its 
 success, becomes subordinated to the life of cities, with 
 its artificial wants and resources and its relative free- 
 dom from the bondage of nature, hastened this new 
 development. Hence Zeus, the god of heaven, 
 who in earlier times was almost identified with the 
 heaven itself, came to be looked upon mainly as the 
 god of justice, the source of aU rightful order and 
 authority in the state. Apollo's connexion with the 
 outward light of the sun fell into the background, and 
 he was thought of mainly as the god of poetry and 
 prophecy, whose inspiration must guide the minds of 
 men when their own wisdom fails. Athene, even in 
 Homer, has already ceased to be the heavenly fire, 
 the lightning which bursts from the head of Zeus, and 
 has become the source of that practical wisdom, that 
 valour mixed with prudence and self-command, which 
 was to find its real embodiment in the civic life of 
 Athens. The interests of art and science, as well as 
 of a political and social life which, for the first time, 
 was based not mainly on kinship, but rather on law 
 
270 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 and constitution had become the absorbing interests 
 of existence, and they were therefore those with which 
 the idea of the divine was most closely associated. 
 
 Now, in this humanising of the gods there is a 
 certain ambiguity which deserves to be carefully con- 
 sidered. In selecting the human form as that which 
 is peculiarly divine, the Greek might seem to be doing 
 little more than had been done by those who wor- 
 shipped phytoTTwrphic and zoomorphic gods, or by those 
 who deified the heavens or the sun. For the god is 
 still identified with an object which is externally 
 related to other objects ; and so long as this is the 
 case, it seems of comparatively little importance what 
 object is selected. Thought is stUl in that lowest 
 form, in which the consciousness of God and the 
 consciousness of self are forced to hide their real 
 I characteristics under a sensuous disguise. The spirit- 
 ! ual is still presented in the shape of the natural. 
 But, though this is true, the selection of this particular 
 object is a great step toward the discovery of the defect 
 of the whole objective way of representing the things of 
 the spirit. For man is a self, whether he is aware of 
 the full significance of being a self or not. The being 
 who knows may not as yet be clearly distinguished 
 from a thing that is known ; but still the fact that he 
 is a subject as well as an object cannot but affect 
 the conception of him as an object. Hence a religion 
 that conceives the principle of unity in all things 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 27] 
 
 under the form of man, is on the way towards the 
 conception of that principle as a subject, which is 
 above all objects, and which therefore can find its true 
 manifestation only in the inner Ufe of those who are 
 subjects like itself. The Greek religion is thus placed ' 
 between the outward and the inward, between objective 
 and subjective religion. It is unable to attain the 
 latter, because it looks at man mainly as an object ; it 
 is unable to be content with the former, because the 
 object it has selected owes its distinctive character to 
 its being also a subject. 
 
 The effect of this ambiguous position of the Greek 
 religion is to favour the development of art and 
 poetry, and indeed to make art and poetry the 
 highest expression of the religious idea. For art and 
 poetry are the necessary expression of the spiritual, 
 so long as it has to be expressed in the form of 
 the natural, or so long as a consciousness of the 
 spiritual, as separated from and opposed to the 
 natural, has not yet arisen. In nations which have 
 not reached this stage, as among the Indians, the 
 Egyptians, and the Phoenicians, we do, indeed, find 
 a kind of art ; but generally this art takes the form of 
 a symbolism, which is sometimes grotesque and extrav- 
 agant, or of a mere magnificence of size and colour. 
 The buUders of the pyramids, like those of the 
 tower of Babel, seemed to be trying to reach the 
 infinite by adding finite to finite. And the Indians 
 
272 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 often sought, by distortions or inconsistent combin- 
 ations of all kinds of natural shapes, to suggest a 
 meaning for which they had as yet no distinct 
 word of utterance. The sphinxes of Egypt and 
 Assyria were efforts to find expression for a secret 
 which seemed everywhere to be hinted at, but 
 nowhere fuUy manifested. But the Greek had at 
 least discovered that the solution of the riddle of 
 the sphinx lies in man and in man only; that in 
 the human form divine the secret is clearly re- 
 vealed which nature elsewhere utters only in dark 
 and mysterious language. The last word of the 
 [Egyptian religion was the inscription on the veil of 
 the goddess Isis, ' I am that which is, that which 
 hath been, and that which will be; no man hath 
 lifted my veil': in other words, the religion of Egypt 
 ends with the idea of a pantheistic unity, in which 
 all finite forms are lost, and which is symbolised 
 by all but expressed by none of them. The 
 Greek, on the other hand, has discovered that 
 finite objects are not to be set side by side as 
 symbols of a truth which cannot be revealed, but 
 rather that man is, as we might express it in 
 modern language, the last term of an evolutionary 
 series, in which the meaning of all other exist- 
 ences is summed up and for the first time brought 
 to clear expression. Man is thus, to use a word of 
 later Greek philosophy, ' the measure of all things,' 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 273 
 
 because he is the culmination of all things. Yet, 
 as the subjective consciousness, the consciousness of 
 the self in its full opposition to the not-self, has 
 not yet made its appearance, man, though the ulti- 
 mate term of nature, is not yet conceived as in any 
 way separated from nature. In him nature is made 
 vocal and self-conscious, but the consciousness of 
 self is not yet regarded as giving him an inner 
 life of his own, which in any way cuts him off 
 from the natural basis of his existence. He is the 
 youngest child of nature upon whom her highest 
 favours have been bestowed, but he has not yet 
 rebelled against his parent, still less does he claim 
 to have a higher origin. 
 
 Now it is this consciousness that lifts the Greek 
 ^bove the Asiatic, frees him from a superstitious 
 reverence for powers alien to himself, and gives 
 him courage as an artist to break away from the 
 traditions of his Egyptian and Phoenician teachers. 
 The Greek artist frees himself at a very early 
 period from the bonds of the conventional and 
 the grotesque, from the stiffness, the lifelessness, 
 and the bizarre distortion of natural form, which 
 we so often meet with in the art of the East ; 
 and he soon learns to give to his figures that 
 plastic individuality and moving grace which makes 
 the human form the living expression of human 
 thought and passion. Yet, as he is still in the 
 
 VOL. I. s 
 
274 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 golden mean of art, — as he has only discovered that 
 
 which lifts man above nature, but not yet that 
 
 which lifts him above himself — there is no straining 
 
 after the utterance of that which can never be 
 
 fully expressed in the form of sensuous perception 
 
 or imagination. The spirit has not yet outgrown 
 
 its fleshly vesture, or begun to regard it as a prison 
 
 house. In Asiatic and Egyptian art the soul is 
 
 not yet sufficiently awake completely to inform the 
 
 body : in modern art it often 
 
 " frets the pigmy body to decay, 
 And o'er-informs the tenement of clay." 
 
 In Greece it is as in the crowning moment of 
 youth, in which soul and body are in perfect balance 
 with each other and with the world, when pain and 
 disease have not yet disturbed the harmony of man 
 with himself and with things, and when the demands 
 of desire do not yet seem to have outgrown the pos- 
 sibilities of earthly satisfaction. In such a time all 
 that is needful for the artist is to omit a few disturbing 
 features, to clear away a few stains of imperfection and 
 finitude, to erase a few traces of weakness and depend- 
 ence, in order to exalt man into an image of the mighty 
 gods ; just as, on the other hand, it is only the fate 
 of mortality that appears to separate him from them. 
 The universal, the infinite, the spiritual, the divine, are 
 as yet known only as that, the whole import of which 
 may be gathered up in a single human form ; or, afe 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 275 
 
 least, as that which requires for its expression only 
 that such a form should be generalised, idealised, and 
 freed from the blemishes that cling to the indi- 
 vidualised existence of particular men. It was of this 
 that Goethe was thinking when he said that the 
 characteristic of Greek art is Bedeutsamheit, or sig- 
 nificance; in other words, that its products are char- 
 acteristic forms from which everything has been 
 removed that is amorphous, inorganic or accidental, 
 everything that does not go to the expression of the 
 spirit of life within. In like manner Greek religion 
 may be said to dwell in a middle region of imagina- 
 tion, lifted above the accidents of individual existence, 
 yet not quite attaining to the universal. Or, to put it 
 in another way, its gods are still represented as objects, 
 yet as objects of a peculiarly ideal character which do 
 not take rank among ordinary objects. But such a 
 golden mean is difficult, nay impossible, to maintain; it 
 is like the perfect blossom of youth, which is no sooner 
 reached than it has begun to pass away. If we speak 
 of Greek religion in its actuality, we must admit that 
 it existed only in process to attain to this point, and 
 that it had no sooner attained it, than it was fatally 
 carried beyond it. The Greek religious idea was thus 
 of an essentially transitionary character — involving a 
 kind of unstable equilibrium between the objective and 
 the subjective, the natural and the spiritual, the par- 
 ticular and the universal. Por, as man may be regarded 
 
276 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 in two aspects, as an object or as a subject; and as he 
 cannot be considered in his distinction from other 
 natural objects without the subjective aspect of his 
 being coming to some extent into view, so the selec- 
 tion of him as the objective embodiment of the 
 divine might be said to be equivalent to placing the 
 religious consciousness upon an inclined plane, on 
 which it could not but be gradually driven for- 
 ward from objective to subjective religion. A few 
 remarks will be sufficient to show the nature of this 
 movement. 
 
 Greek religion springs, as we have seen, from a 
 worship of the powers of nature, similar to that which 
 we find among the Aryans of northern India in the 
 Vedic period. But such a worship is, as we have also 
 seen, a Henotheism, i.e. it wavers between the one and 
 the many, between a polytheism and a pantheism, the 
 latter of which gradually gains ground upon the 
 former, as the nation becomes more reflective. Now, 
 something similar to this happens also in Greece; 
 but it is greatly modified by the anthropomorphic 
 character of the Greek religion, which hides the ab- 
 stract unity under a multiplicity, not of powers of 
 nature which easily pass into each other, but of 
 humanised divinities, each of which has all the fulness 
 of a distinct individuality, all the riches of a definite 
 character. Gods like Zeus, or Athene, or Hermes resist 
 the process of fusion which would melt them into one 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 277 
 
 divine power, in a much more stubborn way than 
 forms like Varuna or Mitra, Agni or Indra. The 
 humanising of the gods gives to each of them an 
 independent substantiality, makes each of them a 
 whole in himself, a microcosm which will not readUy 
 sink back to be lost in the mxicrocosm. Hence, when ' 
 the desire for unity awakes, Greek religion at first 
 seeks to satisfy it by the conception of a monarchi- 
 cally arranged pantheon, in which the highest god is 
 not supreme or absolute, but has many powers 
 subordinate to him, to whom he is obliged to 
 make partial concessions. This is the general 
 picture of the Olympian heaven which is presented 
 to us in Homer. The primitive desire of the Greek 
 mind for order and system was sufficiently satis- 
 fied by an organisation of the heavenly powers 
 similar to that which existed on earth, in which 
 a king supported and limited by a council of 
 nobles, ruled, rather by prestige than force, over a 
 generally submissive though sometimes recalcitrant 
 multitude. 
 
 At the same time, the genius of religion is neces- 
 sarily at war with this simple application of the finite 
 relations of men to the divine. The marked outlines 
 of character and individuality in the Homeric gods 
 were partly due to the poet's effort to realise and 
 picture his dramatis personce; and we cannot suppose 
 that the popular religion was ever so distinct and 
 
278 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 definite in its conceptions. In fact, even in Homer, 
 we can sec that the gods, in what has well been called 
 their ex cathedra functions, as givers of good and 
 executors of justice, are not thought of quite in 
 the same way as when they are taken as the 
 subjects of particular legends.. Furthermore, there 
 are already at work two different tendencies, both 
 of which make for unity, though their effects > 
 cannot as yet be clearly distinguished from each 
 other. One of these tendencies gives rise to the 
 notion of an abstract power of fate, to which 
 even the gods are subjected ; while the other favours 
 an exaltation of Zeus which would make him 
 absorb all the other divine powers. The former may 
 be regarded as pointing to the abstract unity of pan- 
 theism, in which all the Vedic divinities lose them- 
 selves ; while the latter rather foreshadows a mono- 
 theistic solution of the difficulty, as it points to the 
 idea of one great self-conscious power in which all the 
 separate deities are merged, with the loss of their 
 independent individuality but not of their spiritual 
 nature. 
 
 Now the subsequent progress of the religious 
 thought of Greece lay just in the development of 
 these two tendencies : first, in the growth of the 
 consciousness of a divine unity, which was con- 
 ceived in a very abstract way as a fate or law of 
 necessity; and, secondly, in the advance from this 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 279 
 
 abstract or pantheistic unity to that ideal of a 
 spiritual principle which is implied in monotheism. 
 
 In the earlier period of Greek history, the pan- 
 theistic unity tends, in literature at least, to prevail 
 over the manifold polytheism of the Homeric age. 
 Herodotus often prefers to speak of the divine power 
 in an impersonal way, and to treat it as practically 
 identical with a Nemesis, or fate, which manifests 
 itself mainly ia keeping finite beings within the 
 limits of their finitude, and in bringing back their 
 transitory existence in a few years to the nothing- 
 ness from which it has emerged. And, though it 
 may be true that in Herodotus there are occasional 
 hints at the moral lesson that pride goes before 
 a fall, yet it cannot be said that in his general 
 conception of the limits set to humanity there 
 is any distinct idea of a moral necessity. When 
 he expresses it personally, what he speaks of is 
 the "envy of the gods" that "will not permit 
 anyone to be wanton, but themselves '' ; and we 
 can only escape attributing to him all the super- 
 stitious consequences of this conception by regarding 
 it simply as a poetic expression for the limitation 
 that necessarily clings to finitude. Taken in this 
 sense, we might perhaps treat it as a popular 
 equivalent for the language of the philosopher Hera- 
 clitus, who declares that the one permanent thiag 
 in the world is the law of change under which no 
 
280 f'HE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 finite thing remains for two moments the same. Ott 
 this view the passing away of the finite is no 
 external destiny forced upon it by unpropitious 
 powers. The finite exists only as it passes away, 
 and the more desperately and proudly it tries to 
 assert itself against the law of mortality, the quicker 
 is the recoil of its doom upon it. " If the sun 
 transgressed its paths, the Erinyes would drag him, 
 back." 
 
 Now, it is this thought that supplies the basis from 
 which Greek tragedy starts. If we compare Homer 
 with the Tragedians, we see that in the interval a 
 chilling sense of the limits of mortality has fallen 
 upon the Greek mind. The dark shadow, which in 
 the former is hidden by the force and variety of the 
 life that occupies the foreground of the picture, has 
 begun to reveal itself more clearly. The bright play 
 of mythology is now seen to have an iron heart. The 
 varied picture of the action and reaction, of the 
 victories and defeats of free individualities, human and 
 divine, is but a mask on the stem face of necessity.- 
 What must be, must be, is the end of all. There is 
 no pleading with fate and no final reconciliation that 
 reaches beyond it. Necessity is hidden even in the 
 acts that seek to overcome or evade it ; and often, as 
 in the story of Oedipus, by a kind of irony of destiny, 
 the struggles of the victim are turned into the means- 
 of bringing about the very doom they would avert. 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 281 
 
 The only deliverance for the soul is in the hopeless 
 fearless heroism which simply accepts its fate, and by 
 a final effort of resignation detaches itself from 
 all the interests that fate has assailed. In such 
 a view there is no consolation or hope; but the 
 heroic spirit can do without either. The hero can 
 accept his doom, not, like the monotheist, as the 
 decree of a righteous and irresistible will ; nor, like 
 the Christian, as the manifestation of an absolute 
 spiritual power which has in itself the cure for 
 every wound which it inflicts ; but simply as necessity, 
 with which it is useless, and therefore degrading, 
 to strive.^ 
 
 At the same time, while this is the general basis 
 or presupposition of Greek tragedy, we can trace in 
 it the growth of other ideas which were ultimately 
 to triumph over it, if not in the religion, at least 
 in the philosophy of Greece. What Aeschylus and 
 Sophocles put upon the stage is not simply the vain 
 attempt of mortal men to escape the fate of mor- 
 tality, the effort of finite wills to claim more than 
 is allowed to finitude, and the consequent recoil of 
 their destiny upon them. Nor is it even the simple ' 
 moral lesson that excess and insolence bring retri- 
 bution upon themselves. It is rather the tragic 
 collision of interests, each of which has a real moral 
 basis and a claim to its own place in life ; but 
 1 Cf. Hegel, xii. 132 ; vi. 295. 
 
282 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 which is driven to assert that claim in opposition 
 to other interests, which also have their own legiti- 
 mate place, their own ethical basis. The tragic 
 conflict is not between right and wrong, but be- 
 tween right and right.^ When Prometheus rebels 
 against Zeus, when the Eumenides claim as their 
 victim the divinely missioned servant of Apollo, this, 
 as Aeschylus saw, is no contest in which all the 
 pleas of justice are on one side ; it is a struggle of 
 mighty spiritual powers, the absolute destruction of 
 either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life 
 of man. And the work of fate is, therefore, after 
 many sacrifices of the individuals who have wronged 
 either interest, to bring about a healing compromise, 
 in which the lower right shall take its place beside, 
 but subordinate to, the higher. Prometheus has to 
 reveal his secret, and to save the monarchy of a Zeus 
 who has become just and reconciled to men. The 
 Eumenides, the old gods that watch over the sanctity 
 of the family bond, must yield to the higher claims 
 of the gods of the state ; but, at the same time, 
 they must find a temple near the Areopagus, the 
 seat of the court which has freed their victim 
 from his guilt. In Sophocles this equipoise is less 
 definitely kept up. He, perhaps owing to a deeper 
 ethical consciousness, rejects the Aeschylean com- 
 promises in moral conflicts, and lets the opposite 
 ' Cf. Hegel, ii. 321 seq. 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 283 
 
 rights fight it out to the bitter end ; but he 
 still more definitely emphasises the lesson that 
 the confl.ict is a moral one. And his last word, 
 in Oedipus Coloneus, is to distinguish between the 
 outward act of him who, in following out one legiti- 
 mate interest has been led unconsciously into the 
 violation of another, and his inward character. 
 Such an one the gods at last save as by fire in a 
 divine deliverance, though only after he has suffered 
 the consequences of his unlawful act. Destiny thus 
 becomes a moral law, which permits the individual 
 who has, however unwittingly, violated a moral in- 
 terest, to suffer for his wrong; but which at the 
 last allows a deeper voice of divine justice to be 
 heard, a voice which regards not his act but his 
 will. The subjective claim of right is thus be- 
 ginning to interfere, even in Sophocles, with the 
 purely objective demands of the law. 
 
 Finally, in Euripides this subjective element be- 
 comes so prominent that the idea of an external 
 law of destiny seems to be all but lost. The out- 
 ward world is left to a capricious power sometimes 
 called fate, but often and more appropriately, chance ; 
 it is regarded as a medley in which it is difficult 
 to discern either a law of necessity or a divine pur- 
 pose ; as the outward play of romantic accident which 
 has its main interest in the fact that it somehow 
 stirs into activity the inward play of thought and 
 
284 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 feeling.i The divine voice is now heard, if at all, 
 only in the inner oracle of the heart; and the real 
 tragedy, the real victories and defeats, are those 
 that are won or lost by the soul in its struggles 
 with itself. Euripides is a rationalist and a sceptic, j 
 not only as regards the deities of mythology, but in 
 the sense that he has learnt to doubt the existence 
 of any divine power manifested in the outward world. 
 But, in place of belief in a God without, he sub- 
 stitutes a faith in the God within, which contains 
 the promise of a new religion. Hence if Euripides 
 is the least perfect of the Greek dramatic artists, 
 it is partly at least because he is inspired with a 
 new idea, which is inconsistent with the principle 
 upon which the Greek drama rested. The grand 
 outward balance of destiny, which Aeschylus and 
 Sophocles tried to represent, loses its interest for a 
 poet whose eye is turned almost exclusively upon 
 the inner struggle that rends the heart of a Medea 
 or a Phaedra; and the only solution for which he 
 really cares is, not the outward Aeschylean judgment 
 that places the temple of the Eumenides beside the 
 temple of Athene, but the victory over self achieved 
 ' Cf. e.g. Eecfuha, 957 : 
 
 QVK 'ifTTlV OviiV TTUnOV OVT (X&O^IO. 
 
 OiJt' a.v /caA,a)S TrpdcrcrovTa fjirj wpd^eiv KaKiai. 
 ^vpov(Ti S' avra 6eol TrdXiv re koI ir/otxro), 
 TapayfjMV ivTiOevres, cos dyv<ii(rif 
 2€/8(0/iev avroiJS. 
 
THE RELIGION OF GREECE. 285 
 
 by an Alcestis or a Makaria. In Euripides we see 
 already the dawn of the new modern tragedy, in 
 which the inner predominates over the outer life, 
 and each one's fate is simply the evolution of his 
 own soul, — the tragedy of which we find the highest 
 types in Shakespeare. 
 
LECTUEE ELEVENTH. 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE IMAGINATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT 
 OF OBJECTIVE EELIGION. 
 
 Poetry as the Expression of Moral and Religious Truth in Homer 
 Idealising Power of Imagination in Mythology — Plato's View 
 as to its " Nohle Untruth" — How Rationalism, destroys it — The 
 Greek Enlightenment and Plato's View of it — The Modern En- 
 lightenment — General Character of its Conception of Reality — ■ 
 Necessity of its Victory, and its Effect upon Religion — Deism, as 
 a Religion — -Possibility of a Compromise between Scientific 
 Truth and Poetic Fiction. 
 
 In the preceding lecture we were considering objec- 
 tive religion in the G-reek form, in which man is 
 selected as the object which is to be regarded as 
 kindred with and capable of representing the divine. 
 In this religion the gods are not merely personified 
 but humanised, and all nature is interpreted as the 
 manifestation of beings like men, though lifted in 
 wisdom and power above ordinary men, and freed from 
 decay and death and all the accidents of mortality. 
 At the same time we have to remember that man is 
 here conceived rather as an object than as a subject. 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 287 
 
 as the highest of natural beings but still natural. 
 Hence we are still in the region of naturalistic poly- 
 theism and not of spiritual monotheism. In the 
 progress of Greek thought, however, advances are 
 steadily made towards this higher conception. For, in 
 the first place, the dawning reflexion of Greece seeking 
 for unity, finds satisfaction for a time in the idea of 
 a fate — or law of necessity — to which even the gods 
 are subjected; and then, in the second place, by a 
 movement of thought which we trace in Greek poetry, 
 and especially in Greek dramatic poetry, this law of 
 necessity is reinterpreted as a moral law of freedom, 
 and the supreme power of the universe is conceived 
 not as a fate but as a providence. 
 
 I shall not in the present lecture attempt to follow 
 this process any farther, as I wish in the first instance 
 to illustrate another aspect of the advance from the 
 natural to the spiritual, viz. the way in which the 
 poetic imagination gradually fills the objects wor- 
 shipped, even while they are still conceived as mere 
 objective beings which take their place among other 
 objects with a higher spiritual meaning. In doing so, 
 we may still take an illustration of the process from 
 Greece , for Greece, better than any other country^ 
 shows us how far the poetic imagination can by itself 
 solve the problem of the opposition and re-union of 
 the ideal and the real ; how far it can separate the 
 religious from the secular consciousness, and use the 
 
288 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 former to elevate the latter. In the poems of Homer, 
 we have an almost perfect instance of the way in 
 which, and the extent to which, this process may be 
 effected ; in other words, how objects may be kept as 
 objects within the forms of the sensuous consciousness, 
 and yet filled with a meaning which is not sensuous. 
 With Homer, the whole picture of heaven and earth 
 remains still in the simple naturalistic form. We 
 never from him hear of anything but particular objects 
 and events, subject to all the ordinary conditions of 
 space and time. Nothing is told us which might not 
 have been seen, or, at least, nothing which cannot be 
 pictured under the conditions of sense. Yet in the 
 hands of Homer the actions narrated in the poem 
 somehow get a wider meaning, and become sug- 
 gestions or symbols of something more than them- 
 selves. By the unerring tact of the poet, the objects 
 and events are cleared of accidental elements, and 
 so presented that they are hardly to be thought of 
 except as types, i.e. as particulars which concentrate 
 in themselves the meaning of a whole class of objects 
 and events. This instinctive selection of the poet 
 is, in its way, as enlightening as the scientific man's 
 deliberate and conscious selection of just those circum- 
 stances that throw light upon a hitherto hidden law 
 of nature. The poet, however, secures his end not 
 by generalising, but, more simply and directly, by 
 representing the powers of nature and the principles 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 289 
 
 ■of action within us as embodied in particular divine 
 beings, who are constantly interfering with the fates 
 and actions of men, and guiding them to the catas- 
 trophe which is their fit result. So definitely is this 
 idea carried out in the Homeric poems, that to modern 
 readers it often seems as if all the merit or demerit of 
 the actions of the heroes were taken away by 
 the support or hindrance they receive from above. 
 Men seem to be reduced to mere puppets with; 
 which the gods play. For all that men do is, 
 according to the poet, done by the god ; who not 
 only excites and takes away their courage, fills their 
 breasts with resolve or panic terror, but even directs 
 or turns aside their weapons in battle. In truth, 
 this reduplication of agency, as we may call it, was 
 necessary for Homer ; he had no other way of 
 bringing before us the universal or divine power, 
 except as another particular. He could not represent 
 to us the ideal forces that rule man's life, except 
 in the shape of other beings like men, who directly 
 interfered with his actions or their effects. As the 
 spiritual world was only conceivable to him as another 
 natural world, there was no way left for him to 
 •explain their relations except this method of redupli- 
 cation ; he is compelled, first, to separate human and 
 divine as two independent realities, and then to 
 represent the action of the latter upon the former as a 
 ■direct outward interference. In this way the deeds 
 
 VOL. L T 
 
290 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 done come to be attributed, sometimes to men, some- 
 times to the gods, and sometimes to men and gods 
 working together. Homer could neither conceal this 
 difficulty nor solve it : he had no abstract language in 
 which the universal powers of life could be described 
 apart from their special manifestations. If he assigned 
 any reality to the former, he was obliged to bring 
 them together on the same plane with the latter, 
 as particular finite objects. It would be easy 
 to illustrate from the Iliad the necessity under 
 which Homer thus lay, of finding a direct sensuous 
 expression for every spiritual fact which he 
 wished to express. In the first book the self- 
 restraint of Achilles is attributed to the goddess 
 Athene, the goddess representing practical wisdom, 
 who comes behind and pulls the hero by the hair, 
 when he is on the point of drawing his sword against 
 Agamemnon. A more poetic example may be found 
 in a later passage in which Homer represents the 
 healing virtue of prayer embodied in certain divine 
 forms, the Virgin daughters of Zeus, who, with slow 
 feet pursue Ate, the goddess who represents the 
 fatal blindness of passion, and seek to undo the 
 evil she has done. "Prayers are the daughters of 
 great Zeus : lame are they and withered and short of 
 sight, and with anxious heed they follow the steps of 
 Ate. But Ate is strong and swift of foot so that she 
 far outstrips them all as she rushes over the land^ 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 291 
 
 and they come slowly after to heal the wounds she 
 has made." If Goethe, after all the modern work of 
 reflexion, could say that anything that gave him joy 
 or pain tended to change itself into an image, and 
 that it was only in this way that he could come to 
 a definite understanding of its nature and its influence 
 upon himself, how much more must this have held 
 good in the case of Homer, who lived when as yet 
 there was no language available for the expression of 
 human thought, except the language of immediate 
 perception. 
 
 Now, we are apt to take language like that of 
 the passage I have quoted as metaphorical or alle- 
 gorical. And, in a certain sense, it is so; for 
 something more is suggested by it than is expressed. 
 But it is scarcely necessary to say we have not here 
 a case of conscious metaphor or allegory. The poet 
 did not first set before him a general idea of a 
 spiritual principle ; and then proceed to clothe it in 
 a materialised symbol. This would be an inadequate 
 account of poetry at any time, and specially inadequate 
 as an account of the poetry of an age in which poetry 
 was hardly separated from the prose of fact, and 
 in which the prose of abstract thought had not 
 yet been invented. True poetry is never the com- 
 bination of an idea and a picture, as separate 
 elements ; for in it the one exists only through 
 the other. A metaphor is a naked thought which 
 
292 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 puts on a sensuous form as an external dress. A 
 poetic symbol is the living flesh and blood, the 
 organic body, in which an idea must be clothed in 
 order to manifest and realise itself. Hence the 
 true poet only grasps his idea as he embodies it, 
 and embodies it as he grasps it. He thinks in ex- 
 pressing his thought, and it is only in finding 
 the word or the form that he wants, that he dis- 
 covers what he himself was trying to express. 
 ' While he is musing, the fire burns,' and he 
 ' speaks with his tongue,' realising what he means 
 just in the act of creating the objective picture 
 or image which is its expression. In a later age, 
 indeed, it is difficult for the poet to have such 
 unity of consciousness : he is too much affected by 
 the divisions of reflexion to forget the opposition of 
 the real and the ideal, of the thought and the ex- 
 pression, of the universal and the particular, and hence 
 he often falls into the lower region of conscious alle- 
 gory and invented metaphor. ' The native hues ' 
 of his imagination ' are sicklied o'er with the pale 
 cast of thought.' But in the Homeric age this 
 difficulty did not exist. Man had not yet found 
 his way into the region of abstraction, and there- 
 fore he had not to spend any of his poetic 
 strength in escaping from it. He had no feeling of 
 the impossibility of confining a general principle to one 
 particular form, to trouble him in his effort to find 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 293 
 
 such a form and to realise fully the form he had 
 selected. 
 
 When Plato spoke of poetry as a 'noble un- 
 truth,' false in form, true in essence, he showed 
 the rise of a consciousness, for which the poetic 
 expression of truth had ceased to be adequate, — 
 a consciousness which could no longer be content 
 to treat the universal principle, which is the prin- 
 ciple of unity in many particulars, as if it were 
 merely one of their number. And this advance 
 was a necessary one. The imaginative identification 
 of the ideal and real, the spiritual and the natural, 
 the universal and the particular, must inevitably 
 yield in time to a perception of their difference, 
 and even to an exaggeration of their opposition. 
 The fair unity of poetry, in which fact and 
 thought are blended together, must be broken up 
 into the prosaic consciousness of fact on the one 
 side, and the prosaic consciousness of law on the 
 other. But the necessity of this change, by which 
 mythology must ultimately be destroyed, should not 
 prevent us from recognising the immense value of 
 that idealisation of common phenomenal reality, by 
 which it was made to express a divine meaning ; the 
 importance of that sensuous realisation of the divine 
 by which it was first introduced into the natural 
 world. Ideas, it has been said, ' must be given 
 through something,' and, in an early age, that somen 
 
294- THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 thing must be a sensible object in space and time. 
 The first poets or prophets, for they are both in 
 one, unable to comprehend what manner of reality 
 the spirit that was in them 'did signify,' caught 
 directly at any distinct form of nature or humanity 
 that seemed to furnish an expression for it, and 
 proceeded at once to identify this form with the 
 divine presence which haunted them. Or, on the 
 other hand, starting with a mythic form which they 
 had received by tradition from an earlier time, they 
 were led, by a poetic instinct of fitness, gradually 
 to remove from it the features which were incon- 
 sistent with their growing idea of the divine ; to 
 strip it, so far as possible, of the finite limitations 
 which were not in harmony with the thought it had 
 to express; to give it, in short, the unity and com- 
 pleteness of an ideal figure free from all mortal 
 stain or change. They thus, in the only way then 
 available, at once revealed and solved the problems 
 of man's spiritual being, deepened the consciousness 
 of the opposition between his natural life and its 
 divine ideal, and made that ideal a living presence 
 in the natural world. They did not rend the veil 
 of sense but they made it transparent, like a garment 
 which expresses, while it conceals, the form and 
 action of the wearer. If, then, they clung to the 
 outward and sensible yet by poetic selections and 
 rejections they carried it up to a quintessential form, 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 295 
 
 in which, to adopt a phrase of Burke, it lost " almost 
 all" its inadequacy "in losing half its grossness." 
 Thus, when the Indian poet makes the god to say, 
 ^' I am the sun among fires, I am the Ganges among 
 rivers, among mountains I am the Himalayas," by 
 this selection of typical forms he is exemplifying the 
 principles of the imaginative expression of higher 
 truth ; he is illustrating that re-constitution and, 
 as it might be called, that transfiguration of the 
 sensible by which poetry and art turn it into the 
 revelation of ideas which cannot thus be adequately 
 revealed, but which, in the first instance at least, 
 cannot otherwise be revealed at all. 
 
 It appears then that, while in our first con- 
 sciousness of the divine, it must take the form 
 of an object like other objects, of a natural exist- 
 ence among other natural existences, the content of ' 
 this consciousness is from the first ia rebellion against 
 the form. And the way in which this rebellion 
 shows itself is by the imaginative exaltation of 
 the object or objects selected above all others. 
 Thus certain particular existences are freed from 
 the limitations of ordinary reality, and transformed 
 or transfigured, till they become symbols for uni- 
 versal powers or principles. The finite and the in- 
 finite begiQ to be opposed as natural and super- 
 natural, though both are still included within the 
 limits and conditions of the sensible, or, at least, 
 
296 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 the sensuously imaginable world. Thus, in Homer, 
 gods and men are separated by a wide gulf, though 
 both in their way enter into the same conflicts and 
 contend with almost the same weapons. The world 
 of mortals is at once divided from the world of the 
 immortals, and elevated by relation to it ; yet the 
 immortals themselves are after all still subjected t& 
 the same general conditions, and are therefore only 
 to be called relatively immortal. For the imagination,, 
 though it rises above the world of sense, never, sa 
 to speak, gets beyond the reach of its attraction, and 
 it must inevitably return to it in the end. Hence 
 its creations can never be a final satisfaction to the 
 religious consciousness, which is too much in earnest 
 for the bright play of art, and grasps the flower of 
 poetic fiction too violently to spare its bloom. 
 
 An advance beyond this stage of the religious con- 
 sciousness is therefore necessary. Poetry, indeed, 
 never dies, because the universal is always revealed 
 in the particular, and it can be realised by the 
 imagination only under the form of the particular. 
 But the age when poetry is truth, and, in relation 
 to the things of the spirit, the only possible truth, 
 must yield to the age when it is discerned, as by 
 Plato, to be only a ' noble untruth,' a truth of idea . 
 which is untruth of fact. The discord of the form 
 with the matter of poetry must in the long run 
 become explicit, and must lead to a revolt against the 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 297 
 
 former in the interest of the latter. A Homer may 
 with infinite tact disguise the crude nature of the 
 myths with which he works, but he cannot altogether 
 overcome a difficulty that lies in the very nature of 
 his materials. And his very success in elevating and 
 almost transubstantiating the sensible, is apt to 
 awaken a spirit- that will not be satisfied, till it is 
 allowed to see the truth without any sensuous dis- 
 guise. When the veil becomes aU but transparent, 
 the hand will soon be stretched out to thrust it aside, 
 that the dimly seen forms behind may be brought to 
 light. It is inevitable also that, when truth is 
 symbolically expressed, the letter of the symbol should 
 ultimately interfere with the spirit of it. As it comes 
 warm and fresh from the lips of the poet, it may be 
 the necessary embodiment of the truth it expresses : it 
 may carry with it its own interpretation to those who 
 first hear it, and who are at the same time infected 
 with the feeling in which it is uttered. But, as it is 
 handed down to others, and repeated again and again 
 by those who are not in the same attitude of mind, its 
 power and meaning evaporate : it is taken literally, 
 and therefore wrongly. Its 'rhetoric,' or, as we should ; 
 rather say, its poetry, gets ' turned into logic' The 
 natural understanding is set to interpret the words of 
 inspiration, and it finds in them nothing but contra- 
 diction. That which was unessential in the myth, 
 that which made it partly inadequate, is taken as 
 
298 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 equally important with that which gave it its sug- 
 gestive value. The material analogy, under which the 
 spiritual truth ' half conceals and half reveals ' itself, 
 is taken as identity, with the necessary consequence, 
 on the one side, that the spiritual is lowered to the 
 natural, and, on the other side, that, just because of 
 this lowering, belief in the spiritual disappears. Super- 
 stition, bowing down before an idol, just as an idol, 
 provokes the unbelief which refuses to worship even 
 the god. And the rationalism, which begins by point- 
 ing out that the myth is not true as the expression of 
 a simple fact, ends in the denial that there can even be 
 anything more than simple fact to express. 
 
 This process of disillusionment is one which has 
 often repeated itself in one form or other, in periods 
 when awaking reflexion found itself face to face with 
 decaying faith. In Greece, it took place at the time 
 of the Sophists, and found in them its natural 
 exponents. In the modern world, it began in the 
 eighteenth century, and it has prolonged itself into 
 the present day. In both cases it has been accom- 
 panied by an attempt to universalise the physical or 
 mechanical explanation of things. As Aristophanes 
 found Zeus dethroned and Vortex reigning in his stead, 
 so now Positivism has preached that the reign of 
 metaphysics and theology has ended, and Professor 
 Huxley bids us look forward to a time when man 
 will be seen to be only the " cunningest of nature's 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 299 
 
 clocks." This movement, commonly called the En- 
 lightenment or Aufklarung, has been met, both in 
 ancient Greece and in modern Europe, with a powerful 
 protest not only from those who, like Aristophanes, 
 represent the tradition of the beliefs attacked, but also 
 from those who, like Plato, have maintained that these 
 beliefs represent in an imperfect form perennial truths 
 which can be dissociated from that form. It is, there- 
 fore, instructive for us to observe what was Plato's 
 attitude towards the enlightenment of his day : a point 
 on which his great work, the Bepuhlic, casts a very 
 clear light. On the one hand, we find Plato acknow- 
 ledging the necessity of the poetic or imaginative 
 expression of religious ideas, the necessity of the 
 ' noble untruth ' of mythology, as a means of culture 
 in the infancy of the individual and the nation. 
 He maintains that religious ideas can be con- 
 veyed to men's minds, in the earlier stage of their 
 development, only in an objective and external form, 
 and that poetry is necessary to elevate and idealise 
 that form and to make it as adequate as it is capable 
 of becoming, to the truth of which it should be the 
 embodiment. Men will not, he thinks, be capable of 
 grasping the idea in itself if they have not first grasped 
 it in a symbol, which, even as interpreted by feeling, 
 may suggest, but cannot fully express it. On the other 
 hand, he holds it to be inevitable that such un- 
 spiritual ways of expressing spiritual truth should, 
 
300 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 in the advance of reflexion, become a stumbling-block 
 to those who have received their first teaching through 
 them. Doubt or unbelief ia the facts or mythically 
 exalted facts, to which a diviae meaning has been 
 attached, must inevitably arise ; and at first it will 
 seem impossible to separate the ideas from the vehicle 
 through which they were given. To use Plato's own 
 metaphor, the maxims of our supposed parents will lose 
 their authority, when it is discovered that we have 
 been obeying them under an illusion, and that we are 
 not really their children. The whole religious view of 
 life, with all that is based upon it, will seem to be 
 discredited, when the outward form through which it 
 came to us can no longer be taken to be exactly and 
 literally true. Plato recognises this danger, but has 
 no other suggestion to make than that in the Ideal 
 State the youth should be kept from the study of 
 dialectic — i.e.. that the reflective, questioning activity 
 of the understanding should not be awakened in 
 him — till his moral development has considerably 
 advanced. Young men, prematurely excited to ques- 
 tion received authority, are like " puppy dogs that 
 tear everything to pieces." Hence the philosophical 
 enlightenment that discredits the first forms under 
 which a higher truth has been presented to them, 
 should be postponed, till, by the moral discipline of 
 social life, they have become able to bear the shocks 
 of reflexion without losing their faith. By the time 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 301 
 
 that they have received this discipline, they will, 
 Plato thinks, be ready also to appreciate a philosophy, 
 which shows the imperfection, and even, in a sense, 
 the fictitious character of the vehicle through which 
 the divine idea is first conveyed to men, but which 
 at the same time proves that that idea rests on a 
 rational basis. 
 
 From the point of view we have now reached 
 we can understand at once the nature of the difficulty, 
 and the necessity of adopting something like Plato's 
 solution of it. The difficulty lies essentially in the 
 inadequacy of the forms in which the consciousness 
 of God is at first expressed, in so far as these are the 
 forms of the ordinary, objective consciousness ; and the 
 solution must lie in a recognition of the difference 
 between the two forms of consciousness, and at the 
 same time of the relation that binds them to each 
 other. So long as the divine, the infinite, the uni- 
 versal, the spiritual, is taken as standing on the same 
 level with the finite, the particular, the material; so, 
 long, in short, as God is conceived as an object which 
 occupies a definite and exclusive place among other 
 individual objects in the world of sense, so long it is 
 impossible to prevent these two forms of consciousness 
 from coming into collision with each other. And 
 when they do come into collision, it is inevitable 
 that in the long run the consciousness of the finite 
 should prevail ; for vt is, so to speak, on its own 
 
302 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 ground, while the religious consciousness is on the 
 ground of the enemy. What Aristotle objected to in 
 Plato's ideas, that they were aiSla aKjQrfra., ' eternal 
 things of sense ' — at once finite things and eternal 
 realities — may with much more ground be alleged 
 against a mode of thought which intercalates divine, 
 or spiritual, existences in the natural world, as if they 
 were of the same order with other natural beings. 
 Whether that intercalation takes place in the simple 
 Homeric way in which the gods are brought into 
 the field of battle, and sometimes even allowed to 
 exchange blows with mortal combatants, or in the 
 more common form of a belief that the divine mani- 
 fests itself, not in nature as a whole, but rather in 
 occasional breaches of the order of nature, is not of 
 much consequence. In both cases it brings with it 
 the same difficulty. It treats the spiritual as a reality 
 of the same order with the natural, and thereby 
 brings it into colUsion with the natural. If the divine 
 reality be identified with some of the things of sense 
 as against others, it must be brought under the criteria 
 which are applicable to things of sense. Yet these 
 criteria cannot be applied to it without making it con- 
 tradict its very nature as divine. The physical form of 
 presentment will thus obscure and ultimately obliterate 
 the spiritual reality which is confined to it ; and the 
 belief in the divine as a thing of sense, will turn into 
 a disbelief in everything lut the things of sense. 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH, 803 
 
 The strength of Positivism, — using the word in the 
 narrower sense in which it implies the negation of 
 all theology and metaphysic, and of the existence 
 of the objects to which theology and metaphysic 
 relate, at least as objects knowable by us, — lies just 
 in this, that it seeks to carry out thoroughly the 
 process of freeing the natural world from spiritual 
 interferences. It is called Aufklaning, or Enlighten- 
 ment, because it is opposed to every kind of belief in 
 the spiritual or divine which identifies it with the 
 miraculous, the arbitrary, the lawless, or the unintelli- 
 gible ; because, so to speak, it carries its candle into 
 every chamber of the house, and insists on leaving 
 no dark corner unvisited in which ghosts might be 
 supposed to lurk. As it developed, and for the 
 first time systematically developed, a consciousness 
 of law and order in the world — of the definite con- 
 nexion of causes and effects by which finite objects 
 are related to each other — so it emancipated the 
 human mind from the superstitious tendency to 
 attach to these objects the reverence due to the 
 infinite. With this clearing process, however — this 
 war against superstition — there was combined a 
 tendency to narrow man's intellectual horizon, to limit 
 his interests in a way which is fatal to religion, 
 and which does not leave much room for poetry. For 
 the Enlightenment not only removed spiritual reality 
 from a sphere to which it did not properly belong, 
 
304 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 or divested it of a sensuous vesture which hid its 
 true nature ; it also led to the denial that there is 
 in human experience any room for spiritual reality 
 at all, except as an illusion of the infancy of the 
 individual or the race. 
 
 To do justice to this movement, however, we must 
 look at it on all sides, and consider more definitely 
 both its merits and its defects. Let me, therefore, in 
 the fir&t place, explain what exactly is the nature of the 
 positive view of things which the Enlightenment brought 
 with it. Let me, in the second place, show how this 
 positive view of the objects of finite experience is 
 connected with a negative view of all that seems to 
 be beyond the range of such experience. When 
 we have clearly apprehended these two points, we 
 shall be in a better position to judge whether objects 
 conceived as in space and time are the only objects of 
 which knowledge is possible ; and, if not, what is the 
 method by which we can attain to a knowledge of a 
 higher kind. 
 
 What is the positive or, as we may call it, the 
 scientific view of nature? It is impossible here to 
 give a complete account of it, but for our present 
 purpose it seems sufficient to say, after Kant, that 
 it is a view of things which is governed mainly by the 
 forms of time and space, and by the principles of 
 substance, causality, and reciprocity. It takes the 
 world as a collection of particular objects in space 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 305 
 
 going through changes in time, and it traces all these 
 changes to the action and reaction of these objects 
 according to invariable laws ; so that under the same 
 conditions the same results must invariably happen. 
 This scientiiic conception of universal laws of change 
 seems at first to contradict all the usual assumptions 
 of our first sensuous consciousness ; for, as we have 
 seen, the sensuous consciousness tends to treat all 
 things and beings as mere individuals, and to regard 
 their relations to each other as accidental and arbi- 
 trary. Yet, on closer examination, science is found 
 to agree with that consciousness in its most im- 
 portant characteristics, and to differ from it, so far 
 as it does differ, mainly by making explicit its 
 secret presuppositions. In the very earliest utter- 
 ances of man's thought we find him practically 
 using all the principles by which science is guided, or 
 at least asking questions of nature which show 
 that his mind is governed by them. The difference 
 between this earliest consciousness of man and the 
 scientific consciousness is only that the former does 
 not use these ideas reflectively : i.e. it is not aware 
 of the principles which it presupposes and therefore 
 it cannot apply these principles consistently and 
 accurately. The ideas that prompt and guide the 
 action of our intelligence, are not, in the first in- 
 stance, set before us as rules ; and, so long as this 
 is the case, their application is necessarily uncer- 
 
 VOL. I. u 
 
306 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 tain and arbitrary. In this way we can explain 
 how the questions, which the awaking intelligence 
 is driven by its own nature to ask, are at first 
 answered in so superficial and inadequate a way ; 
 and how the most eager curiosity as to the nature 
 and causes of things, should yet be accompanied by 
 an all-accepting credulity which is satisfied with 
 any idle fable that for the moment stops the gap. 
 Having got the tortoise on which to base the earth, 
 the savage never asks for the elephant to support the 
 tortoise. It is only after the principle of explana- 
 tion has been separated from the facts and con- 
 sidered for itself, that criteria of the validity of 
 such explanations begin to be laid down. It is only 
 then that the mind ceases to be content with the 
 first crude hypothesis that is presented to it ; and, 
 seeing the defects of that hypothesis, begins to ask 
 how a more adequate one can be attained. 
 
 Let me state this thought again in a slightly 
 different point of view. Judging by early mythology, 
 man would at first seem to have little or no 
 idea of a reign of law in the world, or of any 
 necessity of connexion between its phenomena. 
 Eather, he seems to regard all things as isolated 
 particulars, which migM have existed by themselves, 
 and which only at times accidentally and arbitrarily 
 interfere with each other. The individuality, or 
 rather particularity, of things is to him their 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 307 
 
 primary aspect, and their relativity is only second- 
 ary. So little notion has he of a definite order 
 and connexion of things that we cannot say that 
 he believes in miraculous interferences with the 
 course of nature ; for, as yet, there is for him no 
 regular course of nature from which miracles could 
 be distinguished. The world seems to be a scene 
 given over to the play of chance and arbitrary 
 will. Only gradually and by long experience does 
 there arise a sense of definite connexion between 
 particular events to modify that apparent contin- 
 gency before which thought stands paralysed. 
 
 But, whUe all this is true, it nevertheless leaves out 
 of account one thing, namely, that the principle, which 
 leads to the systematic view of the connexion of 
 nature, is already present, and that it is its presence 
 that stimulates the mind to those inquiries, to 
 which the first mythological view of the world is 
 a kind of answer. For, confused and arbitrary as 
 that view seems to us now, it is the first effort of 
 the intelligence to bear up against the multiplicity 
 of impressions which are streaming in upon it by 
 every sense, and to connect them together in a 
 rational way. A mythology, however chaotic it may \ 
 be, is thus an attempt to find the unity of the 
 mind in the world ; the only attempt which is pos- 
 sible to the undeveloped consciousness of those who 
 are still intellectually children. From such a mytho- 
 
308 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 logical explanation of the world to the scientific 
 conception of an order of necessity, binding all 
 things together, there is a continuous advance, 
 which can only be explained by saying that it is due 
 to the restless and persevering effort of thought 
 to find a more and more adequate answer to the 
 questions, which it is forced by its own nature to ask. 
 Between the legend of the South Sea Islands about 
 the hero who crept out of a cave in the earth and 
 employed his youthful energies in the task of lift- 
 ing up the heavens, which hitherto had lain flat 
 upon the earth, to their proper place, so as to 
 make room for mankind to move and live, — be- 
 tween this legend and the ^Newtonian theory of 
 gravitation the gap is wide enough ; but it is the 
 same search for causes, that gave rise to this myth 
 and to many improved editions of it, and that finally 
 sets them all aside to make room for the mechanical 
 theory of the universe. 
 
 Now the process by which the idea of law or 
 necessary connexion among all the objects of sense 
 ' is gradually established, is necessarily also a sifting 
 process, by which the religious elements are gradually 
 eliminated from our ordinary consciousness of the 
 finite world. The first step in this sifting we have 
 already described. It is one by which certain objects 
 are fixed upon as realities of a higher order, or by 
 which certain new objects are constructed by the 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 309 
 
 imagination, and endowed with a kind of ideal com- 
 pleteness and independence. These idealised objects, 
 however, are still regarded as parts of the same 
 natural system to which other objects belong ; and 
 there is as yet no clear sense of the inconsistency of 
 bringing the two kinds of objects, so to' speak, into 
 the same plane, or of making them directly collide 
 with each other. Generally, there is a tendency to 
 look for the operation of the gods in abnormal pheno- 
 mena, in strange coincidences of events and sudden 
 overturns of fortune, rather than in the ordinary 
 course of natuiij ; or again, in great impulses or 
 inspirations by which, for good or evil, the soul of 
 man is carried out of itself, rather than in the ordinary 
 processes of mental hfe. But, in such a stage of 
 culture as is represented by Homer, these influences 
 and interferences are scarcely regarded as miraculous. 
 They are still reckoned to be a part of the regular 
 order of things, though a part that attracts special 
 attention, as the revelation of a higher agency than 
 is elsewhere manifested. 
 
 As, however, the consciousness of the order and 
 connexion of nature becomes more distinct, and the 
 idea of God gains greater purity and elevation, it ^ 
 becomes more difficult to combine the two into one, or 
 simply to intercalate the supernatural in the natural. 
 On the one hand, the divine, now distinctly con- 
 ceived as the infinite and the universal, separates 
 
810 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 itself more entirely from all finite objects ; and its 
 direct interference thus comes to be regarded as rare 
 and exceptional. God comes more and more to be 
 thought of as standing apart in his sacredness, 
 exercising a superintendence over all things, but not 
 immediately interfering with special objects and events 
 except when there is a dignus vindice nodus. On 
 the other hand, the idea of what Kant calls the 
 ' thorough-going connexion of experience ' becomes 
 developed, so as more and more to exclude the 
 operation of chance or arbitrary will. An order of 
 necessity is distinctly recognised, and, therefore, any 
 intrusion of a divine or spiritual agency is now viewed 
 as definitely miraculous. And from this it is not far 
 to the conviction, to which science is continually add- 
 ing new strength, that such intrusion is impossible. 
 Thus the ranks of physical causation seem to close up, 
 and to leave no room for supernatural agency. Every 
 fact comes to be regarded as an essential element in a 
 whole, which could not be other than it is without a 
 change in its conditions, and in the conditions of those 
 conditions ad infinitum. The hyssop could not grow 
 on the wall if the whole world could prevent its 
 growing, and it grows because the whole world con- 
 spires to make it grow just there. Every change is 
 an essential link in a chain, or rather a mesh in a 
 network, which connects it with all that precedes and 
 all that coexists with it. To those who are filled with 
 
POETRY A ND TR UTH. 311 
 
 this idea, — the idea that phenomena are what they are, 
 and change as they do change, only because of their 
 relations to other phenomena, and ultimately to the 
 whole world of experience, — it becomes hard to give 
 credence to any exception, to any break in the unity of 
 nature ; and still harder even for a moment to realise 
 the possibility of that mingling of heaven and earth 
 which was so easy a thought to Homer, and which 
 seemed quite rational even to the highest minds of the 
 Middle Ages. In modern times, such a ' peace of 
 God,' — such a truce between the natural and the super- 
 natural as allows them both to occupy the same field 
 of experience on almost the same terms, — is not capable 
 of being maintained. Those who believe that miracles 
 have happened, are at least anxious to reduce them to, 
 a, minimum, and to free their creed from the burden of 
 all that is not strictly necessary to it. On the other 
 hand, science has become more confident in its prin- 
 ciples, as those principles have led to greater triumphs 
 in the discovery of nature's secrets. Conscious that it 
 has verified the necessary interconnexion of pheno- 
 mena over a very wide field, and that it is continually 
 extending its researches into new regions by the aid of 
 the same method, it is more and more impatient of all 
 beliefs that still stand in the way of the acknow- 
 ledgment of the universality of that method. Hence 
 it steadily seeks to banish the infinite from the sphere 
 ■or the finite, and even to reduce the infinite to a 
 
812 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 nominis umhra. Thus it was with the Deism of last 
 century which, while it interpreted every phenomenon 
 by relation to another phenomenon, and protested 
 against all teleological explanations, still left at the 
 end a Supreme Being, of whom we know nothing except, 
 that He is. And Mr. Spencer's unknowable Absolute, 
 of which we have " a consciousness but no knowledge,'' 
 is only another word for the same idea. 
 
 Now I reserve for another lecture the task of 
 pointing out the defects of this conception of our 
 relation to the divine, and also of showing how 
 these defects may be corrected. For the present I 
 will conclude with two reflexions. 
 I The first is, that if the result of our scientific 
 ''progress were to reduce the idea of God to that of 
 an unknowable Eire Supreme, religion would have 
 no special interest in this spectre of its former 
 greatness. For all it does is to preserve the con- 
 sciousness that the finite cannot be conceived as 
 a res completa,—a whole bounded and terminated in 
 itself. But if all that can really be known, all 
 that can be made into a real interest of life, is. 
 assigned to the finite, the idea that there is a 
 ' beyond ' to which we can attach no definite pre- 
 dicate, can scarcely be considered of any practical 
 importance. The consciousness of siich an infinite 
 would even seem to be the gift of an unfriendly 
 destiny; for, so far as we paid any regard to it, it 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 813 
 
 would tend to make us despise our proper work 
 and all the aims to which our life is necessarily 
 confined. It would be like a glimpse of a world 
 beyond his prison walls to a prisoner who could 
 never escape, and whose only wise course would 
 be to shut his eyes to it and make the best of 
 his bondage. And, indeed, if we cannot regard 
 ourselves as anything but ' parts of this partial 
 world,' links in an endless chain of necessity by 
 which finite is bound to finite, it seems inexplicable 
 that our minds should ever be mocked by the idea 
 of anything that is not included in that world. 
 
 The same condemnation must be applied to the 
 effort, encouraged by some writers, to get back by i 
 imagination some portion of that religious belief 
 which is supposed to be for ever lost to the reason. 
 The surest result of the Enlightenment is that the 
 imaginative forms, in which man's first religious 
 consciousness embodies itself are deprived of all 
 credit, owing to the impossibility either of taking 
 them as literally true, or, consistently with the 
 principles on which the enlightenment rests, of sug- 
 gesting any way in which they can be shown to 
 have a true element in them. Hence it is im- 
 possible to take seriously the advice of writers like 
 Lange, who tell us still to cherish, for their prac- 
 tical value, those poetic representations to which 
 we can no longer attribute any scientific truth. 
 
314 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 How can we regard as practically true conceptions 
 which are acknowledged to be theoretically false ; or 
 satisfy our soul with visions which we admit to 
 be unreal? If it were once established that all 
 that is in any way knowable by us is included 
 in the thorough -going connexion of experience, it 
 would become idle to indulge in dreams of any- 
 thing that refused to take a place in that con- 
 nexion. By its very nature the imagination works 
 under the sensuous conditions of space and time ; 
 and, in regard to aU objects m space and time, 
 the law of nature and necessity is, ex hypothesi, 
 supposed to be absolute and without exception. 
 And the untruth of representing objects as real, 
 which yet are not subjected to this law, ceases 
 to be 'noble,' so soon as it is not regarded as 
 pointing to a deeper truth. For as poetry is not 
 ordinary fact, so in the impossibility of knowing 
 anything but such fact, it can be nothing else but 
 a pleasing fiction, an anodyne by which we may 
 console ourselves for a time, but which, like other 
 anodynes, will produce its effect only by making us 
 forget the reality of things. And perhaps a noble 
 mind will rather refuse such consolations, will refuse 
 to accept the myrrh-drugged wine of poetic fiction, 
 merely as a means to escape from its misery, and 
 will prefer to endure its cross with a clear conscious- 
 ness of its pain. Poetry had a noble office, when 
 
POETRY AND TRUTH. 315 
 
 the ideas of an earlier time made it interchange- 
 able with prophecy, the revelation of a truth 
 higher than truth of fact ; but, if these ideas should 
 utterly disappear, if poetry could be regarded 
 merely as the fictitious product of an imaginative 
 faculty, whose only value was that it supplied a 
 temporary rest for our sensibility, and for a time 
 ideally emancipated us from limits from which we 
 can never really escape, it would soon lose all its 
 power and inspiration. No great art could ever live, 
 if it ceased to regard beauty as one with truth 
 and goodness. No poet ever touched the deepest 
 springs of human emotion, who regarded himself 
 simply as the "idle singer of an empty day." 
 
LECTUEE TWELFTH. 
 
 THE LOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 
 
 T%e Principle of Positivism — That it admits no Exceptions — That 
 its Defect is its Ahstractness — Complementary Principle of the 
 Relativity of all Objects to the Subject — Appeal from the Objec- 
 tive to the Subjective Consciousness — The Argument from Desire 
 — Kanfs Distin/ytion between the Desires of the Individual and 
 the Postulates of Reason — " We Ought, therefore we Can" — 
 Kants Inference from this that the Summum Bonum or Moral 
 Ideal must be Realised — That this Inference underlies all Sub- 
 jective Religion. 
 
 In the last lecture I pointed out the nature of the 
 movement which went formerly by the name of 
 the Aufklarung, or Enlightenment, and which nowa- 
 days is more simply called Positivism ; and I tried 
 to show what is its strength and its weakness. Its 
 strength lies in this, that it takes objects simply as 
 such, and recognises that, as objects in one world, 
 they are linked together in necessary relations. It 
 carries out unflinchingly the idea of nature as a 
 system of finite causes and effects, each of which is 
 determined in its place, its time, and its character, 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 317 
 
 by its connexion with the rest. Hence it refuses 
 to admit that there can be any hiatus in the series of 
 finite causation, or that any element can be inter- 
 calated in it which does not belong to it. That any 
 object should break away from the general conditions 
 of objective experience, or should be endowed with an 
 independence and completeness such as is inconsistent 
 with these conditions, is to it an impossibility. Hence 
 the poetic idealisation of special objects which lets 
 them escape, so to speak, from the ranks of merely 
 natural existences, and throw off the control of neces- 
 sity — and, equally of course, the poetic creation of 
 new objects which claim exemption from such limits of 
 finitude — is regarded as an entirely fictitious process. 
 Such mythical creations, whether they be due to the 
 imagination of a particular poet, or to the unconscious 
 working of the poetic instinct in a nation, are not 
 fact, and, therefore, not truth ; for Positivism does not 
 admit that there is any truth but the truth of fact. 
 What is not fact is fiction ; and as men have now 
 learnt what are the criteria of fact, they must reject 
 as fiction everything that will not submit to these 
 criteria, everything that does not fit itself as a finite 
 link into the connexion of experience. Every object 
 which exempts itself from the limits of finitude, every 
 event that breaks the chain of natural necessity, is 
 ifso facto proved to be an illusion, and belief in it 
 may be at once set aside as superstition. 
 
318 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 Is there any possibility of escaping this logic by 
 maintaining that the laws of nature are subject to 
 exception, or that its course is broken in upon at 
 particular points by supernatural agencies ? I am 
 bound to say that I do not think so. I do not 
 think that we can admit in general the mode of 
 thinking represented by the Enlightenment of last 
 century, and by the Positivism of the present day, 
 and then say that, here and there, whether in a few or 
 in many instances, the objective connexion of nature 
 is interrupted by agencies that are outside of the 
 system of nature. If a miracle is a breach of the 
 order of nature, it is a fact that will not submit to the 
 only criteria by which such facts can be determined. 
 If, therefore, I venture to challenge the view of things 
 to which this mode of thought leads, it is on other 
 grounds; not on exceptional grounds which apply to 
 this fact and not to that, to this object and not to 
 that, but on grounds which apply equally to all facts 
 and all objects. I should despair of iinding evidence of 
 'a principle which transcends the necessity of nature, if 
 that necessity were of itself sufficient to give a com- 
 plete account of anything. I should not expect to 
 find what is above nature anywhere, if there were 
 not something above nature everywhere. If material- 
 ism by the aid of the atomic or any other mechanical 
 theory can furnish a complete rationale of the simplest 
 physical fact, it may still be far away from an explan- 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 319 
 
 ation of the universe, but it will have got over its 
 greatest difSculty. On the other hand, it would be a 
 fatal mistake for any spiritual or idealistic philosophy 
 — if by idealism we mean the doctrine that the ultimate 
 explanation of the world is to be found in a rational 
 principle kindred to the soul of man, — to admit that 
 the general course of things is to be explained by 
 nature and necessity, and that the need for a higher 
 explanation arises only when a break is made in that 
 course. It would be dangerous for it even to admit 
 that in such breaks we have better evidence of the exist- 
 ence of a higher power than is to be found in the 
 ordinary course of things. If God must be conceived 
 as revealing himself in the whole world, one object 
 may still be higher, may contain more of Him than 
 another, but there can be no absolute division be- 
 tween different objects, and no breach in the con- 
 tinuity of the process whereby He reveals himself in 
 them all. 
 
 If this be true, then any attack upon the principle 
 of Positivism, which seeks only to establish special 
 exceptions to the course of nature, must be a failure. 
 A supematuralism which tries to survive alongside of 
 naturalism, dividing the kingdom with it, will soon 
 have taken away from it ' even that which it seemeth 
 to have.' The only hope of a successful issue is to 
 carry the war into the enemy's quarters, and to 
 maintain what Carlyle called a Natural SwperTiatitrai- 
 
320 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 ism} i.e. the doctrine not that there are single miracles, 
 but that the universe is miraculous ; and that in order 
 to conceive it truly, we must think of it, not as a 
 mechanical system occasionally broken in upon from 
 above, but as an organism which implies a spiritual 
 principle as its beginning and as its end. The idealist 
 must be prepared to show that the mechanical or 
 •external view of the world to which Positivism tends 
 is an essentially imperfect view, a view which, no 
 doubt, has its uses, and represents certain aspects of 
 the truth, but which never can be taken as a final ac- 
 count of anything, not even of inorganic matter. He 
 must, in short, be prepared to show that that view, 
 though based upon premises which represent an im- 
 portant aspect of reality, yet involves a forgetfulness 
 of other and even more important aspects of it; and 
 that, therefore, its ultimate consequences, as they are 
 derived from a partial hypothesis, are themselves 
 hypothetical. In other words, they do not give us 
 the whole truth in any one instance, and, therefore, can 
 still less be taken as containing a true view of the 
 universe as a whole. 
 
 Now it is impossible here to develop this thesis to its 
 ultimate consequence ; but one thing it is not difficult 
 
 1 Sartor Resartus, iii. 8 : " Innumerable are the illusions and 
 legerdemain tricks of custom ; but of all these perhaps the 
 cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by 
 simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous." 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 321 
 
 to show, viz. that Positivism rests on the ordinary 
 objective view of things, in which no account ij^ 
 taken of their subjective aspect. Yet the object is 
 essentially related to the subject, and it is an obvious 
 fact that we never have the former without the latter. 
 It is possible and natural that this element of our 
 consciousness should at first escape our attention ; for, 
 as we have seen, our first consciousness so far loses 
 itself in the object, that it is forced to regard even the 
 seK within us as a mere object ; and, as a necessary 
 consequence, it also reduces God, who is the principle 
 of unity in subject and object, to the form of an 
 object. At this late period of human history, indeed, 
 the objective consciousness does not retain its original 
 directness and simplicity. The general current of 
 ordinary thought has been widened and modified by 
 many streams of subjective reflexion which it has 
 received into itself Still the one-sided objective 
 attitude of mind, the attitude in which the object, 
 and nothing but the object, is distinctly recognised 
 or attended to, is the common attitude of men. It 
 is that attitude in which we all receive the first lessons 
 of experience, and no one escapes from living more 
 than half his life in it, however he may realise its 
 inadequacy. 
 
 Nor, in this point of view, does science attempt to 
 correct the error or inadvertence of the ordinary con- 
 sciousness. In fact, it rather tends to increase that 
 
 VOL. I. X 
 
322 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 error by the self-imposed limitations under which it 
 pursues its task. The usual method of science in 
 dealing with any complex problem is to break it up 
 into as many simpler problems as possible, in order 
 that it may lessen the difficulties to be encountered, 
 and win the battle of knowledge in detail. As I 
 showed in the first of these lectures, science seeks to 
 isolate the element or aspect of reality which it would 
 investigate, from all the other elements or aspects of 
 it. It thus for a time deliberately accepts what it 
 knows to be an untrue hypothesis, in order that it 
 may avoid the impossible task of answering all ques- 
 tions at once. It deals with pure numbers, with 
 simple geometrical figures, with absolutely rigid bars 
 and perfect fluids, though it is well aware that all 
 these are fictions of abstraction. In all this it pur- 
 sues a legitimate end by perfectly legitimate means. 
 But there is one thing which it is necessary for the 
 scientific man always to remember, if he would not 
 become the victim of his own method, and that is, 
 that he is abstracting. For it is obvious that there 
 are no things which are purely mathematical, or 
 mechanical, or chemical in all their relations. There 
 is no aspect or element of the real world which exists 
 alone. Of none of them can we say what it would 
 be, or whether it could &e at all, if the others were 
 removed. Science is, therefore, strictly speaking, 
 hypothetical, i.e. it gives an account of certain elements, 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 323 
 
 as if they could be absolutely isolated ; while yet we 
 know that they never are isolated, nor, so far as we 
 know, can be isolated from the rest. And from this 
 follows an obvious consequence, viz. that we cannot 
 either apply our science, or know what its results 
 really mean, unless we invert our abstracting process, and 
 recall the elements we have left out of account. We \ 
 cannot apply the simplest mechanical rules without | 
 making allowance for the varied nature of ourj 
 materials, and the varied conditions under which they 
 are to be used. We cannot apply our abstract 
 economical reasonings without considering that men 
 are not creatures moved by the simple motive of a 
 thirst for gain, but human beings living in families 
 and states, and affected by each other in a thousand 
 ways of which economic science takes no account. 
 We cannot apply our anatomical knowledge to the 
 explanation of the phenomena of life, if we do not 
 remember that the body was dead when we dissected it ; 
 otherwise we are likely to find that the very process 
 whereby we seek the truth has removed from our 
 view the most important fact to be considered. 
 " Wer mil was Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben, 
 
 Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben ; 
 
 Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand, 
 
 Fehlt, leider ! nur das geistige Band." ' 
 ^He who wishes to know and to describe a living thing, 
 endeavours first to drive the soul out of it; then he has in 
 his hands the separate parts ; only the spiritual bond, un- 
 fortunately, is gone. 
 
324 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 XotMng exists alone, and when we take it alone, we 
 may be leaving out just what is essential to a true 
 view of it. Hence the thought that divides is apt to 
 lead to dangerous illusions, idols of the cave, if it be 
 not corrected by the thought that reunites. Synthesis 
 must complete the work of analysis, and give us back 
 the whole which we have ' murdered in order to dis- 
 sect.' "We must restore the parts, which by the in- 
 evitable abstraction of science we have displaced and 
 distorted, to their proper position and relations. And 
 on the success of this process of restoration must it 
 depend whether we get from science a true view of 
 the world as a whole, — a view which is better than the 
 confused unity of sense, because it distinguishes, and 
 better than the onesidedness of the special sciences, 
 because it reunites. 
 
 Now, among the elements of reality which are put 
 aside or neglected by science, and which it is 
 necessary to restore if we would have the truth of 
 knowledge, is that of which we have been speaking, 
 viz. the relation of all objects to a subject. Like the 
 ordinary consciousness, and even more than the 
 ordinary consciousness, science insists on a purely 
 objective view of things. And here, too, the abstrac- 
 tion is useful and even necessary, so long as it is 
 not forgotten that it is an abstraction. But this is 
 just what Positivism forgets, when it attempts to 
 universalise the mechanical view of nature and human 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 325 
 
 nature. It treats the world as if it were complete 
 in itself without any knowing subject; whereas it is 
 almost an Irish bull to say that, if there be such a 
 world, we do not and cannot know anything about it. 
 The conscious self may be an important or an un- 
 important element of experience, of that we are not 
 in the first instance called upon to decide ; at any 
 rate, it is an essential element. In the drama of our 
 experience, the Ego may be the Hamlet, or it may be 
 only a walking gentleman : one thing is certain, it is 
 always on the stage ; and, if it were not, the play 
 could not go on. And if we wish to complete our 
 view of the facts, we must restore to its place the part 
 we have omitted, and consider what difference its 
 restoration makes. We must recognise that the whole 
 truth of our experience is not summed up in what we 
 call the facts of the objective world, even if we add all 
 the laws of their connexion which science has dis- 
 covered or ever can discover ; but that, besides, 
 we must take account of the no less certain fact of the 
 subjective unity of the intelligence for which these 
 facts exist. Any merely objective explanation of the 
 world, however complete it may be, leaves out an 
 essential element in it, and is therefore abstract and 
 hypothetical. Por we cannot know a priori that the 
 reintroduction of the element left out will not change 
 our whole view of the other elements. Even if 
 science were able to give a complete account of the 
 
326 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 world, and to explain all the relations of its parts on 
 principles of mechanical necessity, it would not have 
 secured the triumph of materialism. For it might 
 well be that a careful consideration of the relation 
 of this mechanically explained world to the mind that 
 knows it, would invalidate or even invert all the 
 results thus attained. A French writer has said that 
 "if there were nothing but matter, there would be no 
 Materialism." The very presence of the consciousness 
 which is implied in such a theory, is a demonstration 
 that the theory is incomplete ; and therefore that, if it 
 be put forward as a philosophical dogma as to the 
 nature of things, and not merely as an hypothesis 
 which it is useful for certain scientific purposes to 
 assume, it is untrue. 
 
 There are two ways in which this result may 
 be taken, and therefore two ways in which we 
 may seek to advance beyond it. We may take 
 it in a purely negative way, as a condemnation of 
 aU our knowledge in so far as it is based on an 
 objective view of things ; or, in other words, as a 
 proof that the objective view of things can only 
 at best give us a systematic account of phenomena 
 or appearances, and not any knowledge of things as 
 they really are. And from this we may draw the 
 inference that, in order to reach the reality that is 
 hid beneath these appearances, we must look inwards 
 and not outwards, we must cease to study the out- 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 327 
 
 ward world and begin to study our own souls. 
 Or, on the other hand, we may take it in a positive 
 way, as a proof that the objective view of things, 
 even when corrected and systematised by science, 
 gives us an abstract and therefore an imperfect 
 knowledge of them, because it leaves out one and 
 that the most important of their aspects. We may 
 argue, therefore, that the intelligible world cannot 
 be understood, unless we take into account its re- 
 lation to the intelligence ; and we may attempt to 
 reach the truth by bringing back the element thus 
 omitted. We may thus seek to reinterpret the 
 results of our objective knowledge of the world in 
 the light of a fact which science neglects and which 
 Positivism would exclude. If we adopt the former 
 alternative, we shall be led to oppose the subjective 
 to the objective view of things, and to assert the 
 inner at the expense of the outer life. In other 
 words, our weapon against materialism will lie in 
 showing that the world of matter is a world ofi 
 appearance, and that it is only as we withdraw I 
 upon the inner world of thought that we can ap- 
 prehend the reality of things. If we adopt the 
 latter alternative, we shall be led to regard the 
 inner and the outer, the subjective and the objec- 
 tive, as abstract elements of reality, which can only 
 be understood when seen in their unity with each 
 other. And our weapon against materialism will 
 
328 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 be the proof that matter itself is relative to spirit, 
 and that, therefore, neither can be understood as 
 what it really is, till it is seen as a factor in the 
 development of spiritual life. 
 
 Now, after what has been said in a former lec- 
 ture, I need scarcely repeat that these two ways of 
 \ thinking are not, strictly speaking, alternatives, but 
 rather, successive stages through which the mind 
 ■passes in the course of its development. The one- 
 sided objective view of things develops tiU its im- 
 perfection becomes manifest, and then it finds its 
 natural corrective in a view which separates the 
 subject from, and raises it above the object. And 
 it is only when this view also has been thoroughly 
 worked out, and has shown all its characteristic 
 excellences and defects, that it becomes possible to 
 reach a view which does justice to object and sub- 
 ject alike. Even religion, though it is essentially 
 the consciousness of a unity which is beyond the 
 difference of subject and object, and therefore always 
 contains in itself a kind of anticipation of this 
 last and highest view of things, has itself to pass 
 through a predominantly subjective as well as a 
 predominantly objective phase, ere it can reach an 
 explicit apprehension of that unity, or, as I have 
 previously expressed it, ere it can know God in the 
 form of God. 
 
 It is the second of these phases of religion 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 329 
 
 which we have uow to examine. But before deal- 
 ing with it in the concrete form in which it pre- 
 sents itself in religious history, it may be useful to 
 consider a little more closely the inner logic of 
 it, the secret movement of thought which it in- 
 volves. Subjective religion is, in the fird place, 
 the surrender of the outward world, and of the 
 external course of things to fate, to the law of 
 nature and necessity, or, at least, to some power 
 or principle which is not regarded as divine, and 
 may even be regarded as essentially opposed to the 
 divine. And it is, ia the second place, the appeal 
 to something within us, something that is bound 
 up with the inner consciousness of self, as the re- 
 velation of the highest, the authentic voice of God. 
 It is the religion of subjectivity, of moral aspir- 
 ation, of prophecy; the religion for which the ideal 
 is opposed to the real, yet iu a sense conceived to 
 have a higher reality. It is a religion which sets 
 the demands of the heart, the conscience, or the 
 reason, above all the facts of outward experience. 
 Thus when Tennyson, disgusted with the conclusions 
 to which materialistic science seems to be driving 
 him, cuts the knot by declaring that — 
 
 " Then, like a man in wrath, the heart 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt,'" 
 
 he is speaking the language of subjective religion, 
 and claiming that an inward conviction should out- 
 
3S0 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 vote all outward experience. Again, when Iphigenia, 
 in Goethe's tragedy, meets the objection — 
 
 " It is no God that speaks, 'tis only thine own heart," 
 
 with the instant answer — 
 
 " 'Tis only through our hearts the gods speak to us," 
 
 she is setting her own inward ideal against the 
 apparent reality, and claiming that the former should 
 be trusted against all evidence derived from the latter. 
 And Kant is only translating the poetry of such pas- 
 sages into prose when he asserts that the conviction that 
 we ought to do any act, is a sufficient evidence that we 
 can do it; and even calls upon us to believe in God 
 and immortality, because a God must exist to realise 
 the moral ideal, and because there is no room fully to 
 realise it within the bounds of mortal life. He is, in 
 fact, asserting that the Good is the True, that the 
 highest moral ideal is at the same time the ultimate 
 reality of things, and that, in short, our subjective 
 consciousness of that which 'ought to be,' is at the 
 same time our best definition of that which ' is' On 
 this view our inner recoil against immediate reality is 
 believed to carry us beyond it to a deeper reality ; the 
 demand which our spirits make, that the facts should 
 yield to our ideal, is taken as itself a proof that they 
 are illusive, phenomenal, or transitory ; and that, there- 
 fore, in one way or another, they are to be put out of 
 
THJE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 331 
 
 court in our ultimate judgments as to the real nature 
 of things and of the Divine Being on whom they 
 depend. 
 
 Now, how can such a way of thinking be justified ? 
 It is easy to see that it may be morally profitable ; 
 for a belief in the existence of goodness often does 
 good to him who entertains it, even when the indi- 
 vidual believed to be good has none of the virtues 
 attributed to him. Love may be directed to an 
 unworthy or commonplace object, but none the less 
 does its idealising power elevate the character of the 
 lover. And sometimes we may say without any 
 cynicism that the dream is so much beyond the 
 reality, that it is no iU fortune for the dreamer if it 
 remain unrealised. Is it not the fruits that are 
 never enjoyed, or that are prematurely snatched from 
 our lips, which retain immortal sweetness ? Desire is 
 always prophesying its own complete satisfaction ; and 
 it requires only a slight suggestion from without to con- 
 nect the idea of such satisfaction with an object which, 
 if real at all, has no reality corresponding to the hopes 
 that are attached to it so long as it is unattained. 
 And, if it is never attained, its finitude may never be 
 - discovered. But in such cases the beauty lies, if 
 anywhere, in the eye that sees it. The good sought 
 is nowhere, if not in the soul that seeks it. Might 
 we not even quote the words of Scripture in a 
 changed sense, and say that " faith is the substance of 
 
332 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 things hoped for," their only substance ? Is it not 
 the commonplace of moralists that life is a hunt after 
 illusions, which are found out whenever they are 
 caught, — an experience which would soon produce 
 despair, were it not for what Goethe calls the ' uncon- 
 querable levity' of man, with which he substitutes 
 a new illusion for the one that has been found out, 
 and were it not that there are some shadows that are 
 never caught ? 
 
 Now, what reason is there for attaching higher 
 credit to such subjective evidence in religion ? If we 
 find men worshipping what they admire, and bestow- 
 ing the throne of the universe upon a being who 
 realises what they wish for — or at least, what they 
 wish for in their best moments, and think they 
 ought always to wish for — does this show anything 
 except that, as Feuerbach says, the gods are ' the 
 wishes of men thought of as already realised ' ? 
 Why in the case of religion should we regard such a 
 / conversion of the subjective into the objective with 
 I a respect which we do not pay to it in any other 
 sphere ? Our desires and longings, at least when 
 they reach a certain degree of intensity, recalcitrate 
 against the idea of their own subjectivity. They 
 are incredulous of the unreality of their objects, and 
 hold out against the strongest evidence of such un- 
 reality, almost with the same instinctive revolt with 
 which we listen to a story that reflects discredit 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 333 
 
 upon the character of a trusted friend. In such a 
 case men have often felt that they could outvote the 
 world in the strength of their solitary conviction. 
 "My life upon his faith!" But what right have we to 
 treat the great Power of the universe, as if it were a 
 friend whose character is so intimately known to us 
 that we feel certain he cannot deceive ? Is not such 
 a belief an extension of our first natural mistake of 
 thinking all things centred in ourselves, a mistake 
 which is seen in an exaggerated form in childhood 
 with its unreasonable demands, that would grasp at 
 the sun and moon and expect them to become its 
 playthings ? Is it not the lesson of experience that 
 the world goes its own way, and that we cannot make 
 it accommodate itself to us, but that we must accom- 
 modate ourselves to it ? 
 
 The argument from desire is, undoubtedly, one to 
 which recourse is often had by writers who are trying 
 to find some philosophical justification for the relig- 
 ious sentiment, and especially for the demand of our 
 spiritual nature for something more than any finite 
 satisfaction. Thus Dante, in a remarkable passage, 
 pictures man's insatiable thirst for knowledge, which 
 cannot be satisfied by anything less than the attain- 
 ment of absolute truth. At the foot of every 
 certainty, he declares, a new doubt springs up, and so 
 drives us to seek beyond every truth for a still deeper 
 truth ; and then he adds that the possibility of our 
 
334 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 finally reaching absolute truth is not to be questioned ; 
 for, if it were not possible, then " all desire would be 
 vain and meaningless." In this, as is often the case 
 with Dante, he is just repeating the words of the 
 great Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, who declares 
 that " if the rational intelligence of the creature 
 could not attain to the first cause of things, natural 
 desire would remain empty and ineffectual." In the 
 same spirit Pascal speaks of man, as a being 'cribbed, 
 cabined, and confined ' by the conditions of his earthly 
 existence — a being whose destiny in this world brings 
 with it no good which is adequate to his deepest 
 wants; whose nature, therefore, must be taken as 
 prophetic of another sphere for which it is preparing, 
 and in which alone it wUl have full scope. And 
 Goethe's great dramatic poem, Fmist, has a similar 
 theme. The devU deceives himself when he under- 
 takes to satisfy man with earthly food, and Faust is 
 saved because he cannot thus be satisfied. " The 
 man who is ever striving, ever endeavouring after 
 some higher good, him," says the song of the angels, 
 " we can redeem or deliver from the powers of 
 evil."^ Whom neither the devil nor the world can 
 satiate, God must satisfy. 
 
 Now, whatever the value of this argument, we can- 
 not accept it simply as it is stated. Before we can 
 
 ' Wer immer strebend sich bemiiht, 
 Den konnen wir erlosen. 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 335 
 
 even admit that it has any validity at all, we must 
 find some way of distinguishing between the chance' 
 desires, which are continually arising within us to meet 
 or to miss a chance satisfaction, and those higher 
 longings which, as it is maintained, carry with them 
 the assurance of the reality, and the attainableness of 
 their objects. We must be able to show why we do , 
 not put man's aspiration to the infinite in the same 
 class with those random wishes for the impossible, 
 which every day we set aside, in obedience to the 
 common sense that makes us recognise their incon- 
 sistency with the conditions and limits of our earthly 
 existence. There is, indeed, an obvious difference 
 between the desire for the knowledge of God or for 
 the realisation of the kingdom of heaven — for the 
 attainment, whether in this world or another, of a 
 perfect state, in which sin and misery shall be done 
 away, and the last enemy death shall be destroyed — 
 between desires like these, and the desire for any 
 finite good ; say, for the attainment of immense riches 
 or power. But, at first, the difference seems to be in 
 favour of the practical possibility of realising the 
 latter, rather than the former. For desires for a finite 
 good, however great, do not carry us beyond the limits 
 of experience. The wish to be a king or even a 
 millionaire is dependent for its realisation on a 
 thousand contingencies ; but there is a calculable, 
 though, it may be, an almost infinitesimal chance, 
 
336 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 that these contingencies may meet together in my 
 individual case. " Being a man," says Sancho Panza, 
 " I may come to be Pope, and much more easily 
 governor of an island." ^ On the other hand, it might 
 seem that the distinguishing characteristic of those 
 higher desires of which we have been speaking, is 
 just that, on empirical grounds, there is not even a 
 chance, or, at least, the means of calculating a chance 
 of their fulfilment ; seeing that to think of them as 
 fulfilled, is to go beyond aU the conditions of 
 experience, on the basis of which alone we can 
 calculate anything. Why should our faith in the 
 ' prophetic power of our desires, turn into a con- 
 fident expectation, just when they become transcend- 
 ent, and carry us altogether beyond the region of 
 the calculable ? Why should we reject as unreason- 
 able all wishes which somewhat strain the limits of 
 finite possibility, and count supremely reasonable 
 those which, as it were, break the mould of experi- 
 ence in which all our ordinary hopes and fears are 
 cast, and refuse to express themselves except ' under 
 the form of eternity ' ? Is not this another example 
 of the credo qwia impossibile, which we can explain 
 only on Kant's principle that what is altogether 
 beyond experience, is for that very reason safe from 
 being refuted by experience ? 
 
 Now I have already indicated how these difiiculties 
 • Don Quixote, First Part, iv. 47. 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 337 
 
 would be met by one who, like Kant, takes his stand 
 at the point of view of subjective religion. In the 
 first place, he would set aside the argument from out- 
 ward experience as irrelevant. The world of experi- 
 ence, he would argue, is merely a world of appear- 
 ances, which have no reality except for the self to; 
 whom they appear : it is a system of objects, which , 
 are themselves essentially related to the subject that 
 knows them. But this subject cannot, without 
 reasoning in a circle, be included in the system 
 which presupposes him. The self to which all 
 appears cannot be one of the appearances of its 
 own subjectivity : the subject, as Kant argues, 
 cannot be brought under the laws by which it 
 determines and connects the objects of its know- 
 ledge. Although, therefore, outward experience does 
 not afford any evidence for those beliefs and hopes 
 which are connected with our moral consciousness, 
 no shadow of doubt is thereby cast upon those 
 beliefs and hopes themselves. We could not expect 
 that our objective consciousness, which has to do 
 only with the relative and phenomenal, should 
 supply any evidence for ideas that reach beyond 
 the sphere of the relative and phenomenal. But 
 neither can it give us any reason to reject such 
 ideas, if evidence for them should be found else- 
 where in our inward consciousness of ourselves. 
 The astronomer who swept the heavens with his 
 
 VOL. I, Y 
 
338 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 telescope and found no God, had proved nothing 
 except that God is not an object of outward ex- 
 perience. Setting aside, therefore, all objections 
 derived from such experience, we can listen un- 
 disturbed to the voice of reason within us ; for it 
 is only in the inward forum of self-consciousness 
 that we cease to deal with the appearances of 
 sense, and are brought into contact with the essen- 
 tial reality of things. 
 
 But, in the second place, the defender of sub- 
 jective religion has to meet the objection that the 
 inner oracle to which he appeals is at least am- 
 biguous. For, when we turn our eye upon ourselves, 
 we find within us many impulses which obviously 
 have no objective reality corresponding to them. 
 Kant, therefore, tries to show that there is an 
 essential distinction between our ordinary wishes — 
 the wishes which spring out of our natural individual- 
 ity and out of the particular circumstances of our 
 environment — and those desires which arise directly 
 out of our rational and moral nature, our nature 
 as self-conscious beings. The former class of desires 
 is bound up with our individual existence as 
 sensitive beings in a world of sense, beings who 
 are, therefore, acted upon by other objects, and 
 stimulated to react upon them by the pleasures 
 and pains which they occasion. The latter class of 
 desires arises out of the pure consciousness of 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 339 
 
 ourselves as subjects, and is, therefore, inde- 
 pendent of all the conditions of our individual 
 existence. For when we abstract from all such 
 empirical relations of our being, we yet do not find 
 our inner life a blank. Indeed, it is just then, as 
 Kant maintains, that we become most clearly con- 
 scious of certain desires or tendencies, certain 
 demands of our rational nature, which we cannot 
 suppose to be aimless without distrusting that 
 rational principle which is the basis of all our 
 certitude. In the language of Kant, they take the 
 form of Postulates of Reason, postulates which reason 
 entitles us to make, in the absence of any other 
 evidence. Thus we postulate God, freedom, and 
 immortality, not because we can prove them to be 
 real, but because, as moral beings, we cannot do 
 without them : because the attitude towards the 
 world which we necessarily take up, when we 
 regard ourselves as moral subjects, involves their 
 objective reality. Kant does not shun expressing 
 this belief in what seems its most paradoxical form. 
 " The righteous man," he declares, " may say : I will 
 that there should be a God: I will that, though in 
 this world of natural necessity, I should not be of 
 it, but should also belong to a purely intelligible 
 world of freedom : finally, I will that my duration 
 should be endless. On this faith I insist and will 
 not let it be taken from me." 
 
340 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 These statements were criticised by a certain 
 Professor Wizenmann, who brought against them the 
 same objection which has been stated above. In 
 other words, Wizenmann pointed out that the 
 feeling of want is the source of endless illusions, 
 leading men to suppose that a satisfaction is 
 provided for it in cases in which no such pro- 
 vision is made; and, still more frequently, making 
 them attribute to some object a perfect adapta- 
 tion to our wants, which it does not possess, 
 which, perhaps, no object whatever possesses. And 
 he went on to compare Kant's assertion — that we 
 have a right to assume the possibility of the realisa- 
 tion of the moral ideal, or the existence of all 
 the conditions which are necessary to its objective 
 realisation — with the dream of a lover who attributes 
 to the object of his affection all the excellences 
 which he can conceive or desire, and which, 
 perhaps, were never united in any one person. 
 Kant replies : " I quite agree with Professor Wizen- 
 mann in all cases where the feeling of want is due 
 to mere inclination. Such a want cannot postulate 
 the existence of the object desired, even for him 
 who feels it : still less can it be the ground of a 
 postulate which is universal. In this case, how- 
 ever, we have a want of reason, springing not from 
 the subjective ground of our wishes, but from an 
 objective ground of the will, which binds every 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 341 
 
 rational being, and thence authorises him a priori 
 to presuppose in nature the conditions necessary 
 for its satisfaction.'' In other words, Kant holds 
 that there are certain tendencies in us which do 
 not belong to our nature as individuals, with special 
 feelings determined by heredity and circumstance ; 
 but which are the pure expression of our rational 
 nature, of that in us which lifts us above our finite 
 and phenomenal individuality. And for these 
 tendencies we may reasonably expect, nay, we have 
 a right to expect, to find a satisfaction provided. 
 Thus there is in us a desire, not merely to have 
 our wrongs righted and our happiness secured, — or 
 even to see these ends attained by certain persons 
 or classes in which we are interested, — but a 
 desire to see right triumphant for the sake of 
 right; a desire for the realisation of a social order 
 in which universal goodness shall be joined to 
 universal happiness, not because of any good which 
 we might derive from it, but simply because we 
 are obliged to think of such an order as highest 
 and best. It is Kant's view that such desires, and 
 such alone, carry with them the assurance of the 
 possibility and, indeed, of the necessity, of their 
 satisfaction. Thus the very universality, the infinite 
 character, of the ends in question, which makes it 
 impossible empirically to understand how they can 
 be realised, is regarded by him, not as a reason to 
 
842 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 doubt the possibility of their realisation, but rather 
 as taking them altogether out of the category of 
 ends, whose realisation need be a matter of doubt, 
 or whose certainty is dependent upon calculation. 
 We are obliged to regard them as the ends for 
 which all things exist; and we cannot, therefore, 
 reasonably ask by what special means they are to 
 be attained. 
 
 With this agrees Kant's conception of the moral 
 law itself, which, according to his view of it, carries 
 with it the certitude that it can be realised by every 
 one who hears its commands. For the central char- 
 acteristic of the moral consciousness is that it lifts 
 us above the region of calculation as to means and 
 ends, and makes us set aside as irrelevant all ques- 
 tions as to the possibUity of the actions it prescribes 
 to us. The categorical imperative of duty is an 
 absolute demand which is made upon us, or rather 
 which we make upon ourselves, without any previous 
 consideration as to what is attainable. The con- 
 sciousness that we ' ought ' is at once to be taken 
 as sufficient evidence that we ' can.' When we think 
 of life in this point of view, we are obliged if so facto 
 to throw aside our finite weights and measures ; we 
 cease to consult with flesh and blood; we defy augury 
 and go forward trusting in our ideal without, and 
 sometimes against, all calculation. We are to say 
 with Hector: "It is the one best omen of success 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 343 
 
 that we fight for fatherland." We are to say with 
 Danton: "Impossible! do not name to me that stupid 
 word." The sense of power is not here to anticipate, 
 but to follow upon the resolve to act. For it is futile 
 to weigh spirit against matter, or to use at once the 
 scales of worldly prudence and the standard of moral 
 right. We are to assume that the former will adjust 
 itself, like everything else in the world, to the latter. 
 High moral achievement can never be attained by 
 one who anxiously weighs the empirical considera- 
 tions that make for and against the practicability 
 of the course of action which he regards as best. 
 " Impossible," says one of the bravest of Shakespeare's 
 heroines, "impossible be strange attempts to such as 
 weigh their pains in sense." Every great deed has 
 seemed impossible till it was done. And even in 
 the sphere of moral deeds which have no claim to 
 the name of greatness, a certain courage of faith is 
 constantly required of those that would act rightly. 
 We cannot be true to ourselves unless we have the 
 power, in any crisis where an important moral de- 
 cision is necessary, to put aside the spirit of cal- 
 culation, and to believe that fidelity to our best 
 instincts wiU somehow carry us through. 
 
 But if this faith in the moral imperative be 
 reasonable, we ought clearly to realise what it in- 
 volves. It does not mean, strictly speaking, that 
 "to do right is wisdom in the scorn of consequence," 
 
344 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 unless we are referring merely to the consequences 
 to ourselves ; for an act cannot, except by a false 
 abstraction, be separated from its consequences. If 
 it is reasonable that we should be called upon to 
 listen to the demands of our conscience without 
 empirically calculating the consequences, it must be 
 on the ground that the conscience itself yields 
 not only a higher, but a truer view of life than 
 any empirical calculation could enable us to reach. 
 In other words, it is rational so to act, because we 
 are really taking a more complete and comprehensive 
 estimate of things, and especially of our own highest 
 interests, when we trust in what is called the ideal, 
 than when we hold by what we usually caU the 
 real. If it is not a fair answer to the claim made 
 in behalf of the moral law : " You ought, therefore 
 you can," to reply : " I cannot, therefore I ought not," 
 it must be because the reply comes from a less 
 reliable source than the first assertion; in other 
 words, the moral ideal is not a mere subjective 
 dream of perfection, which has no relation to the 
 possibilities of our actual human life ; it is simply 
 the actual itself, as seen in the light of a deeper 
 reflexion, which detects the secret forces working in 
 it. On this view, we are called upon to disregard 
 what is, as against what ought to he, because, after all, 
 our consciousness of what o^bght to he represents what 
 in a deeper sense really is. In breaking with that 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 345 
 
 which is empirically calculable, we are breaking with 
 superficial appearances that we may reach the truth 
 of things. Hence also the obstructions which, in the 
 former point of view, seem to make action impossible, 
 are, in the latter, rightly regarded as shadows which 
 can offer no effective resistance. For it is absurd to 
 think that any power in the universe can ultimately 
 defeat those who have the divine principle of the 
 universe on their side. If, therefore, we admit the 
 claims of the moral imperative to override or set aside 
 experience, we must also admit the farther consequence 
 that " morality is the nature of things," and that what 
 Kant calls the ' postulates of reason ' are true. In 
 other words, the demands or aspirations which are 
 connected with our consciousness of the moral ideal 
 are not merely subjective wishes ; they are our highest 
 and truest revelation of the nature of the universe, and 
 of that divine principle upon which it depends. And 
 if God, freedom, and immortality be necessary postu- 
 lates with a view to the realisation of the moral ideal, 
 then they have for us the same evidence as the moral 
 ideal itself 
 
 Now, I have given this answer — which is substan- 
 tially the answer of Kant — to the objections usually 
 brought against subjective religion, not because I re- 
 gard it as finally satisfactory, but because it throws 
 light on the nature of the difficulties in which such 
 religion is involved, and indicates the only way in 
 
346 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 which those difBculties can be met with any show of 
 reason. Kant, in fact, only makes explicit a process 
 of thought which we can detect in all cases where 
 appeal is made from outward experience to inward 
 conviction, from consciousness to self-consciousness. 
 In brief, his argument is that, when we abstract 
 from outward experience and purify our minds from 
 all those impulses which are due to our nature as 
 objects and our relations to other objects, — when, that 
 is, we leave out of account all that belongs to the 
 phenomenal side of our being, — we stiU find within 
 us, bound up with the practical consciousness of 
 ourselves as moral beings, ideas of the world, the 
 smil, and God, which have a higher truth than all 
 our empirical knowledge. For it is this practical 
 consciousness and its postulates which alone reveal 
 to us what we really are, and what is our relation 
 to God as the absolute Eeality. It is thus for 
 us the legitimate ground of a faith which goes 
 beyond all our knowledge. Now, in this reasoning, 
 Kant, as I have just said, is only making explicit 
 the logic which underlies subjective religion in all 
 its forms — from the extreme form of Buddhism, in 
 which the subject is altogether torn away from the 
 object, to the Judaic form, in which the latter is 
 merely subordinated to the former, and even to the 
 partial revival of the Judaic spirit in modern Pro- 
 testantism. 
 
THE LOGIC OF SUBJECTIVE RELIGION. 347 
 
 It will, however, be easier to appreciate the merits 
 and defects, the partial truth and the partial un- 
 truth of this mode of religious thought, after we have 
 followed it out in the concrete, in the historical 
 development of the different religions of this type. 
 
LECTUEE THIRTEENTH. 
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE EELIGIONS BUDDHISM AND THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL EELIGION OF THE STOICS. 
 
 The Logic of Svhjeetive Religion in Kwnt — How such Religion 
 arises in the Life of Lndividuals and Nations — Development of 
 Buddhism out of Vedic Pantheism — The Absolute Self of the 
 Upanishads — The Cheat Deliverance of Buddha — Its Negative 
 Cha/robcter — Place of Universal Charity in its Moral Code — Sub- 
 jective Movement of Qreek Thought in Anaxagoras and Socrates 
 — Partial Restoration of an Objective View of Things in Plato 
 and Aristotle — Final Triumph of Subjective Indiind/aalism — 
 Comparison of Stoicism with Buddhism — How Stoicism combines 
 its Subjective Ethics with Religion. 
 
 In the last Lecture I explained Kant's way of vindi- 
 cating morality and religion against the doctrine of 
 what is now commonly called Positivism. Positivism, 
 as a philosophical system, seeks to universalise the 
 principles upon which science explains the phenomena 
 of matter, and thereby to exclude from the world, or 
 at least from the knowable world, everything that does 
 not fall under the necessity of nature. Kant answers, 
 not by denying the validity of the principles upon 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 349 
 
 which science is based, or by asserting the existence 
 of any exceptions to the reign of law which it seeks 
 to establish, but by showing that the system of nature 
 implies a principle which is above nature. His first 
 step, therefore, is to point out that all objects are 
 relative to the conscious self, and that, this being so, 
 the self cannot be brought under the laws it applies 
 / to objects. And his second step is to maintain that 
 the pure consciousness of self is the source of a 
 universal law, which binds us as subjects irrespective 
 of special circumstances of our individual existence as 
 objects, standing in definite relations to other objects. 
 I Furthermore, he maintains that with the consciousness 
 ! of this law there necessarily goes a conviction of the 
 possibility of realising it, and a belief in the existence 
 of all the conditions that are required for such reali- 
 sation. Thus, by our subjective consciousness of self 
 we are lifted above the phenomenal world and all the 
 limitations under which it exists as an object of 
 knowledge ; and, at the same time, we gain an insight 
 — incomplete indeed, but certain — into a reality which 
 I is not phenomenal. We rise to faith in a God, who 
 I is fulfilling in the outward world the law of our 
 spirits, and, therefore, to a certainty that the moral 
 end to which that law points is attaiaable, and, 
 indeed, that it will necessarily be attained. 
 
 My object in thus dealing with the Kantian 
 theory, however, was not to criticise Kant, but 
 
350 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 to show the nature of the subjective movement of 
 reflexion, of which he is the greatest philosophical 
 exponent. For the. Kantian philosophy exhibits, 
 in the clearest and most explicit form, the inner logic 
 of the process which gives rise to the second of the 
 three great types of religion of which we have spoken. 
 In other words, it reveals to us the rationale of the 
 bhange from objective to subjective religion. To the 
 earliest consciousness of the individual and the race, 
 nothing can present itself except in an external form. 
 In this stage even the subject has to be conceived 
 simply as one of its own objects ; and, as a necessary 
 consequence, G-od also, the absolute unity of subject 
 and object, must find some outward form in which 
 to reveal or to hide His infinitude. At the same 
 time, even while this external way of representa- 
 tion prevails, it is not to be supposed that men are 
 entirely satisfied with it. On the contrary, there 
 is scarcely a single man who does not at times see 
 or feel its inadequacy, although he may be at a 
 loss to describe exactly what is wanting to it. 
 Almost all men at some period or another, — most 
 frequently in the crisis of youth, in which they first 
 become intellectually awakened to the mystery of life, — 
 recoil upon themselves from the inadequacy of the 
 world. They may not be able, like Kant, to work 
 out the objective view of things to its result, and 
 explicitly to recognise where it fails. But the sense 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 351 
 
 of the transitoriness, the illusiveness, and the imper- 
 fection of the world, as it is revealed in our outward 
 experience of it, throws them back upon themselves, 
 and makes them seek within for what they fail to find 
 without. They become for the time like subjective 
 idealists in their sense of the solitariness of the indi- 
 vidual soul, and their own image seems to stand 
 between them and the world. StUl more clearly we 
 may trace the same movement in the history of the 
 race. Fichte in Germany, and Carlyle in this country, 
 have made it almost a common-place of the phUo^ 
 sophy of history that there are two periods in national 
 development, a period of intuition and faith, and a 
 period of reflexion and criticism. In the former 
 period the nation is occupied in forming its national 
 beliefs, and expressing them in appropriate outward 
 symbols ; in building up its characteristic type of 
 national institutions and customs, and ia asserting 
 itself against the world. In the latter period there is 
 a decay of faith, a growing spirit of criticism, a relax- 
 ation in the energy of the political life of the people, 
 and a feeling of discord with circumstances in indi- 
 viduals. At this stage the higher minds show an 
 inclination to turn back upon themselves, to separate 
 themselves from their social environment, to quarrel 
 with the religious ideas and institutions which have 
 been evolved by the national genius, and to seek a 
 kingdom in their own souls. The spiritual life of 
 
352 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 man thus takes on a subjective and individualistic 
 colour. Morality ceases to be the acceptance of the 
 social duties which arise out of the life of citizenship, 
 and becomes the obedience of the individual to the 
 inner law of his own being. Eeligion ceases to be the 
 worship of a God who is revealed in outward nature, 
 or in the social order of the family and the State, and 
 becomes a reverence for a divine power that speaks 
 only, or mainly, in the soul of the individual. 
 
 Now, as I have already said, the second, type of 
 religion thus originated is, like the first, abstract and 
 imperfect. It must, therefore, give rise to the same 
 conflict of matter and form which was fatal to 
 the objective type ; for the subjective without the 
 objective is as unreal as the objective without the 
 subjective. Still it remains true that the subjec- 
 tive movement indicates a relative advance in man's 
 consciousness of himself, of the world and of 
 God. For, although the mind turned back upon 
 itself may become troubled and unhealthy, yet its 
 pain and disease are necessary steps in the way 
 to a higher life. He who has never got beyond the 
 simple objective view of things, never felt the pains of 
 inner loneliness, nor the agony of a self that cannot 
 escape from its own shadow, is incapable of rising to 
 that highest feeling of peace with God and man, 
 which is not a sense of untroubled unity, but the 
 consciousness of a unity won out of division, not 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 353 
 
 the mere instinct of natural affection, but a love born 
 of the conquest of self. For the reflexion which 
 breaks the immediate bonds of man to nature, and of 
 man to man, is necessary to the development of that 
 independent spiritual life, that consciousness of being a 
 law and an end to ourselves, upon which alone a truly 
 spiritual union can be based. 
 
 Now, if we confine our view to pre-Christian times,^ 
 there are three important examples of this kind of 
 subjective religion and subjective morality which I am 
 describing. These are (1) Buddhism, (2) the philo- 
 sophical religion of later Greece, and most important 
 of all, (3) the " ethical monotheism " of the Jews, as it 
 manifested itself in the later prophets and the psalmists. 
 Each of these has special peculiarities of its own, but 
 they are all examples of that kind of religion which 
 arises when man turns back from the objective to the 
 subjective, and finds the voice of God mainly in the 
 inner shrine of the heart. In this lecture I shall 
 speak of the two former, reserving for the follow- 
 ing lectures what I have to say of the religion of the 
 Jews. 
 
 In Buddhism we have the first and extremest 
 instance of recoil upon the subjective, a recoil, the 
 vehemence of which is made more intelligible to us 
 
 ^It will be shown in the sequel that there is a modified repe- 
 tition both of the objective and of the subjective type of religion 
 in the history of Christianity. 
 
 VOL. I. Z 
 
35+ THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 \by the modern reproduction of it in Schopenhauer. 
 In a former lecture^ I spoke of the way in which the 
 Vedic religion culminated in a pantheism which was 
 also an ' akosmism,' i.e., which regarded all the objec- 
 tive forms of nature as well as of human life, and all 
 mythological idealisations of these forms which had 
 been constructed by the imagination of the Vedic poets, 
 — all finite things and beings, and all the deities formed 
 in their image, — as parts of the great world-illusion. 
 All this is an illusion of diversity and change, beneath 
 which is concealed the one real being, permanent, 
 unchangeable, and absolute ; the one divine substance, 
 of which, however, aU we can say is, that it ' is.' 
 Such pantheism is, as we have seen, the euthanasia of 
 objective religion ; for he who looks away from the par- 
 ticular to the universal, from .sense to thought, must in 
 the long run turn his eyes back from all objects to the 
 self, as the one principle to which they are all equally 
 related. Accordingly, in the Upanishads the absolute 
 is already identified with the real Self, and the abstrac- 
 tion which lifts us above particular objects passes 
 into the reflexion which makes us turn away from 
 objects altogether, and direct our thoughts to the 
 subject within us. As we read in the Katha-Upani- 
 shad,^ " The Self-existent pierced the openings (of the 
 senses) so that they turn forward ; therefore man looks 
 forward, not backward unto himself. Some wise man, 
 ' VoL i., p. 262. 2 Sacred Books of the East, xv. 15-19. 
 
BUDDHISM AND' STOICISM. 355 
 
 however, with his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, 
 saw the Self behind." . . . "The wise, when he 
 knows that that by which he perceives all objects in 
 sleep and in waking is the great omnipresent Self, 
 grieves no more." " As the sun, the eye of the whole 
 world, is not contaminated by the external impurities 
 seen by the eyes, thus the one Self within all things is 
 never contaminated by the misery of the world, being 
 himself without." "There is one eternal thinker, 
 thinking non- eternal thoughts, who, though one, fulfils 
 the desires of many. The wise who perceive him 
 within their Self, to them belongs eternal peace, not to 
 others." On this view, the external world is "the 
 stuff that dreams are made of," and the outwardly 
 directed eye sees not anything but illusion. Hence 
 also the desires that objects awake in us are vain 
 and illusive. For they are chains which, by uniting 
 us to the transitory and illusory world, make us the 
 victims of an outward fatality ; and this fatality, ac- 
 cording to the Indian belief, extends not only to one 
 life, but to an unlimited series of lives, in which the 
 individual returns again and again to the world of 
 shows under different shapes. For, so long as desire 
 continues, it binds him to the illusion of life. So long, 
 therefore, he must revolve in the purposeless vicissitude 
 of birth and death, escaping from one form of transitory 
 existence only to be reimprisoned in another. "He who 
 forms desires within his mind is born again through 
 
356 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 his desires here and there." ^ To escape this fate, we 
 must cut through the links of the chain that binds 
 us to the wheel of necessity ; we must close the 
 openings of sense through which the outward world 
 affects us, and root out the desires that make us 
 seek an unreal happiness in it. Then, when we have 
 done this, we shall be identified with " Brahman," with 
 the Universal Self, the only Being which is absolutely 
 real, and in which the satisfaction of the soul can 
 be found. In this way alone can we reach that 
 harmony with self which is at the same time harmony 
 with God, and free ourselves from the false dream of 
 individuality, which draws us onward through life 
 after life in the endless vicissitude, yet endless re- 
 petition of the finite, continually tempting us with the 
 hope of finding without, a good which can be found 
 only within. For what we really seek far off in other 
 objects is always near us : it is our very inmost self 
 " Verily a wife is not dear that you may love the wife; 
 but that you may love the Self, therefore a wife is dear. 
 Verily the worlds are not dear that you may love the 
 worlds ; but that you may love the Self, therefore the 
 worlds are dear."^ 
 
 This creed, taught already in the final philosophic 
 interpretation of the Vedas, is the fundamental con- 
 ception from which the religion of Buddha starts, and 
 which he works out fearlessly to its ultimate conse- 
 ' Sacred Books of the East, xv. 40. "^Id. p. 109, cf. 163 seq. 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 357 
 
 quences. Struggle, pain, and evil are to Buddha the 
 necessary results of desire, and desire itself is the 
 necessary result of the illusion in which the soul 
 that looks beyond itself is necessarily entangled. 
 Hence the miserable existence of all finite creatures 
 who permit themselves to be tempted onward through 
 the endless transmigrations of a world of shows, in 
 which they never meet with anything real or per- 
 manent. "Who will deliver us from this endless 
 vicissitude of emptiness ? " No one," answers Buddha, 
 "can deliver another, but each one by the aid of my 
 doctrine, can deliver himself." In nothing is Buddha 
 more emphatic than in thus sending everyone back 
 upon himself. According to the " Book of the Great 
 Decease,'' which appears to be one of the most 
 authentic records of early Buddhism, Buddha answered 
 the last appeal of his followers for more instruction by 
 dwelling upon his own weakness, as the mere ' earthen 
 vessel ' through whom the great message had come, 
 and by referring them to the light which each man 
 can find in his own soul. 
 
 " What, then, Ananda ? Does the order expect that 
 of me? I have preached the truth without making 
 any distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrine: 
 for, in respect of the truths, Ananda, the Tath§,gata,i 
 
 ' One of the names given to Buddha. Ananda is the 
 ' beloved disciple ' of Buddha, who stands nearest to his 
 person. 
 
358 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 has no such thing as the closed fist of a teacher who 
 keeps some things back. Surely, Ananda, should 
 there be any one who harbours the thought, ' It is I 
 who will lead the brotherhood,' it is he who should 
 lay down instructions in any matter concerning the 
 order. Now the Tath§,gata thinks not that it is he 
 who should lead the brotherhood, or that the order is 
 dependent upon him. Why then should he leave in- 
 structions in any matter concerning the order ? I, too, 
 Ananda, am now grown old, and full of years, my 
 journey is drawing to a close, I have reached my sum 
 of days, I am turning eighty years of age; and just 
 as a worn-out cart can only with much additional 
 care be made to move along, so methinks the body 
 of the Tath^gata can only be kept going with much 
 additional care. It is only, Ananda, when the TathS,- 
 gata, ceasing to attend to any outward thing, or to 
 experience any sensation, becomes plunged in that 
 devout meditation of heart which is concerned with no 
 material object — it is only then that the body of the 
 Tath§,gata is at ease." 
 
 "Therefore, Ananda, be ye lamps unto your- 
 selves. Be ye a refuge unto yourselves. Betake 
 yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the 
 Truth as a lamp. Hold fast as a refuge to the 
 truth. Look not for refuge to any one but your- 
 selves." ^ 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, xi. 37. Cf. the Dhammapada 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 359 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold is therefore speaking in the true 
 spirit of Buddha when he makes him exhort his 
 followers to turn from outward seeming to the truth 
 revealed within, in the following terms : — 
 
 "This is enough to know. The phantasms are 
 The heavens, earths, worlds, and changes changing them, 
 A mighty whirling wheel of shape and show 
 Which none can stay or stem. 
 Pray not. The darkness will not lighten. Ask 
 Nought from the silence, for it cannot speak ! 
 Vex not your mournful mind with pious pains. 
 Ah I brothers, sisters, seek 
 
 Nought from the helpless gods by gift or hymn, 
 Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruit and cakes. 
 "Within yoxxrselves deliverance must be sought, 
 Each man his prison makes. 
 Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels, 
 None other holds you that ye live and die. 
 And whirl upon the wheel of change and turn 
 Its spokes of agony." * 
 
 The deliverance of Buddha is simple. It is to 
 accept the doctrine that shows the illusion to be an 
 illusion, and so to wither up the springs of all desires 
 which presuppose that it is a reality. But this deliver- 
 ance, as it is conceived by the Buddhist, carries him a 
 step farther. For the subjective consciousness, which 
 is thus freed from the illusion of objective existence, 
 
 § 165 : Sacred Books of Asia, x. 46 : " By oneself the evil is 
 done, by oneself one suffers ; by oneself evil is left undone, by 
 oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself, 
 no one can purify another." Of. the rest of ch. 12. 
 1 The Light of the East. 
 
360 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 is by the same process emptied of all its contents: 
 those contents consisting just in its relations to 
 objects. With the extinction of all relations, even 
 negative relations, to objects, the subject itself 
 would disappear. Hence for the Buddhist the last 
 illusion to be destroyed is the existence of the in- 
 dividual self; for the desire that this individual self 
 should be preserved is the root, or parent, of all other 
 desires that enslave us to external things, and bind us 
 on the wheel of change. The ' will to live ' is the 
 root of all evil, and the last enemy to be destroyed 
 by him who is seeking for freedom from the sorrow 
 of the world. Hence in loosing itself from outward 
 things, the will must finally loose itself from itself. 
 The illusion of life is the whole content of life, and 
 therefore the self will itself disappear along with the 
 shows against which it fights. Peace and rest for the 
 weary are to be found, not in self-mortification, 
 though that is on the way to it : not even in utter 
 unselfishness or universal benevolence to all things 
 that live, though that is far on the way to it : but 
 only in the absolute dying out of the light of self- 
 consciousness for want of fuel, the extinction of life 
 and thought through the extinction of the will to live, 
 the peace of Nirvana which is untroubled with any 
 breath of vain desire, the peace of the ' dewdrop 
 which 'melts into the silent sea' never to be dis- 
 tinguished from it again. 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 861 
 
 This is the strange faith in which many centuries 
 ago India found healing for its pains, and deliver- 
 ance from the aimlessness and meanness of a life 
 in which men were no longer bound together by 
 effective national bonds or animated by worthy social 
 ambitions. The nobler spirits of India — thrown back 
 upon themselves from a world in which they could 
 no longer see any divine power revealed, but only 
 a vain cycle of meaningless change ; in which an 
 empty desire was ever re-awaking to be anew cheated 
 by a transitory and unreal satisfaction — sought to 
 find peace just by ridding themselves of every 
 thought and feeling that was bound up with such 
 a world. Nor did they shrink when they found 
 that even the self must be extinguished in order 
 to be freed from its pain. Hence the Buddhist 
 rises to an all-embracing love or charity for aU 
 beings, immersed like himself in the pains of 
 existence, only in the end to lose himself and all 
 his fellow creatures in the empty peace of Nirvana, 
 which is only not death because it is conceived so 
 to speak as the death of death, the extinction of a 
 life which is worse than death. Such an attitude 
 of mind is explicable only as the extreme of the 
 religion of subjectivity, in which even subjectivity 
 loses its meaning. And from this also we are able 
 to explain why Buddhism had power only as a 
 protest or as a negative deliverance from the world, 
 
362 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 which led to no positive regeneration of it. Sub- 
 jective religion is valuable mainly as a stage of 
 transition, from a lower religion which is merely 
 objective, to a higher religion which is both objec- 
 tive and subjective. In the case of Buddha, how- 
 ever, the recoil was so violent that the movement 
 of progress was broken off; and the result was to 
 provoke a reaction against the creed which had 
 emptied heaven of all its gods, and to bring about 
 a return to the very superstitions which Buddhism 
 had condemned and overthrown. 
 
 At the same time it is necessary to remember 
 one thing in qualification of this judgment. It is 
 always a little unfair to estimate any movement 
 of religious thought in the light of its utmost logical 
 consequences : for, at least in the first instance, the 
 intellectual and moral value of such a movement 
 depends mainly, not on the goal to which it tends 
 but on the course which it takes in the en- 
 deavour to reach that goal ; and also, we may 
 add, on its relation to the earlier forms of re- 
 ligion which it opposes. Buddhism is primarily a 
 protest against a superstitious polytheism, with the 
 social disorganisation which accompanied it ; but in 
 its recoil upon the inner life of the subject, it 
 overbalanced itself and ultimately lost all things, 
 even the subject itself, in the silence of Nirvana. 
 Yet, on the way to this result, it passes through 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 363 
 
 many moral and religious experiences which point 
 to a higher idea of good than that which it finally 
 reaches. Escaping from the pitfall of mere asceti- 
 cism and self-torture, into which the Indian devotee 
 was so apt to fall, Buddha declares that the austeri- 
 ties of the religious life may indicate the same 
 impure and self-seeking spirit which is shown by 
 the life of luxury, and, in short, that, "bodily 
 exercise" in itself "profiteth nothing." "Not naked- 
 ness, nor platted hair, nor dirt, not fasting, nor 
 lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not 
 sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not 
 overcome desires. He who, though dressed ia fine 
 apparel, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, 
 restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with 
 other beings, he indeed is a Brahmana, an ascetic, 
 a friar." ^ The true self-abnegation consists in a 
 detachment from the world which makes it impos- 
 sible for any outward thing to become our master. 
 "Look upon the world as a bubble, look upon it 
 as a mirage: the king of death does not see him 
 who thus looks down upon the world." ^ And this 
 detachment from personal feeling and desire is viewed 
 at the same time as involving a universal sympathy, 
 which, as it makes the joys and sorrows of others 
 affect us equally with our own, leaves no room 
 
 ' Dhamma/pada, §§ 141-2 : Sacred Books of the East, x. 38. 
 »7d. § 170. 
 
364 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 for hatred or uncharitableness, for anger or revenge. 
 Not even in the New Testament do we find the 
 royal law, not to return evil for evil but to over- 
 come evil with good, more explicitly announced 
 than in the ethical writings of the Buddhists. Thus 
 in the DhamTnwpada (or Pathways of the Law) we 
 read, "'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, 
 he robbed me,' — in those who harbour such thoughts 
 hatred will never cease. 'He abused me, he beat 
 me, he defeated me, he robbed me,' — in those who do 
 not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease. For 
 hatred does not cease by hatred at any time ; 
 hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule."'^ "Let 
 a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome 
 evU by good; let him overcome the greedy by 
 liberality, the liar by truth." ^ 
 
 At the same time it is necessary to notice that 
 the ground upon which this unselfish spirit is incul- 
 cated is purely negative, i.e. it is not the worth of 
 the higher life of love, but the worthlessness of the 
 lower life of selfish desire — the unreality and transi- 
 toriness of all finite good — upon which the main 
 emphasis is laid. "The world does not know that 
 we must all come to an end here ; but those who 
 know it, their quarrels cease at once."^ What is the 
 use of quarrelling about that which is worthless 
 because it passes away ? If, therefore, it be asked 
 1 Dhamrmpada, §§ 3-5. ^Id. § 223. » Id. § 6. 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 365 
 
 whether the Christian idea of charity is a higher 
 thing than the Buddhist conception of a sympathy 
 which passes over every barrier of caste and race and 
 circumstance, and which in its universality embraces 
 all men and even all animals, there is a ready answer. 
 Buddhism, like the abstract Pantheism it opposes, 
 has no distinguishing respect for the spiritual nature 
 of man. It is a levelling doctrine which meets the 
 indiscriminate 'Whatever is, is right,' of Brahmanism, 
 with an equally indiscriminate ' Whatever is, is 
 wrong.' It cannot set the qualities that make a man, 
 above those that make a beast. And if its love 
 extends to all men, and, we may even say, to all 
 living beings, it is not that it regards them as having 
 any real value in their individual existence, but 
 that it looks upon them as all equally sufferers 
 from the misery of existing. Hence it might be 
 said that the universal charity of the Buddhist 
 was only his second highest virtue ; and that it held 
 even so high a place as this only because such 
 charity is the negation of all special regard for 
 individual things. In its absence of personal feel- 
 ing universal charity is nearest to that absolute 
 silence of thought and feeling which is the extinc- 
 tion of the personal self But it is in this 
 natural extinction of self, and not in the moral 
 extinction of selfishness which opens the way to 
 the larger life of love, that the Buddhist finds the 
 
366 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 highest bliss and perfection. Or, to take the most 
 favourable view, these are not, in his mind, dis- 
 tinguished from each other. 
 
 Buddhism, then, may be taken as the reductio ad 
 absurdum, of subjective religion, for it is that ex- 
 treme form of it in which it most clearly shows 
 its onesidedness and imperfection ; in which indeed 
 the subjective movement is carried so far as to 
 break off all connexion with the object, and there- 
 fore to empty the subjective life itself of all con- 
 tents. It not only sets the ideal against the real, 
 but absolutely opposes the former to the latter, and, 
 as a necessary consequence, it makes the ideal purely 
 negative. Hence also it distinguishes itself in a 
 peculiar way from other religions of the subjective 
 type. For, while their general defect lies in this — 
 that they represent the Divine Being, who is properly 
 the unity of object and subject, under the guise of 
 an abstract subject. Buddhism carries the opposition 
 of the subject to the object so far that it cannot 
 admit their unity under any guise whatever. It is, 
 therefore, a religion without a God. We might even 
 say, it is an ethics without a religion, were it not 
 that the pure negative movement of thought tends 
 in its logical result to dissolve the moral as well 
 as the religious life ; for the opposition of the moral 
 to the natural loses all its force when it is made 
 1 absolute. When consciousness is thus brought into 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 367 
 
 complete discord with itself, atonement is not possible. 
 The only resource left is that, in the language of the 
 Buddhists themselves, the ' light ' of consciousness 
 should be 'blown out.' 
 
 In Greece the subjective movement of thought 
 took a higher character, as it was a recoil from a 
 much higher kind of objective religion — a religion 
 in which the object worshipped was represented 
 almost exclusively in the form of man. For, as 
 man is a thinking subject as well as an object, so 
 the worship of anthropomorphic deities was already 
 a disguised worship of a spiritual principle ; and 
 with the advance of Greek art and poetry this 
 disguise became more and mere transparent. The 
 unity of nature which shone through the diversity 
 of the Vedic polytheism, was indeed concealed and 
 lost in the multiplicity of the humanised gods; but 
 as the consciousness of the ideal meaning of these 
 ' fair humanities of old religion ' awoke, it could not 
 but prepare men's minds for the conception of the 
 spirituality of God. In this way the diversity of 
 gods which have emerged from the unity of nature, 
 tend again to lose themselves in the unity of spirit. 
 This tendency manifests itself in the history 
 of Greek religion by the early exaltation of Zeus, 
 who is placed at the head of all the other 
 gods as an absolute monarch, while the other 
 divine powers are reduced into his ministers ; but 
 
S68 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 it reaches its logical result only in the philosophy 
 of Greece. 
 
 The earliest Greek philosophy sought to discover 
 an objective principle of unity in the world ; but 
 the only unity it reached was the pantheistic unity 
 of a highest principle or substance, which remains 
 one with itself through all the changes of phenomena. 
 In the philosophy of Heraclitus the leading thought 
 is still that of a law of necessity, which subjects 
 to itself the endless play of the contingent ; just 
 as the humanised gods were subordinated to an in- 
 scrutable fate which they could not avert or alter. 
 But with Anaxagoras the idea of a brute necessity 
 subjecting all to itself disappears, and in its place 
 comes the idea of a pure spiritual principle, which 
 subdues the necessity of nature and uses it as its 
 own instrument. "All things were in chaos till reason 
 came and arranged them." It is the judgment of 
 Aristotle that in giving utterance to this principle, 
 Anaxagoras was speaking the first sober word of 
 Greek philosophy, while all before him had been 
 like men talking at random. In truth, the era 
 ' of subjective reflexion began with this saying ; 
 and Socrates was only following out the same 
 idea in a new application when he made con- 
 I scious reason the main authority in morals, and 
 demanded that all institutions, customs, and rules 
 should justify themselves before its bar. Like 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 369 
 
 Buddha, Socrates called upon men to be their own 
 deliverers : 
 
 "Once read thine own breast right, 
 And thou hast done with fears, 
 Man gets no other light, 
 Search he a thousand years. 
 Sink in thyself ! There ask what ails thee, at that shrine." ' 
 
 Socrates, indeed, did not set the subjective against the' 
 objective. On the contrary, according to Xenophon, 
 he tried to prove by the argument from design that 
 the world is the manifestation of intelligence. But 
 he was the first to lay emphasis on the subjective, and 
 to teach, as it was expressed by a later writer, that 
 "it is by the god within that we know the god 
 without." For he set up the reason of the individual 
 as the highest authority and guide of his moral life, 
 and demanded that the law of the state should vindi- 
 cate itself before the inward tribunal. 
 
 The same thought runs through all the works of 
 his great followers, Plato and Aristotle. Both of 
 these maintain that the world is a rational system 
 which reaches its culminating manifestation in the 
 life of man. They admit, indeed, that reason must 
 speak to man from without, through the visible world 
 of nature and also through the laws and customs of 
 civil society, ere it can be awakened to speak within 
 him. They even admit that the majority of men are 
 
 ' Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna. 
 VOL. I. 2 A 
 
370 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 not capable of rising to the stage of self-conscious 
 reason at all, and that they can have reason developed 
 in them only so far as to accept its dictates from 
 others. Still, the ultimate authority and motive power 
 of social life is for them the conscious reason of the 
 philosopher. And they hold that that reason never 
 can speak to men from without with the clear self- 
 evidencing power with which it speaks within, to 
 those who are capable of hearing it. " It is in the 
 nature of things that practice should fall short of the 
 truth of theory."^ Facts will not conform to ideas : 
 but so much the worse for the facts. In the outward 
 world there is a resisting power — a brute necessity, 
 which in another point of view is contingency — and 
 this makes it impossible that pure reason should ever 
 realise itself there. For, though reason, in the meta- 
 phorical language of the Timaeus, tries to " persuade 
 necessity," its persuasions are never quite successful. 
 In Aristotle, we even find an anticipation of the 
 doctrine of development, or at least the idea of a 
 scale of being which reaches its summit in man. But 
 the rational principle in man is not included in this 
 hierarchy of nature. The pure reason in man is 
 severed from the lower life of sense and desire, 
 somewhat in the same way in which God, as pure 
 self-consciousness, is separated from the world of 
 change and contingency. Hence also God cannot be 
 1 Plato, Republic, 473 a. 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 371 
 
 adequately revealed in nature, either in its parts or 
 in the whole system of iinite things. And, for the 
 same reason, the moral activity of man, which has 
 to do with the regulation of his passions and the 
 ordering of his outward social life, is regarded as 
 essentially inferior to the pure activity of thought in 
 its inner converse with itself. 
 
 Thus we may fairly say that in Aristotle and 
 Plato, as in Socrates, the original naive confidence of 
 man in the outward manifestation of reason in nature 
 and in human life, has been lost; and its place is only 
 imperfectly supplied by the idea of a reason which, 
 in order that it may realise itself, subdues and trans- 
 forms a foreign matter, but is never able perfectly to 
 assimilate and absorb the material upon which it 
 works. In these philosophies, therefore, the sub- 
 jective movement of Greek thought is only for a 
 moment arrested. In morals, the attempt to restore 
 the limited social order of the Greek state on the basis 
 of conscious reason, was doomed to failure, and the 
 magnificent effort of two great philosophers to re- 
 combine the new principle with the old form, could 
 only hasten the natural process of decay. The polit- \ 
 ical idealism of Plato and Aristotle was a gigantic 
 attempt to pour new wine into old bottles. Nor need 
 we wonder that, after Aristotle, philosophy becomes 
 purely individualistic and subjective, and that morality 
 and religion begin to be conceived as bound up, not 
 
372 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 with the consciousness of objects, but almost exclu- 
 sively with the consciousness of self 
 
 Stoicism, which is the highest form of this sub- 
 jective and individualistic philosophy, is a product 
 of the same movement of recoil upon the self which 
 we find exemplified in Buddhism ; but it differs from 
 Buddhism as the Greek religion and the Greek social 
 morality differed from the Brahmanic polytheism and 
 the caste system of India. It agrees with Buddhism 
 in its subjective tendency; for, as the Buddhist rejected 
 the limitations of the system of caste ^ and fell back 
 upon the inner life of the self which is the same in 
 all, teaching that he. is the true ' Brahman ' who 
 purifies his soul, whatever may be his caste or out- 
 ward rank ; so the Stoic taught that the highest good 
 is open to the slave Epictetus as to the emperor 
 Marcus Aurelius. It agrees with Buddhism further in 
 its abstract benevolence ; for the universal pity and 
 charity which was enjoined on the Buddhist towards 
 all mankind, and even toward all living creatures, is 
 closely akin to the philanthropy which made the Stoic 
 " count nothing human alien to him," and regard him- 
 self as a citizen not of any particular state but of the 
 world. The difference was that, along with the 
 
 1 Buddhism, it is to be observed, did not seek to overturn 
 caste. It treated it as an external and indifferent distinction. 
 It dealt with it in the same way in which St. Paul deals 
 with slavery (1 Cor. vii. 21). 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. b73 
 
 Universalism which made the Stoic condemn his own 
 passions and all the objects and ends to which they 
 were directed, there went a distinct conviction that 
 the universal principle of reason is realised in each 
 man as an individual self. The Stoic was not, there- ', 
 fore, in danger of thinking that the highest good lies 
 in the extinction of self-consciousness, the loss of the 
 individual in the universal. Eather, he held that the 
 individual man as such is universal, that each man 
 is embodied reason, and that therefore the absolute 
 good is realised, or is capable of being realised, in him. 
 In this centre-point of selfhood all the good of the 
 universe is concentrated, and the exclusion of all 
 extraneous interests from its life is desirable, only 
 because it enables it to be a law and an end to 
 itself. The Stoic empties his life of objective in- 
 terests, but it is because he has in his own inner 
 consciousness an interest which outweighs and in- 
 cludes them all. His morality is, therefore, not the 
 morality that loses the self in the absolute, but the 
 morality that sees the absolute in the free deter- 
 mination of the self by its own law. 
 
 Yet, as this law is one that springs, not from the 
 nature of the self as this individual, but from the 
 universal reason in him, the subjective morality of the 
 Stoic has a side which is essentially connected with 
 religion, and, indeed, it easily becomes itself a religion. 
 In the consciousness of self we have a principle, which 
 
374 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 is one and the same in every rational being, and 
 which, as it is conceived by the Stoic as an absolute 
 principle, must be to him at once the source and the 
 end of all things. Hence, for the Stoic, pure self- 
 determination — that determination by the inner law 
 of reason which he substitutes for all determination 
 by objective ends — is one with determination by God, 
 who is the principle of unity alike in the inner and 
 in the outer world, the source of the universe, and 
 the end for which it exists. The paradox of 
 Stoicism is this immediate conversion of that 
 which is most individual into that which is most 
 universal, of the subject into the object, of self- 
 determination into an obedience to God. For, 
 " deo parere libertas est"; to be free or determined by 
 our inmost self is to be guided by a divine hand. 
 Stoicism is thus a curious illustration of the truth that 
 absolute opposites convert into each other. It is a self- 
 isolation which turns at once into universal sympathy ; 
 a self-exalting pride that seems to rest wholly on 
 itself, and which yet at a turn of the hand is changed 
 into the humble sense of being a mere instrument 
 in the hand of a higher power. It is a pessimism 
 which finds unreason and evil in all particular things, 
 in the whole course of the outward world, and which, 
 therefore, withdraws itself from the outward upon the 
 inner life. But at the same time, in virtue of the 
 absoluteness of the inner principle on which it falls 
 
BUDDHISM AND STOICISM. 375 
 
 back, it becomes an optimism in general, a belief that 
 the whole universe is the manifestation of a divine 
 reason. In fact, the development of Stoicism is just 
 the exhibition of the contradiction of seeking the ab- 
 solute in the subject as opposed to, and exclusive 
 of, the object ; while, by its very definition as the 
 absolute, it must transcend this distinction. 
 
 But, in spite of this innate and incurable contra- 
 diction, Stoicism has in it an element of the highest 
 truth, if only we view it in the light of the 
 idea of development, and consider it, therefore, not 
 as a result in which the mind of man can rest, but 
 as a stage in its spiritual growth. For, though the 
 subject as altogether severed from the object is an 
 empty abstraction, it is through the recoil upon the 
 subject in opposition to the object that man first 
 becomes conscious of his freedom — conscious of that 
 in him which lifts him above all objects he knows, 
 and which unites him to the divine principle of all 
 existence and of all thought. It is through this recoil 
 alone that he can realise his spiritual individuality, 
 and thereby break away from the power of nature, and 
 also of the naturalistic forms in which truth is at first 
 revealed to him. It is only through this recoil that 
 he learns to recognise that the simple bond of 
 humanity is a real bond, and that it is deeper than 
 all ties of family and nation, just because the self 
 is that in him which is most universal and independent 
 
376 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 of all particular characteristics or relations of his 
 being. While, therefore, it is not true that morality 
 depends upon the self-isolation of the individual 
 from all other men and things, it is true that 
 he who never thus isolates himself vpill never find 
 his way to the deepest sources of moral strength. 
 It is not true that within himself man is absolutely 
 alone, but it is true that he who never has felt the 
 solitude of an inner life, will never discover the 
 real nature of the tie that binds him to nature^ 
 to his fellowmen, and to God. 
 
LECTUEE EOUETEENTH. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF ISEAEL. 
 
 Summary View of the Development of Subjective and of Objective 
 Religion — Moral Strength of Subjective Religion — The Oppo- 
 sition of Spirit to Nature — Semitic Tendency to see Ood in 
 the Destructive rather than the Productive Powers of Nature 
 — The Hebrew Transition from Nature to Spirit — The Religion 
 of Sublimity as opposed to the Religion of Beauty — Opposition 
 of Prophet and Priest, Moral and Ceremonial — Transition from 
 a NationM to a Universal Religion — Rise of Moral Individual- 
 ism — The Idea of a Covenant between God and Man — Limits of 
 the Development of Jewish Religion — Its History as an Illus- 
 tration of the Principle of Development. 
 
 In this lecture, which is the last of the present 
 course, I propose to speak of the Eeligion of Israel, 
 the highest form of subjective religion; but it may 
 be useful first to recall the results which thus far we 
 have reached. Objective religion, as we have seen, 
 represents the Divine Being, who is the principle 
 of unity in all existence, objective and subjective, in 
 an external and therefore a natural form. It, there- 
 fore, bases the social unity of man with man upon 
 their common relation to some power or element in 
 
378 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 nature, which is regarded as the parent or founder 
 of the society and is worshipped as its god. Yet 
 the power or element in nature which is thus wor- 
 shipped is not universally or even commonly taken 
 as a being like man. It is, indeed, personified, 
 and so invested with some guise of humanity ; but 
 usually, at least in the earliest stages of religion, 
 it is some object or class of objects in the in- 
 organic or organic world other than man. With 
 such a religion goes a morality which is not yet 
 other, or at least is not yet recognised as other, 
 than the social obligation connected with the natural 
 bond of kinship, and which of course is limited 
 by that bond. A certain widening of the scope of 
 this naturalistic morality takes place at the stage 
 in which the great elemental powers — the heavens, 
 the sun and moon, etc. — are raised to supremacy 
 over the totems, or tribal and family deities. And 
 a still deeper transformation of it takes place when- 
 ever, as especially among the Greeks, but also 
 among the Eomans, the Germans and the Celts, the 
 naturalistic gods are humanised ; or, what amounts 
 to the same thing, wherever the form and nature 
 of man are taken as those which alone can be attri- 
 buted to the beings who are regarded as divine. 
 For nature cannot be put under man's feet without 
 some discernment in man of qualities which are not 
 merely natural. In such an anthropomorphic re- 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 379 
 
 ligion it soon begins to be seen that, if spirit grows 
 out of nature, yet it goes beyond it and transforms 
 it. The poetic exaltation of man and the humanising 
 of nature, in the poetry and art of Greece, prepare 
 the way for a philosophy that inverts the relation 
 of natural and spiritual, and substitutes the law of 
 freedom for the law of necessity. Thus Plato and 
 Aristotle tell us that the state begins to exist with 
 a view to life, but that it maintains its existence 
 with a view to the good or noble life — the life of 
 culture and moral and intellectual excellence. They 
 also tell us that that which is last as to origin 
 is first as to the nature of things ; and that it 
 is, therefore, to the highest results of the state that 
 we have to look to find out its true raison d'Stre. 
 But when the spiritual source and end of the social 
 life of man is recognised, it becomes necessary to 
 seek the basis of his social obligations in his inner 
 nature as a self-conscious being, and not in any 
 outward tie of blood relationship. The ultimate 
 result of this new perception is, therefore, a recoil 
 from the object upon the subject, and the ex- 
 altation of the inner life at the expense of the 
 outer. Each subject now finds the law of his 
 being written, not without him in the order of 
 the society to which he belongs, but within, in 
 the ' fleshly tables of the heart ' ; and his relation 
 to God is no longer mediated for him by his mem- 
 
380 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 bership in a society, but it becomes a direct re- 
 lation of spirit to spirit, a consciousness which is 
 bound up with the consciousness of self, and which 
 indeed can hardly be distinguished from the con- 
 sciousness of a better self within us. The dialogue 
 of the soul with God is an experience of its own 
 inner life, into which no outer voice can intrude 
 and which needs no outward mediation : — 
 
 " Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can 
 meet, 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet." 
 
 Now, this recoil upon the subject as against the 
 object, upon thought as against perception and 
 imagination, upon spirit as against nature, always 
 has in it something harsh and violent. Elevating 
 God above and opposing Him to all finite things 
 and beings, it tears asunder the bonds of nature, 
 and rends the veil of art and poetry. It hardens 
 men in isolation from the world and even from 
 their fellowmen. It " cuts the universe in two with 
 a hatchet," and refuses to recognise the gentle tran- 
 sitions by which beauty leads man from a lower 
 to a higher truth. It sets the individual man alone 
 with himself and God, and makes him regard every- 
 thing else as comparatively indifferent. And in doing 
 so it is apt to lose the balance of truth, as decidedly 
 as the superstition which sees God only without and 
 not within the soul. Nay, we might even say that, 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 381 
 
 in the ultimate logic of it, it loses the consciousness of 
 ' God altogether ; for a God who is within and not 
 without, like a God who is without and not within, 
 is no God at all. And with this loss of the object 
 must ultimately come loss even of that subjective 
 life to which the sacrifice is made ; for the sub- 
 jective has no meaning except in relation to the 
 objective world, and, as the Buddhist saw, its free- 
 dom from that world turns into its own extinction. 
 Nevertheless, this concentration upon the subjective 
 is a necessary stage in the development of man 
 both in religion and morality. Without it, the 
 moral law in its universality could not have been 
 separated from all natural impulses, even those based 
 upon ties of kinship or nationality ; and without it, 
 religion could never have cleared itself from the 
 superstitious awe of external powers. The one- 
 sidedness of objective religion could never have been 
 overcome without the opposite one-sidedness of a 
 morality and religion of the inner life ; nor could 
 the universal have been realised as a principle that 
 reveals itself in the particular — but which is not to 
 be confused with the particular — unless it were once 
 for all set against all particulars, even at the risk 
 of being emptied of all its contents. An abstract 
 ''ethical monotheism,' which is the typical form of 
 subjective religion, could not elevate and idealise 
 nature or the natural life of man ; it could not fur- 
 
382 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 nish the binding force necessary to make humanity 
 one family. But its purifying power, its power 
 to root out naturalistic superstitions and to cleanse 
 the moral life of man, can scarcely be doubted 
 by anyone who contrasts the life of the nations 
 which have, with that of those nations which have 
 not, been subjected to its influences. In more or 
 less adequate forms, as Buddhism, as Stoicism, as 
 Judaism, as Islamism, as Puritanism, it is the ex- 
 pression of that necessary recoil by which the spirit 
 of man turns away from nature, and even from that 
 second nature of social custom and belief, which is 
 its own unconscious product: a recoil without which 
 it could never truly find itself. Even when it has 
 become fanatical, its fierceness has been a cleansing 
 fire. Even when it has been violent and icono- 
 clastic, when it has refused to see even in the 
 work of a Phidias anything more than a dumb idol, 
 or in the highest product of the art of a Eaphael 
 anything more than, as John Knox said, "a pented 
 brod," it has been the exaggeration of an aspect of 
 truth to which it had become imperative that men 
 should attend. We may regret with Goethe the 
 losses which culture sustains in the victory of one 
 half-truth over another, but it is certain that in the 
 growth of man's spirit such losses are inevitable ; 
 or at least it has not hitherto been found possible 
 to avoid them. It is hardly possible for man to 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 383 
 
 appreciate a new aspect of things, especially of his 
 own life, without being for a time unjust to that 
 which has preceded it. A spiritualism which despises 
 nature, a monotheism which separates God from his 
 world, and a subjective morality which divorces the 
 inner from the outer life and breaks the organic 
 bond between the individual and society, — these can- 
 not be conceived as a final goal of progress in which 
 man can rest. But they mark an essential stage 
 in the development of man, a stage through which he 
 must pass, ere he can reach a consciousness of the 
 divine as a principle which reveals itself in all the 
 differences of finite existence and overcomes them. 
 
 The highest and, as it might be called, the typical 
 example of this kind of religion, is Judaism, and to it, 
 therefore, it will be advisable for us to devote most of 
 our attention. What is said in this lecture, however, 
 must be regarded as an anticipatory sketch, which I 
 hope to fill out with more detail in my next course of 
 lectures. 
 
 The Greeks, as we have seen, by idealising nature 
 ultimately reach a point of view from which nature 
 and that which is natural in man are cast into the 
 background ; and the pure inward self-determination of 
 reason, which in another aspect is determination by 
 God, becomes all in all. The Hebrews reach the same 
 goal in a more direct way. Partly because they 
 wanted the Greek capacity for apprehending the 
 
384 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 spiritual in the natural, they had less, difficulty in 
 rising above nature and attaining to a purely spiritual 
 conception of God. It is true that this characteristic 
 has been somewhat exaggerated, and that later stu- 
 dents have found many traces of an earlier nature- 
 worship among the Jews. The theory of Eenan that 
 the Semitic race are naturally monotheistic, cannot be 
 maintained in the face of what we know of other 
 Semitic races, and even of the race of Israel itself. 
 But there is this element of truth in it, that the 
 Semitic family, and especially the branch of the 
 Semitic family to which Israel belonged, tended to 
 recognise the manifestation of a divine power rather 
 in the more threatening and anomalous aspects of 
 nature, than in its brighter and more genial aspects, or 
 in its ordinary phenomena of production and increase. 
 It was from the tempest, the tumult of heaven and 
 earth, the thunders of Sinai and the earthquake that 
 devoured the unbelieving, that this nation learnt its 
 first religious lessons. And, if her prophets early rose 
 above the Moloch-worship which was found among 
 some of her neighbours, yet it was not till a compara- 
 tively late period that the nation as a whole freed 
 itself from all traces of it. If the prophets ultimately 
 taught that the still small voice within is a higher 
 manifestation of God than the whirlwind or the earth- 
 quake or the fire, yet even in their sublimest poetry, 
 it is these stormy agencies that they chose as the 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 385 
 
 symbols of the divine, rather than the more ordinary 
 and apparently regular phenomena of nature. The 
 action of God on the world is generally regarded by 
 them as disturbing, transforming, miraculously inter- 
 fering with the usual order of things, rather than as 
 establishing and maintaining that order ; it is treated, 
 to use the language of geology, as catastrophic rather 
 than evolutionary. Or, if nature is viewed as reveal- 
 ing Him, it is rather negatively than positively, by 
 the way in which she trembles before Him, or shrinks 
 up into nothing in His presence. The poetry of Israel 
 is the poetry not of beauty but of sublimity.^ Its 
 leading thought is not that of the immanence of God 
 in nature, but of His transcendence, — the transcendent 
 might and glory of a Being for whom " Lebanon is 
 not sufficient to burn, nor vas, oeasts thereof for a 
 burnt-offering," and who "taketh up the isles as a 
 very little thing." The Jewish writers, in fact, regard 
 nature rather as a negative than as a positive starting- 
 point for thought. They use the might and majesty 
 of natural powers as showing what God is only by 
 their nothingness before Him, and their incapacity to 
 express and manifest Him. The strength of the ever- 
 lasting hills is a suggestion of God's omnipotence, but 
 nothing more than a suggestion ; the order and adap- 
 
 * Hence Hegel calls Judaism the religion of Sublimity, as con- 
 trasted with the Greek religion of Beauty. See Phil, der Re- 
 iigion, ii. 39 seq. 
 
 VOL. I. a B 
 
386 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 tation of nature is a suggestion of His wisdom, but 
 nothing more than a suggestion, which tells as much 
 by what it cannot, as by what it can express. To 
 take it as more than this would be the idolatry which 
 confuses the Creator with the things He has made. 
 He has called all these things into being, and by a 
 word^ He can annihilate them, and they reveal Him 
 only by their instant obedience to Him. He speaks, 
 and they are ; He speaks again, and they cease to be. 
 Hence the Hebrew prophet looked upon nature 
 almost as indifferently — that is, with as little sense 
 of an abiding divinity in it — as a scientific man who 
 has taught himself to think of it as a system of 
 phenomena which can be explained on mechanical 
 principles. It was to him only a dead weapon in 
 the hand of the Almighty, which He had created 
 and which He could use and destroy at pleasure. 
 It was not and never could be to him what it was 
 to the pantheistic poetry of the East, or what it is 
 
 1 The transition through which the meaning of the expres- 
 sion 'Word of God' passes in the interval between the Old 
 Testament and the Gospel of St. John, contains in it a 
 whole history of the development of religion. The prophets 
 used it as conveying the idea that God works directly and 
 immediately upon the world without any mediation, without 
 going out of Himself or communicating Himself to that which 
 His will has created. Christian theology uses it just to express 
 the reverse of this : that God does manifest Himself in and 
 communicates Himself to nature and humanity through Hia 
 Son, " who is the express image of His Person." 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 387 
 
 to the revived and spiritualised pantheism of Goethe 
 or Wordsworth, the living garment of deity, a mani- 
 festation of God which cannot be separated from His 
 existence. 
 
 Now, for a religious consciousness of this kind, it is 
 obviously much easier to pass heyond nature. One 
 who hears the voice of God " dividing the flames of 
 fire " and " breaking the cedars of Lebanon,'' who 
 realises His presence as a wasting, desolating exhibi- 
 tion of force throned on the mountain summits of the 
 desert rather than in the brightness and beneficence 
 . of the fertilising sun, finds it less difficult to get away 
 from nature altogether, and to lift his mind to that 
 which is purely spiritual. He is easily accessible to 
 the idea that the infinite cannot be contained in any 
 finite form, or represented in any finite image. His 
 God is already on the way to become a God of pure 
 thought, who cannot be adequately represented either 
 in perception or imagination. As Schiller says to the 
 astronomers, " I admit that the heavenly bodies are 
 the most sublime of objects in space ; but it is not in 
 space that the sublime can be found." ^ The abstrac- 
 tion that lifts God above every finite form, because 
 " even the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him," 
 is already preparing the way for the idea that He can 
 only be revealed within, and not without. And this 
 
 1 Euer Gegenstand ist der erhabenste, freilich, im Eaume, 
 Aber, Freunde, im Raum wohnt das Erhabene nioht. 
 
388 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 is just the transition which we find achieved and ex- 
 pressed by the prophets of Israel. It was their great 
 inspiration which changed the fear of that which is 
 greater than nature into the reverence for that which 
 is spiritual, and thereby separated their religion once 
 for all from the horrors and sensualities of Baal and 
 Moloch worship, which corrupted and poisoned the 
 moral life of the races that were their nearest kindred. 
 This transition is, in fact, the characteristic movement 
 of thought that has stamped itself most deeply on the 
 pages of the Old Testament, — from the period in which 
 Abraham learned to reject the idea of human sacrifice 
 to the latest and highest utterance of the Psalms, 
 which declare that God is one who prefers mercy to 
 sacrifice. It is, so to speak, the negation of nature 
 immediately passing into the assertion of spirit. 
 
 But if the strength of the religious thought of Israel 
 is that it is continually engaged in making this tran- 
 sition, its weakness is that it never quite completes it. 
 Its whole history is the history of the war of prophet 
 against priest, who, however, have always to come to 
 terms; for neither can as yet do without the other. 
 The nation may be said to possess an outward worship, 
 just in order that it may transcend it and look down 
 upon it ; to maintain the temple, the altar, and the 
 sacrifice, just in order that it may teach by contrast 
 that the true temple of God is the soul of man, and 
 that the true priest is he who offers the sacrifice of 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 389 
 
 a broken and contrite heart to God. Hence the last 
 outcome of the life of the nation was, on the one 
 hand, the Levitical law which hedged round the life 
 of the Jewish devotee with the minutest prescriptions 
 of outward service and ritual ; and, on the other 
 hand, the book of Psalms, which expresses, in language 
 that the highest Christian devotion is glad to accept 
 as its own, the inward yearning of the soul that turns 
 away from all outward forms as empty and worth- 
 less, and is content with nothing short of the deepest 
 inward union with God. " Sacrifice and offering Thou 
 didst not desire. Then said I, Lo ! I come, I delight 
 to do Thy will, God. Yea, Thy law is within my 
 heart." ' 
 
 When we look at the outward national life of 
 Israel, we find the same transition presenting itself 
 in another form. The Hebrew nation begins, like, 
 other nations, with a national God and a morality 
 which is conceived mainly as the realisation of the 
 bond of kinship between the children of Abraham. 
 Yet, characteristically, the connexion of Israel with 
 its God, from the earliest time of which we have 
 record, is regarded rather as the relation of subjects to 
 their Lord, than that of children to their father. 
 Nay, we may even say that it is regarded as the 
 relation of soldiers to their general ; for the cradle 
 of the religious life of Israel was the desert camp, 
 1 Psalms xl. 6. 
 
890 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 and Jehovah was at first but a God of battles, under 
 whose guidance a loose aggregation of tribes was 
 converted, first into an army, and then into a nation. 
 And as the nation was founded, so it was again and 
 again restored, by warlike leaders whom the inspira- 
 tion of Jehovah raised up, to assert its unity and 
 independence against Moab and Ammon, against the 
 Canaanites and the Philistines. Hence we may say 
 that the people of Israel are at first less close to 
 their God than most other nations, being merely His 
 servants and not His children. Yet this very nega- 
 tion of natural relationship made it easier for the 
 Israelite to rise to the conception of a spiritual unity 
 which is closer than any merely natural bond. The 
 spiritual fatherhood of God was the ultimate message 
 of Israel to the world, just because it began by 
 setting aside the idea of His being the natural parent 
 of the race. 
 
 In the pre-Christian history of the Jews, at least 
 two steps are taken in this direction. In the 
 earliest times, as I have indicated, we have good 
 evidence that Jehovah was regarded merely as the 
 national god, the Lord of Hosts, who made war at 
 the head of the nation against its enemies and 
 their gods. And, as a national god, he was con- 
 <;eived to be related, not to individuals as such, but 
 only to the nation as a collective whole. So far, 
 therefore, the morality of Israel was like the morality 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 391 
 
 of other early races — a morality which had for its 
 main principles, the solidarity of the kinship within 
 itself and the entire exclusion of other kinships from 
 all the charities and privileges of life. And the 
 religion of Israel in this period was just the con- 
 secration of this unity and this opposition. But, 
 as the view of the relation of Israel to its God 
 becomes spiritualised, it tends to break away from 
 these merely national limits in two different ways. 
 It tends to become at once individualised and 
 universalised, i.e. it tends to become a subjective 
 relation of the individual to his God, and at the 
 same time, being based on subjective conditions, it 
 tends to be regarded as not confined to Israel 
 alone. I say, it tends in this direction. For 
 though, during the pre-Christian history of the 
 nation, it is continually moving towards this 
 goal, it never completely attains it. Stubbornly 
 rooted in national exclusiveness and national privi- 
 lege, it is always striving to reach beyond both. 
 The higher mind of the Hebrew nation is con- 
 tinually reacting against a prejudice which it can 
 never conquer, which at least it never covld con- 
 quer, until the founder of Christianity broke away 
 the spiritual fruit of its labours from the tree on 
 which it first grew, and planted it out in the wide 
 field of the world. The end, however, is already 
 foreshadowed in the earliest of the prophets whose 
 
392 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 writings have come down to us. As God was not 
 the natural father of the race, He was not to 
 be conceived — so Amos the inspired herdsman of 
 Tekoa already taught — as their unconditional patron 
 or partisan ; but His favour for them was bound 
 up with the moral relation of thtir will to His. 
 If Israel was privileged to hear the voice of God,, 
 it had upon it the weight of a greater responsi- 
 bility, which must bring with it a greater punish- 
 ment for failure. " You only have I known of all 
 the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you 
 for all your iniquities.'' It is, however, impos- 
 sible to conceive such a spiritual relation as one 
 of privilege. By the very fact that it is regarded 
 as a moral relation, it cannot be consistently re- 
 presented as a relation between a particular god 
 on one side and a particular nation on the other. 
 The God who stands in a purely ethical relation to 
 His worshippers is of necessity the one and only 
 God, and the men to whom He stands in that 
 relation are necessarily men of any and every race 
 or people. Further, as such an ethical relation is 
 one which involves inward conditions, it must be a 
 relation of the individual as such to God, and not 
 one in which the individual is lost in the family 
 or the nation. Hence the later prophets, Jeremiah 
 and Ezekiel, set themselves against the idea of a 
 collective responsibility for good or evil ; and they 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 393 
 
 take their stand on the principle of ethical indi- 
 vidualism, that each moral agent must answer for 
 his own doings. "What mean ye that ye use this 
 proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying: The 
 fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's 
 teeth are set on edge ? As I live, saith the Lord 
 Grod, ye shall not have occasion to use this proverb 
 in Israel. Behold all souls are Mine, as the soul 
 of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine : 
 the soul that sinneth, it shall die."^ "Everyone shall 
 die for his own iniquity : every man tiiat eateth sour 
 grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge."^ 
 
 Thus the three truths — the spirituality of God, 
 the separate moral responsibility of the individual, 
 and the universality of the relation of the one God 
 to all men — are only three different aspects of one 
 thought which cannot be severed from each other ; 
 and with whichsoever of these aspects we begin, 
 we must necessarily be driven ere long to admit 
 the other two. What we find in the Hebrew pro- 
 phets is, therefore, a national religion in the very 
 process of breaking away on every side from its 
 national limitations. And the transitionary char- 
 acter of Judaism shows itself just in the con- 
 tinual contrast and conflict of the most stubborn 
 and intolerant claims of national privilege, with a 
 conception of worship which reduces it to the 
 ' Ezekiel xviii. 2. ^ Jeremiah xxxi. 30. 
 
394 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 direct subjective relation of the finite to the infinite 
 Spirit. 
 
 The same idea may be illustrated in another way. 
 It is a distinctive characteristic of Jewish thought 
 that, instead of resting the spiritual upon the natural, 
 and basing the moral bond of man with his fellow- 
 man and with God on the physical fact of 
 common blood, it treated the bond of nationality 
 as deriving all its sacredness from a spiritual 
 relation of Israel to God, which had been 
 established by a special contract or covenant of 
 obedience. Now, the idea of such a covenant might 
 at first seem to be favourable to the conception of 
 national privilege ; but it is really opposed to it, in 
 so far as it bases the relation between God and 
 man upon a spiritual act of man himself And this 
 opposition could not but manifest itself more and 
 more clearly, as the obedience required in the divine 
 covenant detached itself from the accidents of cere- 
 mony and ritual. A covenant 'to do justly, to love 
 mercy, and to walk humbly with God,' could be 
 made only with a God who was identified with the 
 universal principle of right ; and it was a covenant 
 into which all men were equally called upon and 
 equally entitled to enter. The goal towards which 
 the whole development of Jewish religion points, the 
 ultimate outcome of the teaching of prophets and 
 psalmists, is, therefore, the consciousness that each 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 395 
 
 individual spirit of man has an inward relation to 
 the Father of spirits, the God who is the source at 
 once of all spiritual and of all natural existence. 
 Logically carried out, such teaching could end only 
 in a subjective and individualistic religion, a religion 
 of the inner as opposed to the outer life. 
 
 At the same time, while this is the goal of the 
 development, the ultimate outcome of the religion, 
 we have to remember that the religion exists only 
 in the process, and not in the result. In other 
 words, we are not to suppose that the full import 
 of the religion can be seen simply by looking to 
 the end or logical issue to which it ultimately 
 brings its adherents, without reference to the whole 
 movement by which it reaches that issue ; and also, 
 it may be added, without reference to the manner 
 in which that issue prepares the way for a still 
 further advance. For the result attained is in itself 
 imperfect, and, its imperfection once seen, it becomes 
 the beginning of a new movement of development. 
 A purely subjective religion would be a narrow and 
 limited thing, if we regarded it by itself, nay, as we 
 have already seen, it is self-contradictory; for the 
 subject as divorced from the object loses all meaning. 
 But the real value of such religion lay just in this, that 
 it was the final term of one stage of evolution and the 
 ■ beginning of another. It is the great error of dog- 
 matism to forget that 'ideas are living things which 
 
396 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 ~ have hands and feet,' and that, if we fix them as 
 definite results, no more and no less, we take away 
 their life and power. The life and power of Jewish 
 religion lay in the process towards the universality, 
 which was also a process towards the subjectivity, of 
 religion ; but it did not attain this latter point till 
 its very latest stage, when it began to harden into 
 a formalism. Thus the doctrine for which the 
 prophets contended — that religion must be a purely 
 subjective relation to a spiritual God, was a rela- 
 tive truth. And it was of the greatest import- 
 ance to emphasise that truth at a time when the 
 great enemy of religion was a superstition which 
 treated God as a merely external power, who 
 secured privileges to men in virtue of their be- 
 longing to a particular kinship and of their per- 
 forming certain outward rites. But, so soon as the 
 end was reached and the thought began to arise 
 that religion is merely subjective and individual, so 
 soon as it became dissociated from the social bonds 
 of family and nationality, it was in danger of pro- 
 ducing an unhealthy division of the inner from the 
 outer life — an opposition of the universal principle 
 to all the particulars in which it could be realised. 
 The sense of national privilege could be safely set 
 aside only when it became possible to conceive of a 
 unity of all men on the ground of a spiritual rela- 
 tionship, — a unity which at once transcends all 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 397 
 
 natural bonds and gives them their relative value. 
 The feeling of the immediate relation of the indi- 
 vidual subject to God could cease to be connected 
 with obedience to a Divine King and Lawgiver who 
 spoke to a special nation through the thunders of 
 Sinai, only when God was regarded as a Universal 
 Father of spirits. For only such a God can be 
 represented as the immanent principle of all life and 
 being, who unites all men to each other as members 
 of one family, and who therefore is manifested in 
 the inner life and consciousness of each, only as, 
 at the same time. He unites him to all his fellows 
 and to the world. 
 
 The long toil of Jewish history; the struggle of the 
 spirit of monotheism with the infection of the sen- 
 suous nature-worships of the kindred peoples, and 
 with the darker elements of its own earlier faith ; the 
 destruction of the nation itself as an outward secular 
 power; the sufferings of its captivity, and the great 
 prophetic inspirations with which it consoled itself ; its 
 revival no longer as a separate state, but rather as a 
 kind of monotheistic church, holding itself apart from 
 the idolatry of other peoples ; the long vicissitude of 
 fortune in which it maintained its stubborn Puri- 
 tanic protest against the world, and nourished in its 
 bosom the unquenchable hope of a Messiah who should 
 redeem at once itself and the world: this whole his- 
 toric process furnishes perhaps the most striking of 
 
398 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 all illustrations of religious evolution. In other words, 
 it exhibits to us a typical instance of the development 
 of a religious idea from lower to higher forms, till 
 finally it exhausts itself and dies, only however to rise 
 again in a religion of a still higher type. Nor has this 
 illustration of development lost any of its force in 
 consequence of those modern investigations, which 
 have so greatly altered the prevailing view of the 
 relations of the Old Testament writings. If there be 
 good reason to regard the books of the Pentateuch as, 
 partly at least, an ex post fcucto reconstruction of early 
 history, in conformity with the views of a later time ; 
 if there be good reason to suppose that the earliest 
 religion of Israel was the worship of a national God, 
 who was revealed mainly in the more gloomy and 
 terrible aspects of nature, and that it was only by 
 the long struggle of the prophets that this worship of 
 terror was changed into the reverence for a God of 
 Justice and mercy, — such results of criticism do not 
 really tend to lower but rather to raise the value of 
 that history, as a support to our faith in a Divine 
 Being who has been gradually revealing Himself, not 
 by signs in heaven or on earth, but through the natural 
 working of man's own spirit. On the contrary, such 
 applications of the idea of development to human 
 history, seem to be now for the first time yielding us 
 rational evidences for those religious beliefs which 
 formerly were supported by a kind of artificial scaf- 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 399 
 
 folding. To discern the steady movement by which, 
 in continual struggle with nature and with himself, 
 man is ever advancing to a deeper comprehension of 
 his own nature and a clearer recognition of the divine 
 power which is the beginning and end of his life, this, 
 it seems to me, is a far more real help in dealing with 
 the doubts that inevitably beset us as to the ultimate 
 meaning of human existence, than any miracle that 
 could bring us into relation with a spiritual world 
 which was essentially divorced from the world of our 
 experience. And it is something more than a happy 
 coincidence that the same intellectual progress, which 
 has incidentally weakened some of the adventitious 
 supports of religion, should also have brought with 
 it this more natural and rational basis of belief In 
 this light " Moses and the prophets " may be more 
 to us than " if one rose from the dead " ; for the 
 evidence thus given is not externally brought to the 
 aid of ideas which have no immediate connexion 
 therewith. It is simply the evidence derived from 
 the growth of the ideas themselves. 
 
 In my second course of lectures I shall endeavour 
 to follow more closely the development of the subjec- 
 tive principle in the Jewish religion, and especially to 
 throw some light on the connexion between its ulti- 
 mate form and the Christianity which at once fulfilled 
 and destroyed it. And then I shall attempt, so far as 
 time and ability wUl permit me, to show what is the 
 
400 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. 
 
 principle or germinative thought presented to us in 
 the recorded words of the founder of Christianity, and 
 how it has gradually developed into that system of 
 life and thought which has passed, and is still passing, 
 through so many phases. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD,