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PHILOSOPHY AND DEVELOPMENT
OF RELIGION
VOL. I.
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY AND DEVELOPMENT
OF RELIGION
I}E ING:
THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 1894
IBY
OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF BIRLIN
IN TWO VOLUMES
WOL. I.
WILLIAM BILA CIK. WOOD AND SONS
ED IN B U R. G. H. A.N D LONDON
M D C C C X C IV
All lights reserved
gº." * Žiž 2. '
$-- / y - 3% P.
> V,
PR E FA C E.
My Gifford Lectures were delivered at Edinburgh in
January and February of this year, and I sent them
forthwith to press without material alteration or
addition. The verbal form alone has been some-
what improved here and there; and some passages
omitted from want of time in delivering the Lectures,
have been incorporated in the following pages. It
seemed to me unnecessary to add anything to what
the Lectures originally contained, but I may refer those
readers who are further interested in my views to my
‘Religionsphilosophie,' third edition ( Philosophy of
Religion, translated from the Second German edition,
1886), and to my ‘Urchristenthum' (Berlin, 1887).
My hearty thanks are due to Dr Hastie for his
translation of the Lectures from my German manu-
script, and to Professor Kirkpatrick for his careful
revision of the proofs. -
OTTO PELEIDERER.
April 16, 1894.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST WOLUME,
LECT.
I. INTRODUCTION,
II. RELIGION AND MORALITY,
III. RELIGION AND SCIENCE,
TIV. THE BELIEF IN GOD: ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT,
v. THE REVELATION OF GoD IN THE NATURAL oRDER
OF THE WORLD, . e g g
\ VI. THE REVELATION OF GOD IN THE MORAL AND RE-
LIGIOUS ORDER OF THE WORLD,
VII. TEIE RELIGIOUS WIEW OF MAN :—
; : I. HIS ESSENTIAL NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY, .
VIII. TEIE RELIGIOUS WIEW OF MAN –
II. REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION,
Ix. THE RELIGious view of THE world —
I. IDEALISM AND NATURALISM,
X. THE RELIGIOUS VIEW OF THE WORLD :—
II. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, e
FAGE
37
69
102
137.
170
204
236
267
299
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION,
L E C T U R E I.
INTRODUCTION.
I HAVE, first of all, to express my thanks to the Senatus
of the University of Edinburgh for the high honour
which they have bestowed upon me in choosing me to
be the Gifford Lecturer for this year. The greater
the confidence thereby reposed in me, so much the
more do I feel doubt and anxiety as to whether I
shall succeed in completely satisfying this confidence.
For it is not an easy matter under any circum-
stances to speak in a satisfactory way about the highest
questions which can engage the human mind, before
an assembly like this—composed as it is of highly
cultivated hearers of the most varied religious and
Scientific views; and in the case of a stranger the diffi-
Culty is increased in many respects to the highest degree.
WOL. I. A.
2 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Not only must his imperfect mastery of your language
compel him to appeal for an indulgent judgment re-
garding the form of his Lectures, but he also finds
himself in a difficult position even with regard to the
Selection of the subjects to be treated, because he does
not possess, like a native of the country, the living
feeling that animates his audience, nor does he suffi-
ciently know the interests and questions which are
specially prevailing at the time. It is but too possible
that he may easily treat in too great detail much that
is already known and self-evident to his hearers, and
may touch only in a cursory way other themes with
regard to which they would specially desire to have
more thorough discussion in detail. In these respects
I must certainly appeal to your consideration, although
perhaps to a certain degree the difficulty is lessened in
my case by the fact that, in consequence of several
former visits to this city, and of friendly intercourse
with Some of its Social circles, and the amiable hospi-
tality which I received on these occasions, the spiritual
life of Edinburgh is not quite strange to me.
I confess that the idea of appearing here, particularly
in Edinburgh, as Gifford Lecturer on “Natural Re-
ligion,” has had for me a peculiar attraction and
charm. This city has always had a special interest
for me ever Since I came to know it, because I saw
here the two great living forces of Religion and
Science combined with one another, and even rivalling
INTRODUCTION. 3
each other, in a degree such as perhaps can be seen
nowhere else. And more especially as regards the
theme of “Natural Religion,” the development of this
conception appears to me to be connected in the
closest way with the history of the spiritual life of
this city. Let me, as witnesses for this view, single
out from many others only three names, those of John
IGnox, David Hume, and Thomas Carlyle.
Perhaps the first of these names will appear to you
Somewhat paradoxical in this connection. You may
ask, What has the Reformer, with his belief in the
Bible, to do with “Natural Religion”? Does his
glowing zeal for the faith not rather stand as far as
possible from the cold scepticism of a David Hume 3
This question I take leave to answer, in the first place,
with this other question, Would such a work as David
Hume’s “Dialogues on Natural Religion' have been
ever possible in Edinburgh without the work of Refor-
mation carried out by John Knox 2 If, as I suppose,
you will answer this question with me in the negative,
you have thereby also already admitted that, notwith-
standing all the manifest opposition between these two
men, John Knox and David Hume, there does in fact
also exist a positive connection between them; may
more, that in the last instance no other than the Re-
former of Scotland, with his strong faith, has the merit
of the fact that we can to-day in Edinburgh carry on
Scientific discussions concerning the subject of Natural
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6 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
world had been overturned by Copernicus; our earth
had been removed from its central position, and had
been shown to be one of the innumerable revolving
bodies in the universe; and thereby the fixed positions
of above and below, which constituted the frame of the
image of the world according to the old faith, had dis-
appeared. Thereafter the thinking mind penetrated
always further into the laws of the universe by its
methods of observing, calculating, and experimenting,
and with every step in the progress of inquiry it
strengthened itself in the conviction not only of the
immutable order and regularity of the events that
happened in the world, but also of its own capability
of ascertaining the truth in all departments by rational
thinking. And, in contrast to this proud progress of
Science, how melancholy was the condition of the life
of the Church Out of the Reformation had arisen
various new Churches and Confessions which were
engaged in the most violent quarrels with each other
and with the old Church ; and from the religious con-
fusions of the time there had grown bloody wars, rev-
olutions, and reactions in all countries. The Sacrifices
required on every side by these religious conflicts were
innumerable. In place of the old religious compulsion
of the universal Church, there had arisen the not less
intolerance of the several religious parties which had
attained to political power. Under such impressions
the question necessarily and inevitably pressed itself
INTRODUCTION. 7
upon thinking men as to whether the distinguishing
forms of faith, to which these numberless sacrifices
were brought, were of such high value after all. The
question was asked whether the truth of Christianity
really lies in the mysterious dogmas, about which the
believers contended with each other all the more
bitterly the less they were rationally conceivable; or
whether the truth did not much rather lie in the
universal truths about which all are agreed, because
reason is able to comprehend their truth.
Founding upon such reflections, Lord Herbert of
Cherbury published as early as 1624 his work on
‘Truth, and its Relation to Revelation,’ in which he
presented five “really catholic truths,” concerning
God, moral worship, and future recompense, and des-
ignated them as the true kernel which had been con-
tained in all religions from the beginning, but which
had been obscured in the course of time by the fraud
or deception of priests. In the same sense John Locke,
towards the end of the seventeenth century, wrote his
work on ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity.’ John
Toland wrote on ‘Christianity not Mysterious '; while
Matthew Tindal, in 1730, published his treatise en-
titled ‘Christianity as old as the Creation, or the
Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature.’
The common thought of these writings was, that
Christianity is essentially nothing else than the moral
religion of reason, the truth of which is to be appre-
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IO PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
condition of the world is so far from justifying us to
infer a perfect, all-good, and all-wise Author of the
world, that, as Hume believes, it might much rather be
regarded as the first attempt of a beginner God, or as
the weak product of an aged God; nay, even the idea of
a plurality of authors, who had mutually impeded each
other, appears to him to be a hypothesis worth consider-
ing. In any case—this is his result—whether we accept
one God, or many Gods, or no God, the world remains
always equally inconceivable; and hence any of these
views has just as much, or as little, right on its side as
the others. The utmost that we can assert is the prob-
ability that the cause, or the causes, of the Order of the
universe may have a remote similarity with human in-
telligence,—a proposition which, as Hume very rightly
remarks, is much too indefinite to suffice as the prim-
ciple of a practical religion.
A similarly negative result is also reached by the
criticism of the proof of Immortality, as Hume has
treated it in his essays on Suicide and Immortality.
The popular proof from retribution rests on an inadmis-
sible introduction of juridical points of view into mor-
als, and on the unjustified assumption that retributive
justice, because it does not sufficiently exhibit itself in
this world, which is known to us, must work so much
the more certainly in a future world. Our present
experience shows us a certain retribution in the natural
inward and outward consequences with which virtue
INTRODUCTION. 11
and vice are wont to be accompanied. But above all
this there is still a something further to be desired, or
rather required—namely, that the constitution of the
world should direct itself according to the wishes of our
Supposed standard reason. But that there lies a guar-
antee for immortality in the instinctive desire of the
human Soul for infinite development, is not admitted by
Hume, since our capacities hardly appear to be sufficient
for a tolerable life in time, and much less for a whole
eternity. On the contrary, he finds in the powerful
instinct of the fear of death an urgent warning of
Nature against illusions with regard to the life beyond.
In no case, therefore, can the belief in immortality be
Supported upon rational grounds, but only upon the
revelation of the Gospel.
If, then, the grounding of religion upon reason is in
every respect as problematical as Hume's criticism
Sought to prove, the question arises, How is it to be
explained that religion could take rise at all, and be-
come such a powerful force in human history ! Hume
has sought to solve this question in his work on ‘The
Natural History of Religion.’ It is not the powerless
reflections of reason which are the roots of religion;
but, says Hume, the energetic and irrational passions
of the Soul, and fictions of the imagination or fantasy,
fear and hope, drove men from the beginning to seek
their Gods behind the unknown forces of Nature on
which their weal and woe depend; and in this process
12 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the fantasy, in virtue of its anthropomorphising ten-
dency, personified the manifestations of Nature. Hence
it follows that the oldest form of religion was not
Monotheism, and therefore that the primitive religion
was not (as the Deists supposed) identical with the
Religion of Reason. As little as men cultivated geom-
etry before agriculture, just as little had they, before
the development of civilisation in the primitive pre-
historic times, already a Monotheistic knowledge of
God. The primitive men much rather thought of their
Gods as powerful beings like men, but neither almighty
nor morally good. When, then, one God was gradually
raised above the others, and especially when the God of
a particular people was elevated above those of other
peoples, and when, in order to win his favour, more and
more flattering expressions of honour were attributed
to him, at last there was reached the idea of an infinite
God. Religious Monotheism is therefore, according to
Hume, just as little as religion in general, a product
of reason, although it coincided accidentally with the
thought of God maintained by the philosophers. Be-
sides, the more Sublimely Monotheism is conceived, it
does so much the less permanently Satisfy the need of
the multitude, who would fain represent the divine
in more vivid form and in more intimate relation; and
hence they have recourse to intermediate beings, which,
as representatives of the highest God, now take up his
place, and thereby the old Polytheism returns anew.
INTRODUCTION. 13
Thus, according to Hume, the history of religion moves
in a constant wavering or Oscillation between Mono-
theism and Polytheism, the advantages and defects of
which maintain a certain reciprocal equilibrium between
them ; and, indeed, the barbarism of Monotheistic in-
tolerance and its tendency to persecution is, says Hume,
even worse than the crudeness of the heathem forms of
worship. Generally it appears to him that the influ-
ence of the popular religion upon morality is exceedingly
unfavourable. The crude notions of the divine arbi-
trariness and of the torments of hell have a hardening
effect upon the Soul; and worst of all is the delusion
that the favour of the Deity is not to be deserved by
right conduct but by ceremonial observances, whereby
morality is desecrated and the morals of a people are
undermined. Thus religion, like all other things, has
also its two sides; and it is difficult to say which of the
two predominates in the common actuality of life.
While we are far from being able to concur in this
radical scepticism, which saw in religion only an irra-
tional pathological phenomenon, yet this must not
hinder us from recognising the significance of Hume
for the science of religion. By his logical criticism he
has destroyed the Self-sufficient dogmatism of the
period of rationalistic enlightenment, whose half-criti-
cism was neither just to faith nor to knowledge, because
it imagined that it exhausted all reason in its narrow
intellectual conceptions, and had no Sense or compre-
14 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
hension either for the unconscious reason of the reli-
gious feelings and symbols, or for the development of
reason in the history of religion. It has no longer
been possible since Hume to speak of “Natural
Beligion ” in such a sense as if there had been in
the beginning of the human race a religion common
to all, and consisting of a few simple truths of reason.
To have destroyed for ever this illusion of the older
rationalism is Hume's abiding merit. He has thereby
paved the way for a mode of consideration which seeks
and finds the natural, not outside of but in the his-
torical, and the rational not outside of but in the
actual. One of the most thoughtful representatives
of this point of view was the historian Thomas Carlyle,
who was also so closely connected with Edinburgh. .
But the way from Hume to Carlyle leads through the
German idealistic philosophy.
Immanuel Kant was, according to his own confession,
awakened out of his dogmatic slumber by David Hume.
In his criticism of the old metaphysical proofs of the
existence of God, he followed pretty closely the foot-
steps of the great Scottish sceptic. But whereas Hume
stuck fast in the negation of dogmatism without being
able to find a new position, Kant found such a position
in the Practical Reason. The Unconditioned, which,
according to Kant also, is unknowable by our theoretic
thinking, he found given in our moral Self-consciousness,
not as absolute being, but as absolute obligation, or as
INTRODUCTION. 15
a demand of reason to recognise the end of humanity
in every man as of absolute worth. This obligation
raises our existence above the conditioned phenomena
of the world of sense, and makes us citizens of the
intelligible world of freedom, or of the spirit. From
this fact of our inner moral experience Kant has also
derived the content of our religious consciousness—the
“moral faith of reason,” as he called it—in distinction
from all authoritative reason that rests on merely ex-
termal and statutory grounds. Morality becomes reli-
gion, says Kant, when what it teaches to be recognised
as the final end of man is, at the same time, thought as
the final end of the Supreme Law-giver and Creator of
the world, or God. This religious view of our duty is
indeed not needed for the grounding of our conscious-
ness of duty, which rests exclusively upon the self-
legislation of our reason; but it is certainly required
as a guarantee for the possibility of our fulfilment of
duty. The presuppositions without which the fulfil-
ment of our moral destination would not be thinkable
are demands or “postulates” of the practical reason.
Because the moral law is not realisable in any given
time without remainder, its realisation, according to
|Kant, thus postulates an infinite duration of the per-
sonality, and therefore immortality. And because the
highest good demanded by reason also embraces, along
with perfect virtue, a corresponding happiness, which
we ourselves are not able to bring about, we have thus
16 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
to accept the existence of God as a guarantee for the
possibility of the attainment of the highest good.
Literally understood, this deduction appears to come
to this—that we believe in God in order to be able to
hope for a future reward of our virtue by happiness;
and thereby the belief in God would be grounded upon
the eudaemonistic passions of the soul. The rational
justification of this position is subject to all those
doubts which Hume's criticism had so acutely brought
into prominence. But this was not properly Kant's
Opinion ; he wished to show that the belief in God is
a necessary demand of our reason, of our moral self-
consciousness, not of our sensibility. Underlying his
deduction there was concealed the deeper thought
(which appears more distinctly in his ‘Critique of the
Judgment’) that we feel ourselves bound as moral
beings to a moral world-order, which is grounded not
merely in us but in God, and that the whole course of
the world in nature and history is the means arranged
by God for the fulfilment of our moral final end. This
thought formed thereafter the standing theme of the
idealistic philosophy which followed that of Kant.
By this moral issue Kant also made the specific
Christian doctrines of sin and redemption more intel-
ligible than the earlier rationalism had done. Although
he did not yet reach the full sense of these doctrines,
he interpreted them as moral allegories relating to the
States of the moral individual. He expounded this
INTRODUCTION. 17
view in his work entitled ‘Religion within the Limits
of mere Reason, where he says that at the beginning
there rules in every one a radical propensity of Self-love
as the consequence of an inexplicable intelligible act of
freedom. The overcoming of this evil principle can
only take place through a complete revolution of the
disposition, or a “regeneration,” which is likewise the
business of the individual freedom which can triumph
over the evil because it ought. The historical Jesus
comes into consideration in this regard only as an illus-
trating example of the moral ideal. The proper object
of faith, however, is not anything historical, but the
moral idea of man which is grounded in Our reason.
Whoever recognises this ideal, and makes it his su-
preme principle, is just before God in spite of defects
in his individual acts. His earlier trespasses are also
made up for, not indeed by a vicarious suffering on the
part of another, but really by this, that the new man
in ourselves continually suffers, as it were, vicariously
for the old man, who alone had deserved the suffering.
It was certainly an important step in advance when
Kant strove to find a rational moral meaning, not only
in the faith in God, but also in the ecclesiastical doc-
trine of redemption. But what still prevented him
from penetrating into the full sense of this cardinal
Christian doctrine was the individualism which he
shared with his whole century. He could think of the
victory of the good over the evil principle only as a
WOL. I. B
18 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
process within the individual subject, and as a work of
the subjective reason of the individual; and he was
even compelled to confess that this process is inex-
plicable as an act of the freedom of the individual.
But, at the same time, as Kant himself had designated
the good as the end of God in the world, it was a small
step to seeing that the victory of the good over the evil
is not the work of the subjective reason of the individ-
ual, but is the advancing work of the universal reason,
or of the divine spirit in the historical humanity. When
the post-Kantian philosophy took this step, it broke
through the limits of the earlier subjective rationalism;
it awakened the sense for the objective reason in the
great historical life of humanity; and it thereby also
Overcame the opposition between rational religion and
historical religion.
This important turn in the course of our philosophical
thinking took place just about the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the
philosophy of Fichte. After this disciple of Kant had
carried out his objective idealism with more logical
Sequence, and had driven it to the utmost point, he
recognised the impossibility of stopping at the human
Ego as ultimate, and went back to the infinite reason,
whose eternal divine life obtains manifold manifesta-
tions in the whole realm of finite spirits. With this
turning round from subjective to objective, or absolute,
idealism, the place of the moral religion of reason was
INTRODUCTION. 19
now taken up by religious mysticism, which no longer
postulates a distant God for the sporadic supporting of
our need of help, but feels the active presence of the
divine spirit in the heart of the individual himself. In
the work entitled ‘ Guidance to the Blessed Life,' Fichte
described religion as the view of the world which rises
above morality, which perceives the divine life in all
the manifestations of the true and good, and feels it in
one's own self as the power of holy living and loving—
as a calm inner mood in which man feels himself ani-
mated by God's spirit, and surrenders his selfhood to
God’s will, and from which there springs joyous and
active love of one's neighbour.
This religion of the heart, which Herder had already
opposed to the religion of reason, was made by Schleier-
macher the theme of his celebrated ‘Discourses on
Religion to the Cultivated among its Despisers.’ Re-
ligion, he showed, is neither knowing nor doing, neither
metaphysics nor morals, neither dogma nor worship,
but it is our pious feeling in So far as we become
conscious in it of the connection of Our life with that
of the All; or, as it is expressed in Schleiermacher's
System of Doctrine, it is our “feeling of absolute
dependence,” in which we take ourselves along with all
else that is finite, and refer ourselves to the one infinite
cause of the universe. The doctrines connected with
religion are secondary products of reflection about the
feelings, and means of expression for the Communica-
20 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
tion of them to others; but they do not belong in
themselves to the essence of religion. According to
Schleiermacher's opinion, one may have much religion
without needing the conceptions “miracle, inspiration,
and revelation”; but whoever reflects upon his relig-
ion inevitably finds these conceptions upon his way.
Hence they have an unlimited right in religion, but
also only as religious expressions for subjective states
of the Soul, without their significance being entitled to
be extended to the sphere of knowing, or moral acting.
Schleiermacher likewise believed that as regards the
conceptions “God” and “Immortality,” the very same
holds good as of all religious conceptions and doctrines:
that their theoretical apprehension is not of such essen-
tial significance for religion as is usually supposed.
The main thing, according to him, is that one should
live at all times in the etermal and have God in his
feeling, whatever view may be entertained regarding
the immortality of the future, and regarding the per-
Somality or impersonality of God. Actions do no more
immediately belong to religion than do conceptions and
doctrines; religion much rather invites one to a quiet
passive enjoyment than incites to outward activity.
Feelings and actions form two series, proceeding side
by side with each other; nothing is to be done from
religion, but everything with religion; the religious
feelings Ought to accompany the active life uninter-
ruptedly, like a holy music.
INTRODUCTION. 21
Notwithstanding the one-sidedness of this theory,
which would make faith the one and all in religion,
and in which the influences of the then dominating
romanticism betray themselves, yet its epoch-making
significance for the science of religion and theology is
not to be underestimated. Schleiermacher, by making
religion in general, and Christianity in particular, to
be understood as a mode of feeling or as a fact of the
inner experience, removed the grounds of the conflict
between the supra-naturalists and the rationalists
regarding the derivation of the dogmatic propositions
—namely, as to whether they are derived from reason
or from revelation. He set himself in opposition to
the supra-naturalists, by apprehending the Christian
faith not as a doctrine founded upon external author-
ity, but as an inner determination of our own self-
consciousness, which must stand in connection and
harmony with the other contents of our rational Con-
sciousness; and therewith Schleiermacher also intro-
duced into theology the fundamental thought of
idealism, that the mind is able to recognise as truth
only that in which it finds its own nature again. On
the other hand, he opposed to the rationalists the view
that the Christian faith is not a product of rational
reflection, but is a modification of the Soul, a feeling
which is given before thinking and independent of it,
and indeed as a fact not merely of individual experi-
ence, but of the common experience of the historical
22 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
community which is called the Christian Church. All
Christian doctrines will only be descriptions of the
common feeling of Christendom, which is determined
by the opposition of sin and redemption, or of the
restraint and liberation of the God - consciousness.
Redemption is therefore, according to Schleiermacher,
as well as according to Kant, not a single miraculous
process that occurred once for all in the past, but it
is the inner experience of the victory of the spirit
over the flesh—of the advancing, strengthening divine
principle in man—which is repeated again and again in
the pious. But this experience has its active ground,
not in the freedom of the individual, as Kant would
have it, but in the common spirit of the Christian
community, which has proceeded from the historical
personality of Jesus, the founder of the community.
Thus did Schleiermacher connect again the bonds
between the subject and historical Christianity, which
had been torn asunder by Kant. Instead of shutting
up religion “within the limits of mere (subjective)
reason,” he put it into the universal connection of the
whole life of humanity, and sought to comprehend it as
the product of the objective reason in history.
Schleiermacher, however, did not yet carry out logi-
cally the fruitful thought of the “development” of
religion, Seeing that he removed the founder of Chris-
tianity to a position above the plane on which the
historical humanity moves, and he carried him back
INTRODUCTION. 23
to a miraculous origin, thereby opening to Supra-
naturalism the entrance anew into the system of
doctrine. This defect was amended and corrected by
the Hegelian philosophy of religion. The strength and
merit of the Hegelian philosophy lay in this, that it
applied the idealism of the Kantian subjective philoso-
phy to the historical life of humanity, and has under-
stood that life in the light of a development of the
spirit in conformity with law. Thereby this philosophy
made an immense impression upon its contemporaries,
who believed they found in it the word that solved all
riddles. In this celebrated proposition of Hegel, “The
rational is actual, and the actual is rational,” there was
expressed an optimistic belief in the rational sense and
the purposeful meaning of the history of the world—a
belief which was a perfect consolation to a generation
that was weary of conflict, and which was, at the same
time, a wholesome medicine for its idealistic extrava-
gance. Hegel recalled his contemporaries from the
Utopias of the golden ages in the past and future, in
which the Rousseaus, Herders, and Kants had revelled,
to the solid ground of the historical life; and he showed
them that undreamed-of treasures of rational ideas and
of impelling and active ideals here presented themselves
to the eye that was lovingly turned in that direction.
He showed them how the reason that governs the
world had been able to carry through its sublime pur-
poses in every age and in the case of every people,
24 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
although half unknown to men themselves; and how
even the defects and evils of every time had been only
the necessary means of carrying forward the stage that
had been reached to a still higher and richer develop-
ment of the spiritual life of the peoples and of humanity.
Thereby a knowledge of history was gained which far
excelled all that had been hitherto reached in im-
partiality and justice of judgment, and in comprehen-
sion of the connection of the individual and the whole
—in short, in rational objectivity; and this view super-
seded the rationalistic pragmatism of the eighteenth
century, by Substituting for it a truly historical method.
This thoughtful view of history was fraught with
special advantage to the history of religion and to the
Church. Hegel recognised in this history a regular
development of the divine revelation in the human con-
sciousness of God, a development in which no point is
entirely without truth, yet in which no one point is the
whole truth, but in which the divine truth gradually
unveils itself more purely, more spiritually, and more
clearly to the human consciousness. The historical
religions are accordingly neither inventions of human
arbitrariness nor the expression of the accidental feel-
ings of pious Souls, but are the necessary products of
the specific common Spirit of the peoples, in the same
way as are law and morals, art and Science; and they
are, therefore, likewise only to be understood in closest
connection with the universal history of civilisation and
INTRODUCTION. 25
culture. Christianity, however, according to Hegel, is
“the absolute religion,” because in it the truth of God
as the Spirit has become manifest and revealed ; man
has become conscious of the presence of God in his
spirit, and has thereby come to his true freedom in
God. Moreover, the process of the evolution of the
religious spirit goes further within Christianity; be-
cause its true essence can only be realised gradu-
ally and in constant conflict with half-truth and one-
sided apprehension of truth. To show this teleological
rationality in the history of religion, and to overcome
thereby the proud subjectivism of the period of en-
lightenment which had set itself above the historical
by its utter lack of understanding and piety—this was
the intention and the merit of the Hegelian philosophy
of religion. But its defect was its one-sided intellect-
ualism, its mistaking the fact that religion is not, like
philosophy, a thing of the thinking but of the emotional
spirit, and that even thoughts Only obtain religious
r significance by their exciting feeling and will, by their
determining the disposition of the whole man, and by
giving themselves abiding expression in his moral
character. So far, Hegel's religion of reason needed
correction by the religion of the heart as expounded
by Fichte and Schleiermacher.
It is just this combination of Hegel's historical evolu-
tionism with Fichte's ethical idealism that is represented
in a classical way by your gifted Countryman Thomas
26 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Carlyle. He was one of the freest spirits of our time;
his keen critical understanding bowed down before no
external authority, no traditional system of belief. In
the dogmas and rites of all the Churches he recognised
the natural products of the historical stage of culture
reached by the peoples; to him they were the symbols
in which the eternal idea must clothe itself for the
consciousness of every age. But as is the case with all
that is historical, much must also again become an-
tiquated when the growth of time has gone beyond
them. In his fundamental aversion to all religious
formalism, to overestimation of what is statutory and
conventional, and to all ecclesiastical form and sham,
he may appear at first sight as a radical Sceptic, as
a second David Hume. And yet no one was further
from the empty scepticism of the cold understanding
than Thomas Carlyle, whose soul glowed with en-
thusiasm for the true and good, who bowed in rever-
ence before the great personalities of history, in whom
he recognised prophets of the true and heroes of the
good. To demy and combat what is false, to believe
and to honour what is true, as that in which the
eternal God reveals Himself to us, this was Carlyle's
element of life; it was his religion. Has not this
pathos of moral idealism the closest affinity with re-
ligious enthusiasm, with the courage that sustains the
conflicts and sacrifices of the Reformers ? In fact,
Thomas Carlyle's character appears to stand much
INTRODUCTION. 27
nearer that of John Knox than that of David Hume ;
Or rather it may be said that Thomas Carlyle united
in himself the religious reverence of the Reformer
with the intellectual clearness of the modern thinker
who does not fear even the sharp edge of criticism,
because he knows that it is the indispensable means of
penetrating from what merely seems true to what is
genuinely true.
In the spirit of Carlyle, which combines the courage
of the thinker in the cause of truth with the reverence
of faith, Lord Gifford, the estimable founder of the
Lectureship which has brought us together here,
wished to see the question of religion treated. And
I do not know how they could be otherwise treated
successfully. The more we are filled with a sense of
the incomparable worth of religion, and especially of
our Christian faith, so much the more must we feel
it to be incumbent upon us to overcome the impedi-
ments which have sprung up in the way of the faith
from the scientific view of the world of the present
day. For this end it is necessary to show that the
doubts of the thinking mind do not affect the essence of
the Christian faith, but apply only to the forms in
which earlier generations have set forth this faith,
forms which sprang from and corresponded to the
state of culture and the philosophy of former ages,
but which on that very account cannot be any longer
sufficient and authoritative for the advanced knowledge
28 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
of our time. It will be a part of the task of these
Lectures to show how these forms of faith have taken
shape and developed themselves in the course of the
ages, what they signify, and what religious truths
they would symbolically express. First of all, how-
ever, we shall have to make intelligible what the
essence of Religion is, which lies at the basis of these
changing forms of the doctrines of religion. But in
thus proceeding we shall not fall back again into the
error of the old rationalism—namely, of Seeking the
essence of religion in its initial state, or in a so-called
“Natural Religion,” which was held to consist in cer-
tain presumably rational universal truths, but which
in truth are only abstract and colourless conceptions.
David Hume, as has already been observed, irrefutably
showed that there has never been such a natural
religion of reason ; but irrational passions of the
heart and fictions of the imagination were recognised
by him as forming the beginning of religion, and the
historical investigations since his time have always
only more confirmed this view. But from the fact
that the condition of religion at the beginning of its
history was everywhere more or less irrational and
pathological, is the inference at all to be justified that
the essence of religion also consists in irrational wishes
and dreams ? Such a conclusion could only be held to
be correct by One who had taken no notice of the
great thought which gives the whole Science of nature
INTRODUCTION. 29
and history in the nineteenth century its proper and
Specifically distinguishing characteristic in contrast to
the enlightenment of the eighteenth century—namely,
the thought of development. g
We know that every living thing unfolds its essential
nature only in the whole course of its life, and hence
that its state at the beginning least enables us to
obtain a knowledge of its real nature. Whoever would
describe the essence of the oak, will not derive its
marks from the acorn, but from the full-grown tree;
and whoever would obtain a knowledge of the essence
of man, will not limit himself to the observation of
the infant, nor will he choose as his models the Savages
who are to be found in the crude state of nature. On
the contrary, he will give heed to what the human
race has developed itself into in the course of thou-
Sands of years; and in the highest representatives of
the moral and intellectual culture of man he will find
the criterion by which to judge of what the human
Species is by its constitution, or what its essence Com-
tains in itself. In like manner, the political philoso-
pher who would determine the essence of the State
will no doubt cherish a historical interest in the first
beginnings of the historical organisation of humanity,
but he will guard himself against defining the con-
ception of the State, as we know it to-day, according
to its first crude beginnings; nor will he derive the
facts of moral right and the function of the State from
30 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the mode of its historical origin, but rather from the
conditions and demands of our rational spirit, which
has attained to clearness regarding itself by historical
experience. The same holds good of Religion : its
essence is least of all to be recognised in its historical
beginnings; it reveals itself only through its actual-
isation in the course of its historical development, and
most distinctly on the highest culminating point of
that development, in Christianity. Only in so far as
we give heed to the sum of the religious experiences
of humanity as they culminate in Christianity, shall
we be in a position for understanding objectively the
essence of religion; and if we were to turn away from
history, the great teacher, in this sphere, we should
not get beyond arbitrary hypotheses and empty ab-
Stractions.
Assuredly we ought not to forget that even Chris-
tianity as a historical phenomenon is not a simple
quantity, but a very complicated whole, composed of
the most manifold elements. Thus the question im-
mediately arises, Which of these manifold elements
are essentially religious, and which of them belong
not to the essence of religion but to its more outward
vestment, and even to its deformations 2 Or in other
words, In what features of Christianity is religion pre-
Sented to us in its purest and most valuable develop-
ment, and in which as less pure and less valuable %
INTRODUCTION. 31
Now it is clear that the relative value of individual
historical appearances is only capable of being judged
by reference to a universal principle, which contains
the ground and law of all that is particular. If, them,
religion is a universally human phenomenon, its prin-
ciple can only lie in the universal essence of man,
in what distinguishes him from the lower animals,
and therefore in his rational endowment. The prin-
ciple of religion cannot consist in individual rational
judgments, propositions, or doctrines, as was main-
tained by the old rationalism, but must consist as-
suredly in reason itself. It will be the task of the
next following Lectures to show that reason is SO
constituted in us that the consciousness of God nec-
essarily proceeds out of its normal function, and to
explain what position this consciousness occupies in
the whole of our spiritual life in relation to its other
functions. To-day it will only be possible to indicate
in an introductory outline of our views the leading
fundamental thoughts, the further exposition and estab-
lishment of which will have to occupy us in the later
lectures of this course. -
Reason is the synthetic thinking which arranges the
manifold contents of consciousness by reference to the
unity of the Ego. As theoretical reason, it arranges
the mental representations; as practical reason, the
appetencies and desires. The harmonious ordering of
32 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the representations is the Idea of the true; that of the
desires is the Idea of the good. Now, since reason as
theoretical and as practical is one and the same reason,
it must strive after a supreme unity which compre-
hends under itself the Ideas of the true and good; and
this is the Idea of God. It is only through reference
to the Idea of God that the Ideas of the true and good
receive their full objective significance. For, as our
representations of things in themselves or of the world,
their ordering in our consciousness can only be effectu-
ated under the supposition that the world of things is
likewise subject to a similar order, or is arranged by
a reason similar to ours. The truth of our rational
thinking thus assumes the truth of the rational order
of the world—that is, of God. And seeing that the
desires of each individual are conditioned by those of
other men, and also by the nature of things, the har-
monious order of the desires in the individual con-
Sciousness is only to be attained under the assumption
that the same Ordering principle also rules in other
men and in nature; and thus the realisability of the
Idea of the good presupposes the reality of the moral
Order of the world, or of God. The Idea of God, there-
fore, contains not merely the finishing unity or highest
Synthesis of the contents of consciousness within the
Subject, but also its unity with the trans-subjective or
objective world of the real; it guarantees the objective
INTRODUCTION. 33
truth of our rational thinking, and the objective realis-
ability of our rational willing.
To the two sides of the Idea of God, in so far as it is
the principle of the true and the good, or the highest
law of being and of the being that ought to be, there
also correspond the two sides which we have to dis-
tinguish in religion as the practical relation of man to
the Idea of God. The fundamental feeling of religion
is best expressed in the words of Goethe,
“Small do I feel myself within the infinitely great.”
This is the feeling of finiteness and limitedness, of
dependence on an infinitely superior power, against
which we can do nothing, and by which our existence
and our weal and woe are conditioned. But the
religious feeling is not a mere feeling of dependence;
it is not a slavish fear of an extraneous mysterious
power: where it thus appears we judge it to be a
deformity or malformation, a crudeness or degeneration
of the religious feeling. Already by the very fact that
we know our dependence, or Our limit, we are in a
certain sense above it; when we make the infinite
power on which we feel ourselves dependent the object
of our thinking, it appears no longer as entirely strange,
but as related to ourselves, as a spiritual power, as the
ordering principle of all that is capable of being known
by us of the laws, purpose, and beauty of the world,
WOL. I. C
34 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and as what excites our wonder and reverence. Rever-
ence is the feeling of dependence on one who is such
that we feel ourselves at the same time sympathetically
drawn to him ; and thus it leads over to the other side
of religion. In so far as we see in God the good, or
the ideal of our true willing, He is the goal of the
longing of our freedom, which can only be released
from the pressure of the finite in that it raises itself
from all limited and divided willing to the one per-
fect and harmonious willing of the whole, in order to
realise and satisfy itself in surrender to it. From the
beginning, mankind have seen in the divine not merely
the power on which they feel themselves dependent,
but at the same time the ideal goal of their longing,
the ideal of their imperfect being, the perfect fulfilment
of their highest hopes, the source of their blessedness.
Thus, in the religious feeling there comes to be added
to the depressing feeling of dependence, elevating
trust and free self-surrendering love. The feeling of
dependence, however, is not thereby in any way
abolished, but, on the contrary, it only then truly
becomes morally deepened. For, when man comes to
know God as the good, as the ideal of true willing,
he feels himself not merely dependent in his being
on divine power, but also bound in his willing to the
divine will, and under obligation to obey and serve it;
he recognises in the purpose of God, or in the universal
INTRODUCTION. 35
good, the regulating rule of authority for his conduct
and his judgment of himself. And when he now
recognises the distance of his being from this sublime
obligation, the humble feeling of human weakness
becomes a painful feeling of guilt and unworthiness.
But Out of this deepest humiliation there springs up
again the highest elevation — namely, the desire for
liberation, not merely from the pressure of the finite
world and its evils, but still more from the dividedness
of one's own being, from the pain of the feeling of
guilt, and from the weakness of the will to do good.
This moral yearning for freedom reaches its fulfilment
in the full moral surrender of the individual’s own
will to the divine will of goodness. In obedience to
God man finds his true freedom ; out of the humility
which overcomes itself there grows the courage of the
trust which overcomes the world. The more, in any
religion, these two sides of humility and trust, Sur-
render and elevation, dependence and freedom, come
to full and harmonious realisation, so much the more
does it correspond to the essence of religion, and so
much the more does it realise fellowship with its
infinite ideal implanted in the essence of the human
spirit. In this we have the criterion by which we are
able to estimate the relative value of the historical
religions, and by which we can understand the law
of their teleological development. Hence we shall no
36 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
longer seek “natural religion” in the rude beginnings
of history, and just as little in meagre abstractions
from actual religion, which have never been actual;
but we shall find them where religion has historically
unveiled its true nature, as it alone corresponds to the
essence of man—namely, in Christianity.
LECTURE II.
RELIGION AND MORALITY.
THE assertion now often heard that Religion and Mor-
ality stood originally in no connection with each other,
is an error which arises from a false way of putting the
question. Our present moral convictions are taken as
a standard, and it is asked whether the oldest repre-
sentations of the gods correspond to our moral ideals,
and whether the duties required at the first by religion
correspond to our conception of duty 2 AS, of course,
there is no such correspondence in these cases, it is
believed that any original connection between morality
and religion must be denied. In maintaining this
view, it is forgotten that the primitive morality is just
as different from our morality as the primitive religion
is from our religion. But it is an incontestable fact
that the primitive morality stands in very close connec-
tion with the primitive religion, and indeed that the
beginnings of all Social customs and legal ordinances
38 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
are directly derived from religious notions and cere-
monial practices.
The family is the oldest religious community, and
only as such did it become a moral fellowship. The
worship of the house-gods or of ancestral spirits was
the ideal bond which connected the members of the
household into a lasting fellowship regulated by fixed
rules. By the entrance of the wife into community
of worship with the husband, marriage became Sanc-
tioned—that is, it was elevated from a mere natural
relationship to a moral relationship, with lasting duties
and rights. The paternal authority had its ground,
as well as its limit, in the religious position of the
father of the family as the performer of the rites of
domestic worship. The imalienability of the family
property also rested on a religious Sanction ; for it
was not the present living members of the family who
were regarded as the legal possessors of this property,
but it belonged to the house-god, who represented the
enduring unity of the family. The generations of the
family had only the usufruct of the property. Again,
because the religion of the primitive period was limited
to the worship of the house-gods, the circle of moral
obligation was likewise still limited to the family;
but within these narrow limits the religious faith
operated as the motive of moral feelings. As the
members of the family felt themselves bound together
by the powerful bond of their belonging to the same
IRELIGION AND MORALITY. 39
house-deity, they learned mutually to esteem and love
each other. Their natural inclinations and mutual
need of help thus received the higher consecration of
piety through the religious idea. Thus the foundation
of morality was laid primarily in the narrowest circle
by the religious Sanction. The expansion of this
narrowest Social combination into the form of civil
Society followed hand in hand with the expansion of
the religious ideas and usages. As the members of
the family assembled around the household hearth
and invited the house-gods, by oblations and invoca-
tion, to the common meal, so the community of the
city was the union of those who honoured the same
protecting deities of the city at the same altars and
through the common sacrificial meal. What from
the beginning formed the bond of civil society was
not interest, nor an arbitrary contract, nor an acci-
dental custom ; but it was the Sacred repast in
presence of the gods of the city, that symbol of an
inner union of all the individual citizens bound by
their common obligation to an ideal principle, a
Super - Sensible obligatory power. Like the house
government of the paternal power, the civil govern-
ment was originally an efflux of religion, and not a
product of force nor of free compact. The royal
power and authority were also originally derived from
the worship of the public altars, and hence the kings
were called ‘Iepol, Avoyevels. The oldest laws and
40 * PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
legislative assemblies were referred by all the peoples
back to divine revelation—a correct reminiscence of
the fact that they had not arisen from arbitrary
invention or agreement, but were regarded as the
expression of religious convictions, whose involuntary
presuppositions were regulative for the formation of
the several relations of life. The laws, like the faith
and worship, were likewise a sacred tradition indis-
Solubly connected with the holy places and legends
of the community of the city. Religion was mixed
up with all the actions of peace and war. It regu-
lated all the manners of the house and of the city,
the meals and festivals, the assemblies of the people
and the tribunals of justice, the military expeditions
and the conclusions of peace,—all these stood in the
closest relation with the religious presuppositions and
purposes. The moral was not yet distinguished from
the religious.
As religious motives lay at the basis of morals and
morality from the beginning of civilisation, these again
reacted so as to ennoble religion. It is not to be sup-
posed that religion, in order to work as a morally
educative power, must have contained from the begin-
ning ideal notions of the nature of the Deity. This
was impossible: for whence could men have obtained a
knowledge of moral Ideals before they had themselves
come to the elements of social morality and practice 2
It was at first also much less important what idea was
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 4l
formed of the nature of the gods, rather than that the
Social groups should feel themselves combined through
the honouring of certain higher powers, and that they
should have in this common consciousness of a higher
obligation a regulating principle of their common life
with each other. But after social customs and ordi-
nances had settled themselves under the influence of
this religious motive, and certain fundamental con-
ceptions of right and wrong had been developed, it was
then natural that they should see in the Deity the
Guardian of the Social order willed by him, and con-
Sequently the avenger of every wrong, including civil
crimes, and not merely the religious trespass in the
narrower sense. But when the gods came to be re-
garded as the representatives and guardians of the
sacred order of justice, the further consequence could
not but follow that a corresponding sentiment should
be attributed to them, and that they should be thought
of as friends, promoters, and examples of all that was
regarded by their worshippers as good and noble. Thus
was formed the conception of the gods as moral ideals,
and this conception again reacted upon the moral Con-
sciousness out of which it had grown so as to strengthen
it. There was therefore found from the beginning a
relationship of closest reciprocity between the religious
and the moral; and the development of the two sides
proceeded for a long time pari pāSSM, and under the
reciprocal influence of the One upon the other.
42 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
In the course of time, however, this immediate uni-
ty of religion and morality must necessarily become
looser and be dissolved. A conservative characteristic
belongs to religion; it clings to the traditional which
is held by it as sacred and revealed by the Deity.
Morality, on the other hand, advances unceasingly for-
wards; its circles widen; the wants of life become
more numerous; with the advancing division of labour
Society becomes organised more distinguishably, the
contrast of the different classes becomes greater; and
the legal relationships become more complicated. Then
the old morals and dogmas transmitted under religious
Sanctions no longer apply; they are found to be ad-
verse to their purpose, and to be a hindrance to the
rational order of society. The sceptical understanding
assumes an attitude of opposition to their supposed
Origin in divine revelation when it comes to reflect
upon the difference between the manners and laws of
the several peoples, and from this it draws the infer-
ence of their human origin. Thus a breach arises
between the traditional religion of the people and the
moral consciousness, first in the case of individuals,
and then gradually of whole generations. The moral
thus loosens itself from the religious foundation which
it had at first, and seeks an autonomous grounding for
itself in human nature. So it was among the Greeks
in the time of the Sophists, who declared man to be
the measure of all things; and So it was again in the
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 43
modern period of rationalistic enlightenment — the
period of the Aufklärung.
But before we pursue the different forms of religion-
less morality, and examine their tenableness, let us still
pause for a moment to consider religious morality, and
notice the defects which result from its immediate de-
pendence on the Sanction of positive religious authori-
ties. We find the classical examples for this point of
view in the Judaism of the period after the Exile, and
in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. In such cases
the moral subject continually remains under the guar-
dianship of priestly authority, and no progress is made
beyond the irresponsible conditions of childhood to a
proper moral conviction and free personal sentiments.
The good is not known as what it is in itself, as the
true end of our own will; but it appears as the ground-
less arbitrary requirement of an external will, of the
God who has proclaimed His law through His ambas-
sadors, and who has impressed its fulfilment by the
threatenings of punishment and the promises of reward.
That the motives corresponding to this view—namely,
fear of divine punishment and hope of divine reward—
only produce a lower slavish morality, has been often
and rightly observed : but, in addition to this, it is to be
observed that, upon this standpoint, an essential under-
standing of the good according to its rational purposive
relation to the wellbeing of man is not possible; and
hence, that all moral laws are only to be accepted on
44 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION,
external authority. From this there results a manifold
train of evils. Morality is resolved into a sum of posi-
tive commands and prohibitions which refer to indi-
vidual actions or omissions; and everything depends
upon these commandments being punctually observed,
without distinction, for they have all the same divine
Sanction. Thereby morality obtains that external for-
malistic and petty pedantic character, such as we know
it in Phariseeism, which strains out gnats and swallows
Camels. Further, the legislation that rests upon reli-
gious tradition always requires authorised expounders,
Scribes, and priests, who have to apply the laws fixed in
the Sacred letter to the manifold individual cases of
Conduct, and to define it more exactly. Now, as these
representatives of religious authority are accustomed
Only too easily to confound the interests of their class
with the divine will, there arises from this a spurious
falsification of the moral values of things by perform-
ances for the Church and the Priesthood being placed
above the fulfilment of the nearest moral duties.
“Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for
doctrines the commandments of men’’ (Mark vii. 7), is
the reproach addressed by Jesus to the Pharisees. The
medieval Church, by its ascetic contempt of the world,
especially degraded the moral orders that are grounded
in the mature of humanity, such as the family, the work
of one's calling, and the national State, declaring them
to be not only worthless, but even hindrances to the
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 45
eternal Salvation of men; and it exalted self-mortifica-
tion and obedience to the Church as the truly meritori-
Ous mode of action. Thus, by the so-called “super-
natural” morality demanded by the Church, the true
natural moral Order of the world was repressed and
distorted.
Against this unnaturalness, this compulsion of priestly
guardianship, the Sound moral sense of man rightly re-
belled: it would not continue to be a mere child guided
by the leading-strings of authority, but strove to attain
to the free self-determination of the man. And in this
connection it happened quite naturally that in the
struggle against the slavish religious morality of the
Church, it was thought that a free morality could only
be found by tearing one's self away from all religion—
may, in opposition to all religion. This was natural,
for extremes meet; and, as has been well Said—
“Fear well the slave whene'er he breaks his chain,
But aye before the freeman fear is vain.”
Is there not something of the passionate bitterness of
the slave struggling for his freedom to be heard even in
the judgments of many of our contemporaries regarding
the emancipation of morality ? This question I would
here raise at least for preliminary consideration. Before
we attempt to answer it, we have to subject to examina-
tion the forms and principles in which a religionless
Secular morality has grounded and fashioned itself.
46 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
In antiquity and in modern times there are found in
this connection essentially two chief tendencies which
we must distinguish, and which we may designate as
the empirical or eudaemonistic, and the idealistic or
rationalistic. As the Greek Cyrenaics and Epicureans,
so the modern Utilitarians have started again from the
proposition, which is accepted by them as an indubi-
table axiom, that the fundamental impulse of man is the
striving after pleasure, and that from this impulse all
morality must be deduced. They teach that that is
good which helps man to the greatest possible and last-
ing pleasure. From regard to lasting pleasure or hap-
piness, momentary pleasure must often be sacrificed.
And, because the individual is so closely connected with
others that their weal and woe also condition his weal
and woe, every one cares best for his own happiness if
he also gives the greatest possible consideration to the
requirement of the happiness of others. Hence the
famous formula, that the highest moral principle is the
greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible
number of men.
In considering this theory, we remark, in the first
place, that a psychological error underlies it. From the
fact that pleasure is constantly the result of the happy
activity of our impulses, the Hedonist wrongly concludes
that pleasure is also always the cause of our impulses,
and the only Supreme motive. As pleasure is the indi-
cation of the Satisfied impulse, the existence and work-
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 47
ing of an impulse must always be presupposed before
there can be any question of pleasure or non-pleasure.
It is not the reflection upon the pleasurable result
which may be expected that impels us to action, but
simply the unreflected pressure of some one of the
manifold impulses implanted in our nature. But if
pleasure is the feeling resulting from the activity of
the impulses, then the more precise quality of the
average lasting feeling of pleasure or happiness in the
Case of every man, depends on what impulses or tend-
encies of the will are predominating and ruling in him.
As different as men are in temperament, course of life,
culture, and character, so different becomes their taste
for what lastingly produces weal or woe, and so different
therefore will be their ideal of happiness. But then,
how is it possible to establish what the general happi-
ness, or the greatest possible happiness of the greatest
possible number, consists in 2 Shall we set about
arranging some universal way of voting upon the sub-
ject, and get every one at the poll, man by man, to
declare in what he considers his highest happiness to
lie I fear the result of this universal enquête would
be of such a kind that all true friends of the people
would keep from recognising it as the canon of their
philanthropic efforts. And does not this involve the
clear proof that “happiness” is a much too indefinite
and undefinable conception for being fitted to be the
supreme principle of morality ?
48 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
A further important consideration arises as a Second
objection to this theory. As pleasure and happiness
are a matter of subjective feeling, the striving of the
individual after happiness must necessarily form the
basis of the eudaemonistic ethics. But on what ground
is the individual to be required to strive after the
happiness of others and even of all? This question is
the Achilles-heel of Utilitarianism. The representa-
tives of this theory indeed are wont to satisfy them-
selves very easily on this point by assuming at Once
that the universal happiness includes that of all in-
dividuals, and therefore that every one, in caring for
the happiness of others, eo ipso, cares likewise best for
his own. But things are not actually so simple as this.
Bxperience much rather shows that the wellbeing of
others, of Society, of a people, often enough does not
coincide with that of the individual, but crosses it; and
that such wellbeing demands sacrifices of individual
happiness, renunciation of One's own advantage and
personal comfort, and even under certain circumstances
the very life of the individual. What then is to deter-
mine a man from the utilitarian standpoint to such a
self-denying altruistic mode of action ? Such conduct
cannot, at all events, be derived as a duty from the
Supreme principle of individual happiness: on the con-
trary, one would think that self-denial in favour of
others must be judged to be immoral, being in contra-
diction with the Supreme moral principle. The utili-
JRELIGION AND MORALITY. 49
tarians are indeed seldom resolute enough to draw this
consequence. Rather do they seek to escape from the
difficulty by referring to the many artificial motives by
which Society seeks to impel individuals to a common
useful mode of conduct, and to restrain them from
actions that would be prejudicial to the community.
Such motives are fear of civil punishment, or of the
disapprobation of public opinion, or of shame and dis-
grace on the One hand, and on the other hand, hope of the,
esteem of society, of honour and reputation, or even of an
untarnished name, and of the manifold advantages which
arise to the individual from the secured existence of the
public legalised order. And who would deny that such
motives are, at all events, not to be underestimated in
their significance as co-operating factors of the moral
life 2 The question is only whether they are also
adequate when taken as the sole basis and Supreme
principle of morals 2 I believe that this must be
denied on Several grounds. In the first place, it is to
be denied because all the motives derived from the
external consequences of actions can be determining
only for the external conduct, and not for the immer
sentiment of the actor. Morality, however, in distinc-
tion from legal right, has to do with this inner senti-
ment. Whether any one restrains himself from what
is bad from fear of civil punishment and public dis-
grace, or from an aversion to what is mean and un-
worthy of him, makes no difference, when judged from
WOL. I. D
50 - PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the utilitarian consideration of the result of his act;
and yet the alternative is very different for the moral
judgment. This characteristic of the moral judgment,
that it is directed not merely to the actions but to the
motives and sentiment of the actor, cannot find any
ground in utilitarianism; and hence, in any case, it
could not be fitted to be the Supreme principle of
morals, but in the most favourable case only to be the
principle of a legal order. But more exactly viewed, it
is not sufficient even for this. For, if it is only by con-
sideration of the consequences of his action as useful or
prejudicial to him that the individual man lets him-
self be determined, one cannot conceive what should
restrain him whenever he has not to fear any, or com-
paratively trivial, evil consequences, from pursuing his
own advantage in the most unscrupulous way, at the cost
of his fellow-mem. The prudent egoist who, without
getting into collision with the penal law and preserva-
tion of his external position, knows how he can mer-
cilessly make use of others as instruments and sacri-
fices for his own advantage—may, even the prudent
criminal, who may understand how to keep himself
free from punishment—would not be to blame from the
standpoint of a prudent calculation of utility. But it
is clear that, in a Society in which such a way of think-
ing was universally prevalent, the legal order could not
permanently exist, but would necessarily soon be dis-
solved into the chaos of a “bellum omnium contra
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 51
0mmes.” The historical example of this issue is pre-
Sented in the history of French society at the end of
the last century.
Finally, if the Eudæmonists, along with the external
consequences of actions, also reflect upon their inner
consequences, such as the joy of a good conscience and
of Self-esteem, the pain of a bad conscience and of self-
contempt, and would derive from them efficient motives,
they are thus manifestly borrowing from the idealistic
moral principle, otherwise combated by them. They
must, however, first show how such moral feelings are
at all possible from their eudaemonistic standpoint.
Certain as it is that the man in whom the feeling of
duty lives, shrinks from evil as a source of inner misery,
just as little can this feeling, which already presup-
poses the consciousness of the obligatory authority of
the good, be made the ground of this very conscious-
ness, or the principle of morality. If a man be once
told that the striving after happiness is the Supreme
determining principle of action, he cannot be prevented
from seeking his happiness in the Satisfaction of those
impulses which he finds to be the strongest. If these
happen to be the sensuous and Selfish impulses, he may
then indeed be pitied on account of his bad taste, but
he cannot be blamed for his violation of the moral
principle. Nor will much be effected in his case by
warning him against the evil consequences of his mode
of action, or the pain of an evil conscience and of Self-
52 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
contempt, for appeal is then made to feelings which
have not been developed in the course of his striving
after happiness, and towards which he holds himself
indifferent, nay, which he even repudiates with proud
contempt, because they could only prevent him from
seeking and enjoying the happiness of life in his own
way. We cannot gather grapes from thorns. If sub-
jective eudaemonism is taken as the principle of
morality, no dialectical art will ever succeed in de-
riving from it the unconditioned authority of the good,
independent of the inclination and favour of the in-
dividual, or the sanctity of duty. And wherever this
appears to be the case, there is always involved a petitio
principii. The feeling of duty, the founding of which
is here in question, is already silently assumed as
present, and it is then certainly easy to show how, in
judging of the relative value of individual modes of
action, their consequences are regulated for human
wellbeing. However justified utilitarianism may be
as a heuristic principle in the process of valuing in-
dividual actions, it is as little available as a foundation
for moral Sentiment and the formation of character.
This has been well recognised by the idealistic
moralists from Zeno to Kant, and they have therefore
sought for the foundation of autonomous morality in
an opposite way. According to the Stoics, the virtue,
dignity, and happiness of man consist not in the Satis-
faction of the desires, but in freedom from desires, in
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 53
apathy, or in the Supremacy of the passionless reason.
And Kant in like manner taught again that our reason
unconditionally commands us to respect the dignity of
humanity in every man, to recognise every person as a
subject of rights and duties, and always to fulfil Our
own duty unconditionally, purely from respect for duty,
independent of all inclination, and even in constant
conflict with inclination. Certainly there is something
sublime in this Kantian view of virtue which belongs
unconditionally to duty, from pure respect for the law,
or for our own reason as the lawgiver, and which con-
cedes no rights whatever to the inclinations, but on the
contrary proves its higher descent and strength just in
conflict with them. But it may well be asked, Is this
Sublime virtue not cold, and even repellently cold, when
it appeals to us? Was Schiller not right when he said
that this morality of the categorical imperative “is a
morality for slaves, and one which the children of the
house do not deserve” 2 and was the Gospel not right
when it showed us in heartfelt love to the divine ideal
of the good, a higher, because freer and gladder, morality
than that of the law Ż
But if we ask how this rigorism of the Kantian
ethics, which reminds us of the Stoa, is explained, we
shall recognise the Same ground for it as in the case of
Stoicism. It lies in the ascetic dualism which severs
reason from nature, and in the rigid individualism
which severs the individual from the fellowship of
54 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
mankind and of the Deity. In order to secure the
dignity of man as a moral personality, Kant believed
that it was necessary to set him entirely upon him-
self, upon his own reason and autonomous freedom,
and to exclude him from all the influences of mature,
and of human society, and God. He resolved the
moral world into a plurality of spiritual monads, be-
tween which there is found no moral reciprocity, no
bond of Solidarity of its members, no organic develop-
ment of the common spirit, no divine education of the
whole. But how under such a presupposition can we
find it thinkable that the weak voice of the law-giving
reason of the individual could ever procure for itself
hearing and respect from the sensuous and selfish im-
pulses which are only continually resisting it 2 In
fact, such an abstract reason would never be able to
realise its moral demand ; humanity would never be
able to come even to the first steps of moral develop-
ment were there not already implanted in our nature
those social impulses and feelings which bind the
individual from the beginning instinctively to the
community, and which, developed by the educating
influence of Society, become powers for good, in which
the later awakening voice of the law-giving reason
finds its inner natural representative and echo. Kant,
by ignoring this natural connection of the individual
with the species, not only made the growth of the good
and the realisation of reason in man inconceivable, but
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 55
he also evacuated the idea of the good of all deter-
minate contents. In place of the manifold moral
goods which the divine-human spirit has created in
history, and which can become to the heart of man
an object of reverence, devotion, love, and inspiration,
Rant has put the empty formula of duty, which re-
pels the feeling heart, suppresses the living individu-
ality, and makes the moral world stiffen into barren
monotony.
It is not wonderful that a protest was raised against
this suppression of individual feelings, even by such
men as otherwise gave their full approval to the
idealism of the Kantian ethics. The Herders and
Schillers, the Fichtes and Schleiermachers, were not
less averse to the Ordinary utilitarian morality than
Rant ; but, on the other hand, they could not be
satisfied with the irreconcilable discordance asserted
by Kant between reason and nature, duty and incli-
nation ; they were convinced that this opposition must
find its reconciliation in a higher morality, in which
duty itself has become the object of inclination, the
good has become the good that yields happiness, and
obligation has become the free and joyous volition of
the will. They designated this higher moral ideal by
various names—they called it humanity, moral beauty,
freedom, love; but they were always agreed in holding
that it is what is properly divine in man, what raises
him above the narrow limit of his own selfhood, and
56 PHILOSOPHY OF RIELIGION.
unites him with the primary source of spirits. Thus,
by carrying idealism itself to a deeper position, they
at last reached a religious morality which, however far
it might be removed from the ecclesiastical faith of
revelation and authority, yet came into closest Con-
tact with the fundamental character of Christian
morality. Nor did these original thinkers at the be-
ginning of this century deny the connection of their
ethical idealism with Christianity: with all their free
attitude towards the Church and dogma, they had yet
So much historical sense as to recognise that the
humanity, the beautiful culture, and the love in which
they beheld the moral ideal, was a fruit that had
ripened on the tree of Christianity. It was the Epi-
gons about the middle of this century, such as Feuer-
bach in Germany, the two Mills in England, and Comte
in France, who first began to accentuate the difference
of their free secular morality from that of Christianity,
and to carry it out to a sharp, extreme contrast. Since
that time it appears almost to be regarded as if it be-
longed to good tone in the circles of advanced culture
to boast of the independence of morality from all and
every religion, as the highest achievement of the pres-
ent time. This position seems to recall in many re-
spects the old history of the friendship between Pilate
and Herod. Representatives of the opposite tendencies,
namely, idealists and utilitarians, are now seen uniting
with each other and working together in union for
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 57
the spread of an emancipated Secular religionless
morality.
What are we to say, them, regarding this phenomenon?
In the first place, we may regard it as a natural product
of our time, when extremes are everywhere carried out
to the sharpest opposition. In particular, the striving
of the different Churches for power and Supremacy now
makes itself everywhere felt in increased energy, and
opposes to all the struggling of the new time for a
reform of the traditional doctrines and dogmas only a
rigid mon, possumus, and exhorts us modern men to
bring to it the sacrifice of intellect. This naturally
incites the self-conscious spirits of the age to haughty
opposition, and drives them into the arms of a Voltair-
ean radicalism, which believes that it can find moral
progress only by a breach in principle with religion
and the Church. But however conceivable this mood
of many of our contemporaries may be, yet it cannot
be regarded as sound or wholesome. We indeed will-
ingly admit that to-day, as in all former times, there
are many estimable moral characters among the irre-
ligious men of our time—men who are distinguished
by strict conscientiousness, faithful fulfilment of the
duties of their calling, and devoted zeal for the well-
being of their fellow-men; but, far as I am from wish-
ing to dispute this experience, I would still raise a
warning against drawing too rashly from such isolated
examples of religionless morality universal conclu-
58 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Sions regarding the normal relationship of religion and
morality.
I should like, in the first place, to refer to the fact
that the moral principles and Sentiments of such men
have nevertheless not become what they are of them-
selves, but are the fruit of their education by the
Christian community, which led the young by doctrine
and example to the recognition of the good as what is
absolutely valuable, as a “sacred” authority, and which
deeply impressed on their still susceptible hearts the
feelings of reverence and piety, and of obligation and
love for the ideals of the good. To the subsequent in-
fluence of this education by the Christian community,
whether they are conscious of it or not, we owe the
best of our moral convictions and the formation of our
character. But it is at the same time an unquestion-
able fact that the Christian community rests on a
religious foundation, and that its moral sentiment is
rooted in its religious belief. The good is regarded by
it as the absolute authority, not because it is useful, but
because it is the revelation of the holy will of God; its
faith in the victory of the good in the world rests not
upon the postulate of the subjective reason, but upon
the objective experiences of history, in which it recog-
mises revelations of the judging and saving, the redeem-
ing and educating, spirit of God. This radical implica-
tion of morality in the religious view of the world and
history may indeed, pass from the consciousness of par-
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 59
ticular individuals who have been educated by the
Christian community, but it continues to exist in the
common spirit of the whole community, by which the
individual moral spirit is maintained and reared. Now,
if we put the case that the religious faith which has
hitherto formed the root of the moral convictions in
Christian society has fallen away, not merely in the
case of individual persons, but for whole generations,
would it then be probable that the moral convictions
could thereafter also assert themselves without modi-
fication in the purity and power with which they have
been hitherto propagated by the Christian training 2
The experience of history does not appear to speak for
its being so; rather does it show that, in times of re-
ligious decay, general languidness of faith, and Scepti-
cism, the moral consciousness is also wont to sink, and
fall into weakness, confusion, and dissolution.
I should like further to raise the question whether
in the case of many and even the most earnest
representatives of religionless morality, the professed
irreligiosity is not rather more apparent than real?
They repudiate the religion exhibited in the definite
form of the ecclesiastical dogmas in which they have
learned to know it ; but does it follow from this that
religious belief, or piety, is extraneous to them in every
sense ? In the case of men of truly moral sentiment
we may well doubt the possibility of their total irre-
ligiousness; for the upright man who is earnestly in-
60 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
terested not merely in the appearance of the good or
external legality and respectability, but for the good
itself, cannot but attribute to the good the highest
right in the world, and therefore must demand its
victorious assertion and accomplishment in reality.
But in demanding this, and feeling the right of this
demand, he will also have the courage to believe in
its truth, to believe therefore in the good as the true
power over the world, or in such a constitution of
the actual world that it must serve as a means for
the realisation of the good. Now this belief in “the
moral world-order * is in fact already “religion”; it
is the religion of Fichte, of Matthew Arnold, and of
many ethical idealists. Whether religious belief could
not, and should not, be still more definitely appre-
hended, is a question of Second rank, which will engage
our attention in a later connection. We may here,
however, recall the fact that Fichte soon advanced
from belief in the moral world-order to faith in God
as the sole principle of all that is true and good. And
it is in truth a near consequence that the good, if it is
the end of the world, must likewise be its ground; and
if it is both the ground and end of the world, it must
likewise rule the whole course of the world, and con-
sequently reveal itself not only in the far future, but
in the whole historical reality as the spiritual power
that progressively realises itself. In recognising this
we stand, as a matter of fact, upon the basis of the
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 61
Christian faith in God, as has also been distinctly
recognised by Fichte in his later philosophy of
religion. .
... Where the moral consciousness is not able to rise to
this faith, and to find in it its immovable foundation,
it is always threatened with the danger of losing its
energy in conflict with empirical reality, and ultimately
becoming perplexed. One can only deceive one's self
regarding this danger so long as the eyes are closed in
naïve optimism to the power of the evil and badness
that are in the world outside of us, and to the weakness
of one's own heart, as is indeed the case at the moment
with most of the heralds of the religion of humanity or
of religionless morality. But experience also teaches
that this simple optimism is not able to stand long
before the harsh power of reality. There is certainly
something great in universal philanthropy, that prin-
ciple of Christian morality; but if it is no longer, as in
Christianity, the fruit of religious belief, but a substi-
tute for it, then the serious question arises whether
men as they exhibit themselves in experience are
really so amiable that it would be an easy thing to
love them unceasingly, to exert all One's powers for
their good, and to make the greatest Sacrifices for
them 2 If the philanthropist is rewarded with bitter
ingratitude when his noblest endeavours fail, from the
callousness of Some and the malice of others, must not
his enthusiasm be chilled, and his courage in Sacrifice
62 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and action be maimed, unless he draw unconquerable
force from his faith in the power of a goodness which
overcomes the world as it appears, and is therefore
divine 2 He only can love men in a lasting and ener-
getic way who looks not merely upon what is before
his eyes, namely, the common reality, but who believes
in the indestructible divine element in man; but how
can one believe on the divine in man without belief in
the divine which is superior and prior to man, the
etermal spirit, of whom and through whom and to
whom are all things 2 It is undoubtedly possible that
even where the wings of philanthropic enthusiasm
have been broken by rough contact with reality, the
feeling of duty may still remain strong enough to
determine permanently the moral guidance of life.
Experience shows us not seldom such stoical charac-
ters, who, without loving men, and even with expressed
contempt of them, yet keep firm and unmoved to duty
for the sake of duty. Undisturbed by the success or
failure of their actions, they hold fast to what they
know to be right as that which is commanded by their
reason. They respect the law of their reason, because
they must otherwise lose respect for themselves. Such
virtue we must always regard as estimable: we may
well admire its power of defying the world, but we will
hardly trust its power to overcome the world. The
very hardness which it uses to protect and steel itself
against the world, slays those tenderer feelings which
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 63
bind man to the world, and open to him the entrance
to the hearts of his fellow-men. The rough severity of
this virtue does not exercise a warming and attracting,
but a repelling and chilling, influence upon its Sur-
roundings; it isolates the moral person from Society,
and thereby cuts off his moral influence upon it ; and
the feeling of this isolation engenders but too easily
a pessimistic bitterness and proud haughtiness towards
the despised crowd. This is the frequent fate of those
strong natures who, for the humble and trustful morality
of the pious soul, would substitute the proud morality
of the autonomous law of reason. But for weak natures
it is altogether to be feared that respect for the auton-
omous moral law would be but an inadequate substitute
for the religious support of the moral consciousness in
its struggle with the adversities and temptations of life.
Belief in determinate dogmas may certainly disappear
without any injury to morality, seeing that they are
only artificial and fallible attempts to interpret man's
religious experience; but where the kernel of re-
ligious faith has also disappeared — namely, the Con-
viction that the world is God’s, and that the course of
the world is subservient to the realisation of the divine
purpose of good, what could then give the moral
consciousness power to protect itself from sceptical
dissolution ? If the good is not the governing power
of the world, why should I then still recognise it as the
authority binding on my will 2 If I find myself in
64 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
a world in which nothing is found but selfishness
Sporting in a hundred forms and disguises, and vic-
toriously achieving its ends, why then should I be an
exception to others, and Sacrifice my inclinations and
interests to what I have been taught to regard as my
duty 2 What them—so at last asks the sceptical un-
derstanding—what then gives duty the higher right as
Superior to my inclinations 2 If it be only my own
thought, why should I not then be also the lord over
my own thoughts 2 If it is a rule of action which
I have set to myself from my own freedom, why then
should I not be able again to loosen myself from this
rule when it becomes too inconvenient for me ! But
if it is a rule which others have devised and prescribed
to me, what then obliges me to give obedience to the
will of others who are not more than I am, and who
also only follow after their selfish interests 2 If selfish-
mess stands opposed to selfishness, why should my
Self-seeking not have just as much right as that of
others ? Am I not the nearest one to myself? Have
not I therefore the right to make myself, my own
wishes and interests, the measure of all things, the
criterion of all my actions 2
It would be difficult to say how the moral conscious-
mess could preserve itself from such sceptical dissolution
if it wholly severed itself from all religious foundation.
The moral law will only be able to assert its absolute
validity if it springs not out of the thinking of indi-
RELIGION AND MORALITY. - 65
vidual men, whether it be my thinking or that of
others, but is the revelation of the willing of the uni-
versal reason, which stands above all individual wills
as their ground, and is at the same time active in them
as the common bond of their community. This is just
the divine will. In so far as all individuals feel them-
selves bound to this power which rules over the whole,
they are also bound internally to each other; and, in-
deed, bound by a bond which rests in the ground of
their being, and which consequently precedes all par-
ticular desire and choice and reflection, which is not a
product of their freedom, but the presupposition, and
therefore the power, the authority, over their freedom.
But in this transcendental obligation of all, there is
likewise contained, together with duty, the right of
every person to be recognised and esteemed by others
as a rational being and an end in himself. Resting
upon the ground of the divine will, human Society is
a moral Organism in which all stand for One, and One
for all. Take that religious ground away, and Society
dissolves into a chaos, in which every One is against
all, and all against every One.
If I may now attempt to sum up the result of what
has been said, it appears to me that the relation of re-
ligion and morality may be most simply determined in
this way. They have both a common root, which is the
transcendental fact of the human will being bound to
the universal or divine will; but this principle obtains
WOL. I. E
66 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
immediate manifestation in religion as the union of
God and man, while in morality it appears mediately
as the social bond of the individual and society. So
far it may be said that religion contains the ideal
ground of morality, and morality the real manifesta-
tion of religion. From this it follows that each of
them has its truth only in union with the other; and,
on the other hand, that either of them must become
Stunted and falsified when torm away from the other.
If religion tears itself away from morality, then its
Symbolical representation of the transcendental prim-
ciple of unity becomes an empty form, a mere image,
mythology and ceremonial worship; and in So far as a
mysterious truth and power are still ascribed to these
empty forms, to these fantastic ideas and arbitrary
ceremonies, then religion, robbed of its moral content,
becomes perverted into a caricature of the truth, and
from this proceed pernicious Superstition, magic, and
famaticism—religious malformations or deformities by
which the moral life of individuals and of the com-
munity is injured and Suppressed. Against this the
moral spirit then reacts by tearing itself away from
religion, and by Seeking to quieten itself upon an
extra-religious Secular basis. In this lies indeed a
step of progress, in so far as morality, freed from the
hindrances put in its way by the Superstitious and
hierarchical Ordinances of positive religion, then gains
independence of movement, which enables it to order
society according to the natural wants and rational
RELIGION AND MORALITY. 67
ends of human nature. But if, with the statutory
coverings of religion, there is given up at the same
time its essential kernel, which contains the ideal
principle of morality itself, the result is that the
secularised morality becomes stunted and dies, like the
plant which has been cut off from its roots. Then in
place of the genuine moral sentiment, there comes the
Surrogate of an egoistic prudential morality, or even
the naturalism of a war of all against all, the dis-
Organisation of Society, which leads to a universal un-
freedom. True, the idealistic morality strives after
Something higher, by the attempt to ground morality
upon the autonomous reason ; but by isolating this
principle in the thinking subject and separating it
from the historical life of the community, it falls into
an unfruitful formalism, which is not able to take the
place of the religious root of morality. Accordingly,
experience shows that morality can just as little
flourish without religion as religion without morality;
while religion sinks into pseudo-religious Superstition
and fanaticism, morality sinks into a pseudo- moral
naturalism and abstract formalism. Hence it follows
that, as they both spring out of the same root, So they
can only develop normally into full harmony and living
reciprocity with each other.
It is the great and eternal truth of Christianity that
it has raised this inner connection of religion and
morality to a principle. Morality has here its firm
ground, its living root, in the consciousness of our son-
68 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ship to God, in love to God the Father, and to Christ,
the ideal of the divine Man, and in surrender to the
universal divine purpose of the world—namely, the
kingdom of God, that ideal of the perfect community
and fellowship of humanity, which is not a mere ideal,
an abstract postulate and problem of human striving,
but is always at the same time a growing reality,
a working of the divine spirit in historical humanity,
and which therefore also contains the real possibility
and guarantee for the becoming good and blessed of all
the individuals who surrender themselves to this spirit
as its instrument. And as the Christian morality has
its firm ground in faith in God and the coming of the
kingdom of God, so, on the other hand, the Christian
religion has its real manifestation in morality. “This
is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.”
“And this commandment have we from Him, That he
who loveth God love his brother also.” Jesus has con-
nected love to man with love to God as the same great
commandment, and Paul has called love fulfilment of
the law. Not in lip-service that says “Lord, Lord,”
and not in the practice of ceremonial worship, but in
the rational worship (Romans xii. 2) of the moral life,
does Christian piety find its manifestation and authen-
tication. Christianity is not faith merely, and not
charity alone, but “faith, hope, charity, these three;
but the greatest of these is charity.”
LECTURE III.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
As with the beginnings of morals, the beginnings of
Science among all peoples likewise lie in religion.
Myths and legends are the original forms in which
man's impulse to find his place in the world sought
to satisfy itself; and out of them proceeded the cos-
mologies which everywhere form the beginnings of a
philosophical explanation of the world. But as secular
morality with the progress of civilisation separated
itself from religion, so in like manner the impulse
towards knowledge did not feel itself permanently
Satisfied by the traditional legends. Men sought by
independent reflection on the phenomena around them
for better answers as to the What and Whence of things,
and in this way they soon came to hypotheses and views
which stood in more or less manifest opposition to the
religious traditions. Our own age feels more painfully
than any former time has done the pressure of the
70 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
opposition between faith and knowledge; and this is
proved by the ever-renewed attempts to reach in One
way or another a solution of this opposition, or at least
to bring about a mitigation of the extreme tension now
holding between religion and Science.
Let us, in the first place, survey the relation of re-
ligion and Science in its historical development, and
then try to discover in the nature of the cognitive
mind the point of contact with religion, and conse-
quently the connecting point for a mediation between
religion and Science.
A theoretical factor is essential to all religion; man
must form an idea of the power that governs his world,
and of his own position in relation to it and to the
world. But its interest does not turn upon an exact
knowledge of the individual in detail, such as the un-
derstanding seeks to obtain by observation and com-
parison, abstraction and combination; on the contrary,
the organ of knowledge involved in religion is originally
Only the fantasy which objectifies religious feelings in
images of Sensible perception, and thus creates myths,
fables, and legends. Mythology is the natural language
of religion, the indispensable investment of spiritual
emotions and aspirations in sensible images. But this
investment is effected SO unconsciously and involun-
tarily that no distinction is made between the spiritual
content and the sensible form. The sensible object,
whether it be a matural phenomenon or man, which
FELIGION AND SOIENCE. 71
awakens in the soul the religious impression of a higher
world of spiritual mysterious powers, is so identified
with this impression that it appears itself immediately
as the divine. Thus arise the primitive religious myths
in which content and form are still immediately one,
and the spiritual is present in the consciousness only
in and with the sensible. In the further spinning out
of the legends there undoubtedly also works the free
creative fantasy, whose end is aesthetic enjoyment, and
which plays freely with its forms in the interest of
poetic beauty. But from this artistic creation of the
epic poets, the Original religious mythical creation is
distinguished in the soul of the people in this, that in
the latter case the fantasy does not yet stand as a free
Superior over its object, nor does it deal freely with its
forms, but is still so wrapped up in its objects that it
believes in its own forms.
Even in the higher religions, in which the divine is
no longer identified with the phenomena of nature,
but is known as a higher object above mature, the
religious spirit still requires the creative fantasy in
Order to give to its inner experiences a sensible ex-
pression. From this need spring those miraculous
legends, in which historical processes become idealised
into images and types of Spiritual experiences which
always repeat themselves in the life of pious souls, or
in which super-sensible truths, ideas, and ideals, sprung
from the inner world of the Spirit, become realised in
72 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
symbolical processes of the external world. In order
to know the good as the true, the human mind re-
quires a mediation of the two by poetic beauty, in
which the idea comes to manifestation in the medium
of the real, and in which the sensible is transfigured
so as to become the transparent veil of the Spiritual.
This combination of spiritual significance and sensible
expression is thus always characteristic of the religious
mode of representation: the whole language of the
Bible bears witness to it. And so long as this mode
of speech finds naïve religious apprehension, the Sen-
sible form does not make itself felt as in any way
disturbing the spiritual meaning. It is not till the
reflecting understanding comes in and seeks to under-
stand literally what is meant figuratively, and when
it would fix the indefinite flowing and ever-changing
representations into fixed conceptions and doctrines,
that the difficulties, the absurdities, and the contra-
dictions arise which demand Solution, explanation, and
mediation. This was the task of the Fathers of the
Christian Church from the end of the second century
on through several centuries. In order to repel the
errors of the heretics, and to grasp the faith of the
Church in fixed, universally authoritative propositions
or “dogmas,” they made use of the Greek philosophy
as in their time the universally employed medium
of didactic communication and elucidation. This pro-
cedure was the more readily adopted, seeing that Plato's
RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 73
transcendent world of ideas came closely into touch
with the transcendent kingdom of heaven of the
Christian Apocalypse, and as the motion of the Logos
in the Hellenistic philosophy had already been em-
ployed in the New Testament to designate the revela-
tion of God in Jesus Christ. It would undoubtedly be
doing wrong to the Church Fathers if the intention
were ascribed to them of transforming the Christian
religion into philosophy, or making philosophy a sub-
stitute for it: rather did they accept the religious
faith of the Church as the established basis upon
which the Scientific theologian had to place himself
in order to unfold the contents of the religious con-
sciousness by the aid of philosophy, to understand
one particular in connection with another, and thus
to gain a better view of the sense and meaning of the
whole. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that, in
consequence of the dogmatic controversies, the orig-
imal religious meaning of the ecclesiastical doctrines
always retreated more behind the formulas artificially
constructed out of the philosophical and juristic con-
ceptions of the schools. Still more does this hold true
of Scholasticism. With the production of the dogmas,
the understanding of their religious motives had also
disappeared; only the petrified product had remained
—namely, the rigid formulas of the decrees of the
Councils, which were honoured the more as sacred
relics the more their incomprehensibility appeared to
74 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
point to a higher origin. This ecclesiastical authority
was further supplemented in the twelfth century by
that of the Aristotelian philosophy, the knowledge of
which had been learned through the medium of the
Arabs. In the double slavery under these so entirely
heterogeneous two authorities, and in the despairing
effort to be equally just to both, the scientific power
of the Middle Ages consumed itself. Faith, corrupted
by the false knowledge of the scholastics, let no gen-
uine knowledge arise; and it held the mind that was
thirsting for knowledge in such hard chains that it
finally despaired of even being able to know anything.
The Scholastic theology, which aimed at rearing up
a universal science on the basis of authority, ended
in Scepticism. The mixture of Biblical religion and
Greco-Roman science, which was what the Christian
theology had been through all the centuries of the
patristic and scholastic periods, however useful it
might have been as an educational means for edu-
Cating the peoples still in their pupilage, became
at last an intolerable fetter for faith as well as for
knowledge.
The way for the dissolution of this false, because
unfree, unity of religion and Science was paved on
both sides by the reform of faith which proceeded from
Mysticism, and by the liberation of Science which pro-
ceeded from the renascence of antiquity. This mysti-
cism, which in the later Middle Ages passed into more
RELIGION AND SCIENCE, 75
and more decided opposition to Scholasticism, laid the
dogmas and their dialectical dissection aside, and re-
flected immediately upon the object itself—that is, on
the inner religious experience of the pious Soul, its un-
blessedness in separation from God, and its blissfulness
in humble, trustful surrender to Him. If there often
arose an ascetic tendency from this mystic piety, yet it
was always characterised by its inner feeling of the
love of God, and by a high moral earnestness; and out
of the depth of this religious experience there proceeded
in the case of individual thinkers (like Meister Eckart)
an original theological speculation, which was far re-
moved from the dogmatism of the school, and which
was typical for the future. It is well known how
closely the Reformation of the sixteenth century was
connected with the pre-Reformation mysticism. Lu-
ther was himself an admirer of the “German Theol-
ogy,” which sprang from the school of Eckart. The
Protestant mystics attached themselves immediately to
their spiritual kinsmen of the pre-Reformation period,
and although they were expelled from the official
Churches of the Reformation, they yet preserved the
genuine Spirit of the Reformation in many respects
more purely than these Churches themselves. But
the ecclesiastical theology of Protestantism, from the
need of a didactically developed system of faith, re-
turned again to the old dogmas; and thus there soon
again arose a new scholasticism, which at least
76 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
equalled the old scholasticism in its want of freedom
and in its dry formalism.
Yet these partially retrograde currents could not
keep back the new advance of non-theological secular
science which had proceeded from the impetus of the
Renaissance. While the theologians were still busily
employed in the Churches in restoring the old dogmas
which had been drawn up on the basis of the Ptolemaic
cosmology, and which fitted only into its framework,
this cosmology was destroyed by Copernicus and Sup-
planted by the new view of the world which stands in
utter contradiction to the whole of the system of the
ecclesiastical dogmatics from the Creation to the com-
ing down of Christ from heaven and His return again,
as was clearly recognised by Melanchthon much more
acutely than by all his later followers. As Astronomy
attained to a knowledge of the laws of the motions of
the heavenly bodies, so did physics and mechanics
investigate the laws of the terrestrial world, and
mathematics furnished the most general and precise
formulae for the results of observation and experiment.
From the natural Sciences and mathematics, there was
thus formed the conception of the conformity of all
that happens in the world to law. Men began to view
“Nature” as an ordered whole, in which all particular
being and happening are conditioned by their causal
connection with everything else by immutable laws.
Spinoza gave this thought the philosophical foundation
RELIGION AND SCIENCE, 77
and construction by which it became the principle of
that universal view of the world which extends far
beyond the investigation of nature, which has been
designated by the name of enlightenment or illuminism
(Aufklärung), and which is essentially homogeneous
with the “positivism" of the present day. How far
this intellectual view, which would conceive and ex-
plain everything in the world according to the law of
Causality, lay from the poetic mythological view, to
which miracles, and the interferences of higher beings
with the course of things, had been things natural and
self-evident This self-intelligibility of the super-
natural and miraculous, which was still regarded as
indubitable by the thinkers of the middle ages and of
the period of the Reformation, was no longer possible
from the time of the eighteenth century. In the world
of experience with which science has to do, there could
be no more holding of miracles as events which were
not to be explained by the orderly causal connection
of things in space and time. The attempt was there-
fore first made to limit miracles to rare exceptional
cases in the far past, which were to be believed on the
ground of the tradition of sacred history. But what if
this support of them also became problematical ? And
in fact there sprang up a second opponent to Ortho-
doxy, and not the least dangerous One, in historical in-
westigation. The principle of the necessary connection
of causes and effects being also applied to the historical
78 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
life of man, there arose the “pragmatic method,” which
sought to explain historical events everywhere from
the concurrence of individual circumstances and mo-
tives, and put in place of the intentions of Provi-
dence the intentions of the acting man and the play
of accident. Moreover, in the school of humanistic
Science students had now grown accustomed to careful
investigation of sources, and to criticism of the docu-
ments handed down from the past. The application of
this method to the sources of Biblical and ecclesiasti-
cal history led to the beginnings of Biblical criticism,
which, modest as they were at the outset, yet proved
more and more sufficient to shatter the foundation
of the Orthodox dogmas, the inspiration of the Bible.
Thus from all sides there accumulated doubts of the
possibility and reality of the Supernatural and miracu-
lous as such, not merely in the experience of the
present, but also in the past of which the sacred
history treated.
What was to become of faith in presence of this
enlightened knowledge 2 How was the divine still to
find a place in a world where all goes on naturally,
where everything is the regular effect of finite causes 2
Various attempts have been made to mitigate by
reasonable compromises the tension of this antagon-
ism, which has been occupying the thinking of the
Christian world for now about two centuries. Such
a compromise is presented in the Supra-naturalism,
RELIGION AND SCIENCE. . 79
that proceeded from the Leibnitz-Wolffian school,
which accepts the view of the world taken by the
Aufklärung in general with regard to our religious
experience, and limits miracles to individual excep-
tional cases, in which the order of nature is broken
through by supernatural omnipotence for the sake
of higher ends. Such miracles were represented as
having been necessary in their time as means of
attesting the revelation, which indeed did not pub-
lish doctrines contrary to reason but such as are
above reason—which doctrines we have to hold as
true on the basis of their supernatural attestation.
IIere, then, the dogmas are Supported on miracles,
but the miracles again upon the Supra-rational dogma
of the divine Omnipotence, and on the proof of its
historical reality to be adduced by reason. It is
evident that this compromise is an untenable half-
position, which can neither Satisfy faith nor know-
ledge. It cannot satisfy faith; for faith wishes to
find the divine presence and activity, not merely in
rare individual events but everywhere in internal
and external experience. Nor can it Satisfy know-
ledge; for reason, when it has once become conscious
of its right to the cognition of truth, will nowhere
let a boundary-line be drawn where it has to cease
to examine and begin blindly to believe. Reason
can only co-ordinate the absolutely supra-rational and
inconceivable with the anti-rational, which it must
80 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
demy unless it would surrender itself; and in par-
ticular it cannot admit that nature is generally a
regular order of events, while yet this order is broken
in individual cases, and the connection of what exists
in space and time is dissolved by events such that
the conditions holding in the whole of the world of
space and time were not present in them. It is,
therefore, easily conceivable that supra - naturalism,
with its halfness and unclearness, could not keep
the enlightened rationalism from drawing its last
consequences, and thinking the divine away out of
the world without exception, so that the utterly
empty abstraction of the “Supreme Being ” alone
remained—a Being beyond or outside of the world,
and without active revelation in it, and consequently --
without religious significance. For how could there
be possible a religious relation, a feeling of one's self
as dependent and also as exalted, in reference to a
Being of whom nothing further is known than that
He is what is beyond the world—a negative bound-
ing conception without any positive cognisable content,
an unmoving secluded Being whose activity would be
annulled by finite causes and put to rest, which there-
fore would enter into no real relation to us, and of
which we would never experience any efficiency at
all ? An enlightenment which in this way makes
God an empty Being, an unknowable essence, cuts
through the vital nerve of religion. It has indeed
RELIGION AND SCIENCE, 81
been said that if the objects of faith can no longer
be held to be proper realities, they still retain their
high value as ideal images of the creative fantasy,
through the aesthetic enjoyment of which the Soul is
raised above the common reality of things, and is
calmed and edified. But it is difficult to take such
consolation as meant in earnest ; for although the
pious man knows well that the highest truth which
forms the content of his faith can only be known
and expressed by him in figurative form, yet all the
value and all the edifying power of these forms rest
for him just on the fact that they are forms of a
true content, that they are not mere inventions or
fictions of our human imagination, but are the ex-
pression of a reality which is not only as true as, but
even truer than, that of the world, because it makes
all our knowing of the world possible and authenti-
cates its truth. Take away from the pious man this
conviction of the truth contained in the figurative
language of religion, the conviction of the objective
reality of the objects of his faith, and let these ideal
images lose for him all earnest significance, how would
he then be able any longer to worship that which
he has now recognised as a form of his own creation ?
Such a strange substitute no one would ever have
ventured even to offer as a compensation for the de-
vastation of the faith effected by the Aufklärung, had
it been considered—which many appear to have for-
WOL. I. F
82 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
gotten to-day — that the Alpha and Omega of all
religion is reverence, that reverence is only possible
for what is above us, and that nothing can be above
us which is only of us, or is only the self-produced
form of our subjective thoughts, wishes, and dreams.
Now, if all such compromises and pretended sub-
stitutes are insufficient, what then does there remain
to religion in order to prevent the overthrow of its
sanctuaries by the knowledge of the understanding 2
We do not require still to seek for the answer to
this question. History itself has long since given it.
The same weapon which inflicted the wound has also
begun again to heal it. The thinking which sought
to conquer the world and subject it to its concep-
tions in this process, lost God and its own self. But
when it became aware of the fact that it profits a
man nothing though he should gain the whole world
and lose his own Soul, it then began to go into itself
and to reflect about itself. And, behold, it has found
again in its own inner self the God which it was
no longer able to find in the outer world ! At the
end of the last century there was repeated the same
turn of thought which we find taking place in Greece
four centuries before Christ. The Superficial think-
ing of the Aufklärung, which clung to phenomena,
was overcome by the deeper Self-reflection of the
Platonic philosophy, which found in the essence of
the spirit the ground of being as well as of know-
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 83
ledge, the source and the rule of truth. This turn
in the history of thought appeared decisively in
modern times in the critical philosophy of Kant ; but
it was prepared by Berkeley's idealism and Hume's
Scepticism, by which the natural realism of the em-
piricists had been overcome. If science was again
to find a positive relation to religion, it must first of
all become clear regarding its own principle. That
is, it must have recognised the one-sidedness of the
two opposite principles of knowledge — namely, that
of naïve natural realism or empiricism, and that of
Subjective idealism or rationalism—and it must have
Sought their synthesis in a deeper principle, in which
the point of contact and connection with religion
will at the same time be found.
Natural realism is the popular opinion that our
knowledge of things is given to us simply through the
perception of the senses. In this view the soul is
represented as like an unwritten sheet of paper, or
as a photographic plate, on which things make copies
of themselves, so that they come into our conscious-
ness exactly as they are in themselves. But Physics,
Physiology, and Psychology have irrefutably shown
how erroneous this popular realism is. Sounds do
not lie in the vibrating bodies, or in the waves of air
which proceed from them, but they arise first in our
hearing ear; colours do not lie in vibrations of the
ether, but arise only in Our Seeing eye; and the same
84 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
holds true of the sensations of smell, taste, and touch.
But even extension and motion depend for our con-
Sciousness on the perception of space, by which it is
easy to perceive that they cannot be given to us from
without. Just as little as the nerves of the eye, can
those of the sense of touch convey into our conscious-
ness spatial copies of bodies: On the contrary, the spatial
image or perception can only be sketched by the self-
activity of the soul—on the ground, it is true, of certain
signs given in Sensation. But if spatial extension and
form are just as subjective as colour, Sound, and Smell,
what remains of the material world of bodies? And what
right have we then still to hold our perceptions to be
simple copies of things themselves 2 Nay, more, what
guarantee have we for holding that there are any things
outside of us which correspond to them 2 What ground
have we for determining whether our representations
are not merely subjective 2 and whether our assump-
tion of an existence of external things is not a pure
prejudice sprung from the conceptions of Substantiality
and causality which have been arbitrarily fashioned
by us? With this conclusion (which was drawn in
Hume's scepticism) the world of the senses, which
empirical realism had held to be the complete—or even
the only—reality, became an unsubstantial appearance
or phantasm, a chaos of impressions and representa-
tions of our consciousness, to which we are not en-
titled to ascribe either reality, or substantiality, or
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 85
Causality, or regulated order according to law, and
which therefore hardly signify more than do the illu-
Sions of a confused dream. This was the natural and
inevitable end of the empirical realism which made
the knowing mind the passive receiver of a truth given
from without.
It was Kant's merit that he carried back the truth
of cognition to the laws and forms of our thinking and
perceiving, which lie originally in the essence of the
cognitive mind, and which are therefore universally
valid. But, as it usually happens that a new principle
carries its just opposition to the old principle to the
excess of the opposite one-sidedness, So it happened
also in the case of Kant. He started from the alter-
native that our conceptions either could arrange them-
selves according to the objects, or the objects according
to our conceptions; and since the first view, that Our
conceptions depend on the objects, was the opinion of
the empiricism which had dissolved itself in scepti-
cism, Kant believed that, for his part, he could only
put himself on the opposite side; and he set up the
paradoxical proposition that our understanding is the
lawgiver of nature—that is to say, in So far as nature
consists only of our representations. Only to this do
our forms of thought, according to Kant, extend; but
they do not hold good of things in themselves, as these
are independent of our consciousness. Taken exactly,
Rant had no right even to accept the existence of
86 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
things out of our consciousness, seeing that this view
rests upon an inference of causality, while causality
should not be accepted as valid when carried beyond
the representations of our consciousness to trans-Sub-
jective things. With this position the Kantian phil-
Osophy fell into subjective idealism—which it does not
indeed logically maintain, but which had already arisen
as a consequence, derived from Kant's premises by his
scholar Fichte.
But subjective idealism is just as untenable a prin-
ciple of knowledge as empirical realism. If I can
know nothing of any being beyond my consciousness,
then the reality of the external world, inclusive of
other men, is for me not merely a doubtful but even
a worthless hypothesis, seeing that I should not stand
in any relation with that which exists outside of me.
Little as any one will carry out “Solipsism” in prac-
tical earnest, yet it is just as certainly the theoretical
consequence of subjective idealism, which is thereby
already reduced ad absurdum. But subjective idealism,
moreover, does not even suffice for the explanation of
our inner world of consciousness, for it leaves unex-
plained whence the sensations come to me which I find
as given facts; and further, what distinguishes the real
phenomena of my waking consciousness from images
of my fantasy, from dreams and hallucinations 2 It
leaves unexplained why I cannot proceed arbitrarily
in combining my Sensations into forms of perception
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 87
in space and time, and in the arrangement of my repre-
sentations according to logical categories. But I feel
myself bound to a norm or rule, in the violation of
which I fall into error. On the ground of subjective
idealism there could properly be no error at all; for,
if the matter of the sensations somehow given is
indifferent to the forms of its connection brought to
it by the autonomous understanding, there is no norm
for the application of the various logical categories,
and then there is also no abnormal or erroneous ap-
plication of them that is contrary to truth. Nor can
this difficulty be removed by appealing to the corre-
spondence of the judgments of one individual with
those of others; for, as subjective idealism denies the
trans-subjective relation and validity of thinking, every
Ego accordingly is hermetically shut up in the inner
world of his sole consciousness: the world of conscious-
ness of the one has no relations at all with the world
of consciousness of others—which, moreover, is but a
problematic world; it has no points of contact, no
common means of finding its place in such a world:
it therefore cannot possibly regulate itself according
to these ; mor, therefore, can it have in agreement with
them the norm and control of its own correctness or
truth. The uselessness of subjective idealism as a
principle of knowledge shows itself most manifestly
by this, that, in doing away with every norm for the
recognition of truth, it also makes truth itself impos-
88 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
sible. For there can only be truth and error in the
judgment of the subjects where these know them-
Selves to be bound to a common objective norm, to a
principle of logical order which makes itself felt within
every thinking subject as a binding law of its thinking,
and which at the same time rises above the distinc-
tions of all thinking subjects. Only the universal or
divine reason, which, as the ground of all thinking and
being, is the truth in itself, can also be the norm of Our
knowledge of truth.
We have thus again reached a result with regard to
Our true knowing similar to that which was reached in
the last lecture with regard to our true willing accord-
ing to duty. As the ground of moral obligation was
not to be found either in the subject or in Society, but
only in the universal or divine will that combines both,
so in like manner the ground of Science, or of cognition
generally, is neither to be found in the subject nor in
the object per se, but only in the divine thinking that -
combines the two, which, as the common ground of the
forms of thinking in all thinking minds, and of the
forms of being in all beings, makes possible the corre-
spondence or agreement between the former and the
latter, or in a word, makes knowledge of truth possible.
As morality is not in fact dependent in such a way on
religion that certain particular duties are prescribed
to it by a religious authority, yet certainly in this
sense that it finds the ideal principle of all genuine
RELIGION AND SCIENCE, 89
moral willing and doing in its being bound to the
absolute will of the good, or of God, so in like manner
science is not bound in any individual act of know-
ledge to religious authority, but it can only really find
the ground of the possibility of all true cognition in the
fact of its being bound to the creative reason which is
absolutely the truth. In this thought philosophical
speculation was from the outset at one with religious
mysticism. “In Thy light do we see light,” says the
Psalmist. According to St John, it is the Divine Logos
who enlightens every man; and, according to St Paul,
the Divine Spirit enables man even to know the deep
things of God, and to judge everything independently.
It is also a good Biblical thought that our knowing of
the truth stands in essentially the same relation as our
willing of the good. The knowing and the acting mind
are not at all, as is now so often heard, two different
kinds of minds, but are only two forms of the activity
of one and the same mind, and they therefore also
stand under essentially the same laws. Neither as
knowing nor as willing can our mind correctly exercise
itself if it put itself apart by itself and shut itself
against the non-ego, the object, or Society, or try to
raise itself above them ; for then it will either remain
void of content, an empty form, or it will seek its
content in arbitrary untrue ideas and in arbitrary
ungood ends. Fantasticalness and libertinism have
been often the offspring of subjective idealism. But,
90 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
on the other hand, our mind can neither in its knowing
nor in its willing receive its content simply from the
external world; it would thereby cease to be a real
mind, a self-activity, and it would become the thought-
less receptacle of extraneous dogmas that were not
understood, and the unfree instrument of an alien will.
Our mind can only rightly realise its essence in its
thinking and willing if it stands in orderly reciprocal
action with the world of things and men, if it sub-
ordinates itself in activity and passivity, in giving and
taking, as a serving member to the Organic Order of the
universe in which the divine spirit reveals itself as one,
and yet in the variety of many gifts and powers.
Hence there result, regarding the relationship of
religion and Science, similar consequences as in the
case of the relationship of religion and morality. With
all the difference in their immediate objects, religion
and Science still hang so closely together in their
ground and aim that their normal relationship will not
be hostile opposition, but friendly mutual completion,
while conflicts will only arise from abnormal tendencies
and malformations of one or the other or both.
It may appear paradoxical to say that faith lies at
the basis of all Science, yet this cannot be disputed.
All our knowing is formed from Sensations and acts of
thought which are carried on within our soul, and yet
we believe that we know by these subjective functions
the objective world, the reality which exists outside
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 91
of us. This universal conviction is a belief which rests,
not upon logical proofs, but upon the trust that our
nature is so constituted that, when we correctly apply
Our powers of knowledge, we are not mocked by empty
delusions, but are able to represent the reality of things
in thoughts. But this involves the assumption that the
real is also constituted for being thought by us, or that
it is thinkable. But the real can only be thinkable if
it is realised thought, a thought previously thought,
which our thinking has only to think again. There-
fore the real, in Order to be thinkable for us, must be
the realised thought of the creative thinking of an
eternal divine reason, which is presented to our cog-
mitive thinking. The confidence, therefore, that we, in
Our endeavour to know, do not merely move in subjec-
tive illusions and dreams, but that we copy the reality
in our thinking, implicitly includes the confidence that
the reality is the manifestation of the creative thoughts
of the divine reason. Moreover, let us not forget that
the assumption of the uniformity and immutable con-
formity to law of nature lies at the basis of all scien-
tific induction—an assumption which is manifestly not
to be proved, and which therefore can only be accepted
by faith. This, however, includes in itself the further
assumption that the whole of nature is ruled by a
single principle—and, indeed, since laws are ideal rela-
tions, by a single spiritual principle, an ordering reason.
Hence, rightly viewed, it is religious belief which is
92 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
presupposed by all scientific knowledge as the basis of
its possibility. Naturally, this presupposition need not
be present as conscious conviction in the case of every
one who cultivates Science: just as little as in the case
of every one who acts morally from a feeling of duty
must there be present the consciousness of his being
bound by the universal divine will. But it must
always still remain true that both in the feeling of
duty, and also in reliance on the truth of our thinking,
religious belief in the divine ground of our selves, and
of the world, is to be posited implicitly as an accom-
panying presupposition. To raise this wºvcomScious as-
sumption into consciousness is the task of the philos-
opher who analyses the process of knowledge—that is
to say, in so far as he actually goes down to the founda-
tion of things, and does not, as mostly happens in the
present day, stop short where the decisive questions
just begin.
As Science rests upon a belief, the actual, although
unconscious, belief in a world-Ordering divine reason, it
also finds its final goal only in the thought of God. Its
proximate goal certainly is everywhere the connection
and ordering of the manifold facts given by experience,
the finding out of the connection between phenomena
and of the laws which govern the different groups of
phenomena. In doing SO, as long as it merely investi-
gates the connections of individual things in a limited
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 93
sphere, it of course need not have recourse to God, who
is certainly not an individual substance or an individ-
ual cause alongside of others; and therefore we per-
fectly understand how an astronomer like Laplace con-
fessed that he did not need the hypothesis of a God
for the explanation of the mechanism of the heavenly
bodies. Yet the particular groups of phenomena with
which the individual sciences have to do, nevertheless
do not stand isolated with reference to each other, but
they are all connected with each other. Hence, the
knowledge obtained in none of them can come to a
final Satisfying conclusion ; it always points beyond
this narrow circle to a wider connection, to higher laws,
and to more general principles. Now it is the task
of the universal Science, philosophy, to connect the
principles of the individual sciences with each other,
and, by Carrying them back to One universal Supreme
principle, to seek the ultimate conclusion of knowledge
generally. In continuation of this same procedure,
according to which we seek everywhere unknown
causes for given facts, philosophy as the universal
Science seeks in a Supreme principle the hypothetical
ground for the explanation of the universe or of the
world as such. The often-heard assertion that it there-
by oversteps its bounds is a prejudice for which no real
grounds can be adduced, and which is rather explained
as arising only from a temporary Sceptical discourage-
94 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ment and weariness of Scientific thinking. Sigwart
Says admirably at the close of his ‘Logic':—
“The metaphysical close of the explanation of the world
forms the presupposition without which no desire to know
in the proper and strict sense is at all possible ; it goes
beyond the facts given in experience in no other direction
than every attempt to conceive what is given as fact does so.
With the same right with which we build up in the individ-
ual substances and their powers an intelligible kingdom as
the ground of phenomena, and pressed by the same impulse
to embrace in a unity what is dispersed, we also take a
further step towards an ultimate explanation of the world,
according to the demands or obligations of our thinking.
What separates metaphysics from the rest of science is not
its method, for method in regard to all knowing is at the
last absolutely the same ; it is only the universality of its
task, and this task itself is as necessary as that of knowing
generally. It stands at the beginning of all science, seeing
that it brings into clearness the principles which all scientific
striving presupposes ; it stands at the end of all science,
Seeing that its presuppositions can only authenticate them-
Selves by the result—viz., the thorough-going agreement of
all knowledge. Metaphysics will therefore remain a work of
partial knowledge, as all knowing is knowing in part so long
as the finite thinking has not expanded and raised itself
into the divine.”
Thus far it has also been already indicated that
science, in its attempt to find a final philosophical
explanation of the existing world, never will nor can
reach a completely satisfying definitive result. We
can only predicate of the unconditioned principle of
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 95
the world such positive determinations as we have
derived from the world of our experience, be it natural,
or spiritual, or both. But these predications which
spring from the world of the manifold and conditioned
can of course only inadequately designate the essence
of the One unconditioned being ; they can only pass as
analogical and symbolical determinations which would
express that we think of the essence of the basis of
the world as being in a certain, yet always only rel-
ative, similarity with such or such phenomena of our
inner or Outer experience. It is conceivable that
Science, when oppressed by this difficulty in the deter-
mination of the absolute principle of the world, should
often, on the One hand, renounce the attempt to reach
a. single explanation of the world, and, on the other,
believe that it must be contented with the most in-
definite and lowest determinations of the principle of
the world, such as being, force, matter, motion, and
Suchlike. In the former case it comes to no deter-
mination of knowledge at all, to no answer to the
questions as to the Whence and Whither of existence
which are always moving men; and thereby all par-
ticular knowing becomes uncertain and doubtful, the
courage of the inquirer is paralysed by doubt, and the
energy of the impulse of knowledge is tied down. In
the other case the result is untrue explanations of the
world, arising from insufficient principles, such as
materialism and positivism. With this result the
96 PEIILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
higher spheres of life are just those which remain inex-
plicable; and, in order to get rid of the inexplicable,
the proper character and significance of the spiritual,
moral, and religious life is ignored, and everything is
reduced to the level of the lowest physical phenomena;
and the actual world is therefore not explained, but
mutilated and distorted. Materialistic aberrations and
Sceptical distraction, indifference, want of intelligence
for the great connections and universal ideas, with
a pedantic Squandering and losing of one's self in the
most minute and puny matters—these are the dangers
which, as experience shows, threaten science in times
of philosophical disheartenment. In presence of such
dangers it is religion which, by its idea of God as
sprung from the inner experiences of the soul and
corresponding to them, always sharpens the conscience
anew, and rouses it to strive unweariedly in the pro-
Secution of its highest task — namely, to seek for a
principle for the explanation of the world which will
be truly and universally satisfying. Not that Science
should therefore at once accept the religious idea of
God upon authority, and employ it for its explanation
of the world. In so doing it would but too easily
Overlook its proper task of rising step by step from
the particular and gradually approaching the ultimate
principles of things, and it would lose the capacity of
proving all things, even the religious ideals, and holding
fast only the best of all. But science will certainly
RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 97
behold in the religious idea of God the symbolical
anticipation of the goal to which it has itself not to
Soar upon the wings of fantasy, but to climb along the
toilsome and endless way of the thinking understand-
ing. It will always be compelled to say to itself that
the religious spirit, which draws its highest principle,
not from the wide breadth of universal experience, but
out of the depths of the inner moral-religious ex-
perience, does not merely as such belong to the whole of
the reality which is to be explained, but that it occupies
in this whole the very highest position and significance,
So that consequently every explanation of the World is
insufficient and erroneous which leaves no place for
these highest facts of experience, and which stands
in contradiction to the necessary demands of the moral-
religious spirit. Religion, therefore, without wishing
to impede the work of science in detail, or to keep it
under its tutelage, will yet be regulative with regard to
Science in so far as it sets before science in symbolical
form the goal which it must keep in view and strive
after in order to fulfil, at least approximately, its task
of an ultimate explanation of the world.
That which is a task for science, an ideal that it has
always to strive after and yet will never completely
attain—namely, the highest Idea of Truth that com-
pletes and concludes all knowledge—is possessed by
religion. Religion, however, does not possess it in the
form of conceptual knowledge that Satisfies the scien-
WOL. I. G.
98 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
tific thinking, but in the form corresponding to the
presentient soul, of the symbol or of the significant
sign. Hence religion needs for the correct interpreta-
tion of its signs the completing and correcting help
of Science, just as much as Science needs religion.
So long as the forms in which the religious spirit
objectifies its inner experiences to itself are yet
transparent enough to let their inner real sense be
recognised, and so long as they still remain in har-
mony with the universal view of the world, so long
will they not be felt as an impediment, but will serve
religious elevation as its natural means. But when
the creative power of the religious spirit dries up, its
forms and faith are then wont to become petrified, and
what was at the beginning a transparent veil of truth
becomes then a hard covering behind which the spiritual
content is so concealed that it is hardly longer recog-
misable by any one. What at the beginning was only
a means, then becomes an end in itself; what at the
beginning was the expression of a really present com-
mon belief, them becomes a compulsory yoke, which
produces a mere external uniformity of confession by
the subjection of men's minds to a formula that is not
understood. And if at the same time the general con-
sciousness of the world in the course of the advance
of civilisation experiences such profound transforma-
tions as has been the case with the Christian peoples
since the awakening of the Sciences of nature and
RELIGION AND SOIENCE. 99
history, then the contradiction between the old believed
notions that rest upon quite other assumptions and
the present knowledge becomes more and more glar-
ing, and doubt of the truth of the traditional dogmas
always rises up more earnestly, and with it doubt of
the truth of the religion which men had been accus-
tomed to identify with those dogmas. In this state of
matters Some put themselves on the side of the secular
knowledge or even of the latest and boldest hypotheses
which are given out as Science, and they triumphant-
ly proclaim the near end of religion, having no pre-
Sentiment that religion, as well as Science and art,
morals and law, is a constitutive element of human
nature, and therefore may pass through the most mani-
fold developments, but can never cease as long as there
are men. On the other hand, others put themselves
On the side of religion, defend all its traditional
doctrines and dogmas as Ostensibly infallible divine
revelations, and combat with all the weapons at their
Command the results of science as a vain delusion in-
vented and diffused by bad men. Thus the antagonism
between faith and knowledge has become so acute at
the present day, that many despair of any possibility of
a reconciliation and mediation of them.
According to what has been now said, we do not see
ourselves compelled to share this pessimistic view of
the situation. Rather are we of opinion that a little
calm Self-reflection would only be needed on both sides
100 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
to recognise that both parties stand in their ultimate
aims much nearer than is supposed, and that there is
much more reason for them to learn mutually from
each other than to exhaust their powers in a blind
conflict. Science, as we saw, will have to remember
that its acceptance of the knowableness of the world,
if it is not to be without a principle at all, can only
be supported on a belief in the creative divine reason
in which the agreement of the forms of thinking and
being is grounded, and in which consequently the truth
of our thinking is guaranteed. It will have to recall
the fact that the world of nature or of external sensible
phenomena, the investigation of which it pursues with
so much zeal and Success, is nevertheless Only the one
side of reality, along with which consists the inner
side of our own psychological life as the much more
important half of reality; and therefore that an ex-
planation of the world which would ignore this more
important side, and which would take the principle of
the universe only from the external world of pheno-
mena, would commit the most prodigious abstraction,
and, in spite of all fortunate discoveries in detail, would
yet at bottom miss the truth on the whole. On the
other side, the representatives of religion will also have
to remember that they possess the treasure of spiritual
truth always only in earthen vessels—that is, in symboli-
cal representations—on which their earthly and temporal
Origin is but too clearly impressed for them to be able
RELIGION AND SCIENCE. IOI
to put forth a permanent claim to infallible divine
truth ; and consequently that the striving of the think-
ing mind to distinguish between the eternal truth and
its temporal vesture, between the spiritual kernel and
its sensible shell, is not an act of Sacrilege, but a service
which is performed for the sacred cause of truth, and
therefore of God. It is not to be doubted that this
Service of truth is not accomplished without pain and
Sacrifice, when so many ideas that have become dear
prove themselves to be but perishable earthly vessels;
but these pains are the price to be paid for obtaining
the most precious of treasures—namely, a conviction
which establishes the heart. Piety will lose nothing of
its humility and trust if it perceives the governing of
divine Omnipotence no longer in rare Supernatural in-
cidents but in the whole constant order of nature, and
if single spots of history are no longer to be separated
out as the Sanctuaries of a unique mysterious revelation,
but the whole development of the moral and religious
life of humanity becomes the revelation of educating
wisdom and love. If science helps religion to attain to
this deepening of its insight and widening of its view,
ought it not then to be rather treasured as a friend of
religion instead of being feared as its foe 2 At the pres-
ent time, indeed, the two still stand in a state of violent
feud; but the time will come when they will mutually
understand each other better, and will be united in the
harmonious worship of God in spirit and in truth.
LECTURE IV.
THE BELIER IN GOD: ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT.
KANT has said that there are especially two things
which excite our reverence: the starry heaven above
us, and the moral law within us. He has thus indi-
cated the two sources from which the belief in God
springs—namely, the external world in So far as it
shows to our thinking a rational Order of existing be-
ing, an all-embracing truth; and the internal world in
so far as in it a rational Order of being that-ought-to-
be presses itself upon us as an all-determining end,
or the ideal of the good. That the good which we
oppose to actuality as that which Ought to be, is yet
not merely our Subjective thought, a dream of our
imagination, but that it is that which truly is, the
power that is over reality; and that the principle of
the whole external existence is not alien and indifferent
to the ideal longing and hoping of our own being, but
is the Source of its motive power and the guarantee of
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 103
its right to realisation,-this is the kernel of the belief
in God. The idea of God is the Unity of the True
and the Good, or of the two highest ideas which our
reason thinks as theoretical reason and demands as
practical reason; and if reason is not to lose its unity,
and therefore itself, in this antagonism between know-
ing of the real and demanding of the ideal, it must raise
itself above the opposition to the synthesis of the two
sides, or to the idea of God. This is the a priori
ground or rational origin of the belief in God found in
the nature of our mind.
It is of course evident of itself that this principle,
as we have here expressed it, was not from the very
begimming in the consciousness of men; for, in order to
think ideas, reason must already be developed, which
in the first of mankind it could just as little be as in
children. This, however, does not exclude the fact
that there was from the beginning the unconscious
rational impulse which lay at the basis of the forma-
tion of the belief in God, however manifold may have
been the, direct motives which co-operated with it.
All traces of the oldest history of religion point to
this, that the belief in God did not exist ready-made
from the beginning, but that it was formed out of the
prehistorical belief in spirits contemporaneously with
the beginnings of Social civilisation, on the threshold
of the historical life of the peoples. And the original
belief in Spirits appears already to point back to two
104 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Sources—to external nature and the Soul of man. For
ancestral spirits and nature-spirits are found every-
where in the primeval period of the peoples side by
side with one another, and passing into each other in
various forms of combination without the one being
able to be referred to the other. They appear to be
both equally original, and to be explained by different
psychological motives.
Various naïve reflections may have contributed to
the universally diffused belief of the primitive men
in the continued existence and active presence of the
souls of the dead. When they saw life disappear in
the dying with the fleeting breath, it was natural to
find the principle of life, or the Soul, in the breath;
and hence in most languages the words for Soul and
Spirit coincide with the designations for Breath and
Wind. But that the soul that flees with the breath
does not perish, but only changes its place of residence,
was testified to primitive man by his dream-percep-
tions, in which he saw the dead again appear. From
this he concluded that they continued to live as aeri-
form shadowy beings, usually invisible, and that they
moved more rapidly than when they lived in the body,
penetrated everywhere, and were superior in knowledge
and capability to earthly men. The incorporeal double
of the dead person could, according to the primitive
belief, assume the most different and most frightful
forms; it could work at a distance, transport itself
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 105
with the swiftness of lightning to other places, and
could otherwise produce wonderful effects beyond the
measure of what is natural to mankind. Besides, the
Spirits of ancestors remained, according to the oldest
view, in the neighbourhood of the families they had
left behind, and in constant relation with them ; they
claimed a share of the daily meals and other marks
of honour; they rewarded such performances by the
protection of their kin; and they punished the neglect
of these things by sensible evils.
But the spirit-host believed in by primitive men was
recruited not merely from the world of men, but also
from that of mature. The intermediate link between
the human Souls and those with which the untutored
fancy peopled nature may have been formed by the
Souls of animals, the worship of which played a great
part in Egypt, and which are even now objects of
worship among Savage tribes. In everything which
moves On earth or in the heavens, and which Con-
Sequently appears to live, the primitive man beheld
an active Soul as the subject and cause of the respec-
tive movements. Fountains, rivers and seas, trees and
woods, winds and waves, and in particular also the
earthly fire of the hearth and the heavenly fire of the
storm, and finally the Sun, moon, and stars, and the
heaven that embraces all,—all these appeared to the
naïve fantasy as living beings, because its “personify-
ing apperception’’ was able to apprehend the subject
106 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
of phenomena only as an active subject after the
analogy of the human soul. This animation of nature
is not to be explained by holding that the primitive man
only compared natural phenomena with living beings,
or even that he merely thought of them as a domicile
or Operation of spirits of human origin. Either view
would presuppose a definite distinguishing of the
Sensible element and of the supersensible subject; but
Such a distinction only appeared later, whereas, for the
Original mythological notion, the sensible element and
the Subject that was active in it still coincided as one.
It is only on this view that all those names, attributes,
and myths of the natural Deities are explained, which
manifestly have their roots in natural phenomena. I
can therefore not agree with those who, after the
example of the ancient rationalist Euhemeros, would
explain the natural Deities from elevation of ancestral
Spirits to be rulers over earthly and heavenly regions—
a view which is advocated, for instance, by Mr Herbert
Spencer. I believe that they explain themselves more
Simply, without going round about by human Souls, from
the animation of nature, which was just as natural for
the childlike fantasy of the primitive man as it still
is to-day for children and poets. Only so much may
perhaps be admitted, that for the more definite personi-
fications of the nature-spirits, for their separation from
the element of nature, and their elevation to be the
objects of a standing and common cult, the undoubt-
THE BELIEF IN GOD. - 107
edly more original cult of ancestral spirits may have
Co-operated. -
Nevertheless this prehistoric belief in spirits cannot
yet be properly called religion; it only contained the
germs of religion. The development of these germs,
however, could not be reached before the beginnings of
Social Organisation and order. So long as men still
lived in roaming hordes without social Organisation,
there was also still merely an indefinite Swarm of
Spirits without individual qualities, only perhaps that
the friendly spirits were distinguished from the hostile
(light spirits from dark spirits). It was not till
families gathered around the domestic altar (the
hearth) as settled households, till these families ex-
panded into clans, and till the clans united into tribes,
that there also arose out of the swarm of common
Spirits the Gods proper as the protecting powers of
the corresponding groups of human Society. And
With these groups there also grew at the same time
their ideal representatives, the divine patron spirits or
tutelary genii. The families had only their narrowly
limited house-gods; the religion of the clans and tribes
rose to the worship of higher common tutelary Deities—
whether it was that the ancestral spirit of a prominent
family, of a chief, or of the founder of a city, rose to
the rank of a common God of the people, or that the
local cult of a nature-spirit became the connecting
Centre for a greater group of the surrounding dwellers,
108 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and thereby the (elementary) tutelary spirit of the
place was transformed into the tutelary spirit of the
community of the region and into the founder of their
state, and was identified with a tribal hero or put into
genealogical connection with one. Thus there arose
out of the deification of ancestral spirits and the
humanisation of nature-spirits, the world of the Gods
of the several national religions. In the case of many
of these mythical forms it will always remain obscure
how they fashioned themselves in the consciousness of
their votaries, whether by a nature-spirit, to which a
certain place was sacred, becoming the tutelary God of
the Settlers on his territory, and thus becoming their
HerOS eponymus, or by a historical ancestor with the
growing power of his clan being raised to be the ruler
also of their natural surroundings, of the land, Sea, and
sky. So much appears at all events to be certain (as
it is put in the words of Goblet d’Alviella), “that in
the classical mythology there is found a continual
interaction between the Gods and heroes: if Gods
are represented as glorified men, it is no wonder
that glorified men also come to be regarded as
Gods.”
With the elevation of the tutelary spirits of definite
social human groups above the other spirits, the begin-
ming of the religious belief in Gods was made. An
organised Polytheism, however, was not yet reached
everywhere, but this only came about in those peoples
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 109
who attained to a certain degree of culture and a last-
ing political unity. Ideas of a divine hierarchy de-
veloped themselves everywhere pari passu with the
improvement of the earthly political institution. And
men were also quite conscious of this parallelism be-
tween the heavenly and earthly kingdom, but by a
natural perspective deception they always held the
human community to be a copy of the heavenly. But
what distinguishes these Gods of the Polytheistic
national religions from the spirits, is not merely the
greater power and dominion attributed to them, but
also a new and higher content and purpose of their
life: they are the bearers, founders, and preservers of
the world-Order—not only of the natural, but also of
the moral, order of the world. The spirits worshipped
by Savage tribes are individual powers which act by
Caprice and chance, which combat with each other,
perish, and are Supplanted by new spirits. The Sava-
ges are never Sure that the Sun which sets to-day will
appear again to-morrow, or that the Summer which is
now overcome by the giant winter will return again
next year. As their own life is still driven on without
content and purpose by momentary impulses, SO also is
it with the life of their swarms of spirits. The higher
belief, and properly the first religious belief in Gods,
has been gained from two sides—from the formation
of a social Order among men, and from intellectual
reflection upon the Order of things in the life of
110 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
nature, which both co-operated to bring about the
Same result.
Because the beginnings of all social orders and
practices, from the government of the house up to
the government of the State, had been essentially
formed under the influence of religious motives, it
was inevitable that the Gods should be thought of as
the founders and protectors of these Orders and prac-
tices: not that they had from the very beginning
also represented moral ideals of a universal kind—
for such were not yet known to primitive men, nor
could they therefore ascribe them to their Gods—
but they were certainly the representatives of the
abiding collective will and the common wellbeing of
the community of their worshippers. Accordingly,
every violation of this whole or of its individual
members, by which the existence and wellbeing of
the family, the tribe, and the people is violated, is at
the same time a trespass against the divine power
that protects this community. Hence in the primi-
tive States the administration of justice stood every-
where in closest connection with religion. The social
obligations were strengthened by the Oath, the ap-
peal to divine witnesses and avengers; and the Gods
aided the discovery of criminals by Oracles or divine
judgments, which played everywhere an important
part in times of crude administration of law. The
expiation of a crime by punishment or voluntary
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 111
restitution is everywhere at the same time a religious
expiation for the reconciliation of the offended Deity.
Now the more this rational side of the divine gov-
ernment, directed to the good of the moral order
of the human community, gained in significance for
practical piety and took precedence over its physical
Working, so much the more was it also necessary
for the representation of the personal character of
the Gods to be put into harmony with their social
governing for the common advantage. Men began to
represent the protecting powers of Society as types
of the qualities valued in society, and consequently
to represent them as moral ideals; not of course in
the sense which we are wont to connect with a moral
ideal, but in the sense that the existing ideas of
human ability held by the peoples were personified
in the Gods themselves. In particular, the artistic
fantasy of the Greeks succeeded in developing their
Gods into ideals of that ca)\okāya.0ia, of that beauti-
ful morality of symmetry, of the harmonious balance
of reason and morality, in which they beheld the
ideal of human virtue. It is certainly not to be
thought that this higher representation of the moral
being of the Deity was anywhere the universal popu-
lar view; it was, in fact, everywhere originally only
present in the knowledge of individual enlightened
men, and had to assert itself laboriously in constant
conflict against the cruder ideas of the mass of the
112 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
people. It is well known how keenly the Greek
philosophers, from Heraclitus and Xenophanes, pro-
tested against the immoral representations of the
national religion. And around what else did the
struggle of the Hebrew prophets against the obtuse-
ness of the crowd turn than just the opposition between
the moral conception of the Deity and the naturalistic
mythological conception ? Perhaps we may see in
this opposition the proper turning-point of the his-
tory of religion, even more than in the question about
the unity or plurality of the divine, which indeed is
connected with it, although the two do not quite
coincide.
In two respects the awaking reflection on the order
of nature has been of great importance for the de-
velopment of the belief in God, side by side with
the progress of the social order. When men began
to reflect upon the regularity in the succession of
the times of the day and year, and their connection
with the motion of the heavenly bodies, the thought
could not but press itself upon them that the powers
which rule in nature do not act according to arbi-
trariness and Caprice, but that they stand, just like
men, under a constant and common Order. This order
they could then refer either to the prescription of a
Supreme God standing above nature, or to the reign
of law indwelling in the universe itself, which, as a
universal power above the individual Gods, was partly
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 113
personified in particular genii, and partly expressed in
abstract conceptions. The Egyptian Maat, daughter of
the Sun-god Ra, and the Persian genius Asha Vahista
were personifications of the natural and moral Order
of the world; and for the same thought the Hindus
had the impersonal conceptions Rita and Karma, the
Greeks had Moºpa and Népeats, and the Chinese had
Tao. In So far as by all these expressions there was
designated a world-ruling power Superior to the many
individual Gods, there is clearly betrayed the con-
sciousness that the many Gods are not yet the highest,
that the really divine still lies above them ; and this
therefore shows a Monotheistic tendency. The tran-
sition to Monotheism has, however, been made in
two different ways, which led to different conceptions
of the Monotheistic thought of God. The one of these
ways which was taken by the Hindus and the Greeks
proceeds from the phenomena of nature, and leads
through continued abstraction and generalisation to a
single substance and universal law, or to Pantheism;
the other way proceeds from the limited national God,
and leads through the expansion of his sphere of
power and the moralisation of his nature to ethical
Theism, the classical representatives of which have
been the prophets of Israel.
It is quite conceivable that a people disposed for
philosophical reflection, like the Hindus and Greeks,
may have come early to the thought that the many
WOL. I. - FI
114 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Nature-Gods were only different forms of the mani-
festation of one and the same divine Being; but it
is also conceivable that the propensity to abstraction
and generalisation, when once awakened, could not
come to rest before it had resolved the manifold
manifestations into the unity of a universal Being
which, because all distinctions have been obliterated
in it, is only an empty indeterminate abstract Being
which is hardly distinguished from nothing. Certainly
it was a step in the progress of the religious Spirit
that the Deity was no longer thought of as a finite
object along with other objects, but that the thought
of infinitude, of opposition to all limited worldly ex-
istence, was taken up in earnest. But the infinite
was still conceived of in a one-sidedly negative way,
in the Brahmanic and Eleatic speculation, as the abyss
which swallows up all finite being, not as the positive
ground which produces and maintains the finite. The
Brahma of the Vedanta philosophy, like the One in-
finite Being of Parmenides, is like the cave of the
lion, into which all the footsteps lead, but none lead
out again. If the true is only the most abstract dis-
tinctionless and changeless Being, then the world of
manifold and changeable existence is an untrue ap-
pearance, a delusion of Maya, which indeed becomes
the more inconceivable, Seeing that the subject and
its consciousness—for which the appearance of the
manifold and changeable exists—has itself also but
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 115
an apparent existence like everything else. Thus does
the Pantheism of the absolute substance show itself
as Akosmism, and ultimately as absolute Illusionism.
As in this infinite there disappear with all other dis-
tinctions also the distinctions of true and false, of .
weal and woe, of good and bad, the religious disposition
can here only consist in indolent brooding over the
nothingness of existence, in indifference to all the
interests of life, and finally in the extinguishing of
the living will itself—“Nirvana.”
While the Indian mind had lost itself in the mazes
of Pantheism, Akosmism, and Illusionism, the more
energetic thinking of the Greeks was happily able to
Overcome this stage of transition, and to rise to a view
of God and the world which was destined to be of the
greatest importance for the religious development of
humanity. Plato, like the Eleatic philosophy, had also
distinguished between the world of sense, which is
only apparent reality, and the “really real,” which is
elevated above space and time. But this really real
being, according to Plato, is not, as with the Eleatics,
an abstract unity that excludes all distinctions, and
consequently also all thinking, but it is a world of
thoughts, the plurality of which is unified by inner
necessity into a harmonious whole; and thus it forms
the world of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
This world of ideas is embraced into a unity in the
highest Idea, the Idea of God, which at the same time
116 PEIILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
is perfect being. In God (the divine reason) there lies
not only the ultimate ground of all knowing and being,
or of all truth, but also the ultimate end of all being, or
the good. That God's essential being is the good, that
all statements regarding God are to be measured by
the idea of the good, and that He is therefore as much
the ground of justice in the moral world as of truth and
beauty in the natural world,—these are central thoughts
of the Platonic philosophy, the high historical signifi-
cance and abiding truth of which stand fast, although
it may also have to be recognised that its original intui-
tions were still affected with the limits of the Greek
thinking. It was a lofty idealism which saw in the
world the revelation of a divine reason, a system of
archetypal ideas, which the human spirit represents
in its knowledge of truth. But this idealism had still
as its reverse side the dualism between the Idea and
the irrational reality, which is not the pure expression
of the Idea, but stands in partial opposition to it.
For, when the Ideas enter into manifestation they
are drawn out of one another into the dividedness of
space and time, and are thus as it were displaced and
distorted. The sensible world is therefore only the
imperfect obscured representation or copy of the pure
world of true being, or of the Ideas. The cause of this
imperfectness is the irrational principle of the “un-
bounded” or of exteriority and succession in time, a
principle which is properly a non-existing being, pººj čv;
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 117
but as the contributory cause of the world of appear-
ance it yet again becomes a negative quantity, a matter
adverse to the Idea, which hinders the pure manifesta-
tion of the Idea. With this division of the ideal and
sensible world a mediation of the two was needed, and
this was found by Plato in the soul of the world and
of man which stands in the middle between reason
and sense. These thoughts, the opposition of the
two worlds and their mediation through a middle prin-
ciple, became of immense importance for the following
time. But they have their root in Plato in this posi-
tion, that the spirit, when it began to reflect upon itself,
was at first conscious only of its distinction from the
external world, but not yet of its autocratic power
over it; and this, again, is connected with the fact that
it apprehended its specific nature first in thinking, and
not in 'moral willing, that it recognised as its task only
the copying the given harmony of the world, and not
the free shaping of the world and realising of its own
ideal in the world. It is the Greek Intellectualism
and AEstheticism, the want of ethical depth and power,
which forms the limit of the Platonic idealism and the
ground of that dualism which does not let the Divine
Spirit come to full lordship over the real world. The
same dualism may be also observed in the philosophy
of Aristotle. He, indeed, finds everywhere in the
world rational purposes (thoughts of final ends) as
the working “Form” of things; but this rational prin-
118 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ciple has always to combat with the irrational principle
of matter which is contrary to purpose and conception,
and its resistance is never entirely to be overcome.
According to Aristotle, God is pure Form without
matter, pure activity without passivity and change;
but such Form is only pure thinking, which again
has only itself as its content. As this activity of
thought which persists in itself (vömous voijoſeos), God
is separated from the world which is mixed up of
activity and passivity; He is indeed the self-unmoved
cause of the motion of the world, in so far as the
imperfect strives after His perfectness, but He does
not rule over it, and He does not come to revelation
in it. As the philosophical thinker after Aristotle
felt himself in the consciousness of his higher dignity
exalted above the cares of the practical life, so, accord-
ing to him, God is infinitely exalted in the stillness
of His eternal unchangeable thinking above the world
of becoming, of striving, and of struggling, in nature
and humanity, which is a world full of change and
suffering. This philosophical transcendence was com-
bined by the Epicureans with the popular Polytheism
in such a way that they thought of the regions inter-
mediate between heaven and earth as inhabited by
Gods, who lead by themselves a cheerful life of enjoy-
ment without troubling themselves in any way about
earthly things and the affairs of men. The Stoics, on
the other hand, went back again to the world-Soul of
THE BELIEF IN GOD. II9
the Ionic philosophy of mature; they thought of the
Deity partly as the primal material of the world, the
fire out of which all proceeded and into which all
again returns, and partly as the world-reason, the
Logos which guides and orders all, the all-wise Provi-
dence, This latter side became so very predominant
among the later Stoics that their conception of God,
which at the beginning was more of a naturalistic
Pantheistic character, always approached more to an
immanent ethical Monotheism. But as the Stoics did
not wish wholly to lose touch with the mythological
faith of the people, they received into their system the
national Gods as the subordinate forms of the manifesta-
tion of the One Deity, or as Its ministering Organs. The
same was also done by the Neo-Platonists, who needed
these half-divine middle beings (“demons”) the more
urgently as they carried the Platonico - Aristotelian
view of the Deity as belonging to a world beyond this
to its utmost issue; they divested the Deity of all
positive attributes, and made It a wholly incognisable
Being which, inaccessible to clear thinking, can only
be felt by ecstatic feeling. As the ancient philosophy
thus ended with Agnosticism, it was indeed able to
further the dissolution of the mythological Polytheism,
but it could put nothing positive that could satisfy the
religious feeling in place of the old. The substitute for the
old belief in God could only be formed by the new faith
which had developed itself out of the religion of Israel.
120 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
The belief of the Hebrews in their tribal God Jahve
had in the pre-prophetic time hardly yet distinguished
itself clearly from the analogous belief of the other
Semitic tribes in their tribal Deities. The belief was
first brought to a higher development by the prophets,
who raised the tribal God of Israel to be the God of the
world, by identifying Him with the moral good in the
same way as Plato did some centuries later, and by
thinking of His government as an exhibition of holy
justice, which has only the good itself as its end, and
which does not let itself be determined by any partial
collateral considerations, not even by those which
related to national privileges. To the Hebrew pro-
phets Jehovah indeed always remained the God of
Israel in a peculiar sense, but His government of the
world had nevertheless a universal end, which passed
beyond the national limits and was unconditionally
valuable in itself; and this end it had to realise in the
establishment of a kingdom of righteousness and peace
in Israel, and from Israel outwards in mankind gener-
ally. The prophets, while believing in the victory of
this moral end of the divine government of the world,
also already looked with hope to the time when the
God of this moral government would be the only God
of all the peoples. Besides, it was favourable to the
religion of Israel that a Polytheistic mythology, already
deeply rooted in the fantasy of the people, did not stand
here opposed to the higher moral idea of God, as was
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 121
the case among the Indians and Greeks. Even the
anthropomorphic traits, which were by no means want-
ing in the belief in Jahve, were however not of the
Same kind as in the more sensuous Polytheistic re-
ligions. No such myths were told of Jahve as of Zeus
and Jupiter. If the popular belief ascribed passions to
Jahve, such as wrath and jealousy, it was not difficult
for the prophets to interpret these passions morally as
the reaction of the holy God against the human sin and
guilt which resisted His purpose of good. Such moral
anger and punishment, however, does not exclude the
faithfulness and long-suffering of God in carrying out
His good purpose, but it serves the realisation of the
moral ideal by means of the chastisement and purifica-
tion of the sinful people. From this point of view the
history of their people became to the prophets the ad-
vancing revelation of the educating wisdom and justice
and grace of their God, who also holds the fortunes of
nations in His hand and guides them to the final end
of realising His all-embracing kingdom, in which right-
eousness, peace, and Salvation will reign. Nor could
the misfortunes in their experience disconcert the pro-
phets in this faith in the moral teleology of the govern-
ment of the world; for all the adversity of the present
only turned their hopeful look further away and higher
towards the much more glorious ideals of the future.
In the consciousness of the prophets, God, just because
He was one with the moral Ideal, became the God of
122 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the historical revelation, the Lord of the times and
seasons, who in His decrees disposes of all that is in
the future. The Hebrew did not, like the Greek, find
the revelation of God in the harmony of an ideal world
of thoughts which was always immament in the actual,
but he found that revelation in the purposive striving
of the whole of history, in which all that is actual is
continually transcended and directed by the ideal of
the future.
In the spirit of the great prophets the two sides of
the thought of God were combined in the closest way—
namely, the exaltation of the holy One above human
weakness and sin, and the condescension of the gracious
One to a helpful presence. But in the post-exilian
Judaism the first side of the Idea predominated so
strongly, that God was then thought of almost only as
a lawgiver and a judge in the other world, and men
could only see His revelation in humanity mediated
through middle beings like the angels and the personi-
fied Wisdom, or the personified Word. Judaism had
therefore at last arrived at the same dualistic tran-
scendence of the Deity as the Platonic idealism ; and
thus the same need showed itself on both sides to fill
up the gulf between this world and the world beyond
by intermediate beings. The religious philosophy of
the Alexandrian Jew Philo was a product of these con-
verging currents of the time. According to Philo, God
is not merely not to be thought of in an anthropomor-
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 123
phic way as like men, but He is without attributes at
all, and exalted above all conceptions and names; We
C8,]] only know of Him that He is, not what He is ; we
can only call Him the existing One and the cause of all
being. His working upon the world is not immediate,
but is mediated through other powers which are em-
braced in the divine “Logos.” This Logos is the image
and the first-born Son of God, the ideal of the world,
and the Mediator of its creation and government, and
of all the revelation of God in Sacred history. This
shadowy form of the Philonic Logos, which wavers
between conceptual abstraction and personality, could
naturally not suffice to satisfy the religious need of a
real historical revelation of God; but its great his-
torical significance consisted in this, that it prepared
the conceptual form for the theological apprehension
and expression of the new revelation in Jesus Christ.
Jesus recognised in the God of the prophets and of
the Psalms his heavenly Father and the heavenly
Pather of us all, who makes His sun rise on the just
and the unjust, who condescends to the miserable and
sinners in compassionate love in Order to make them
His children and associates of His kingdom, the imi-
tators and instruments of His own holy love. The
God-consciousness of Jesus was not indeed a Hellenic
cheerful consciousness, as has been said; his God was
rather the holy One of Israel infinitely exalted above
the sinful beings of the world. The requirements of
124 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
His will were not lowered by Jesus, but were
raised into a demand for the Surrender of the
whole man to the one unconditioned purpose of God;
and the essence of the kingdom of God has been set
forth by him in sharpest contrast to the kingdoms
of this world and their glory, which must be re-
nounced by whoever would win the kingdom of heaven.
But while Jesus maintained the religious ideal in its
unconditioned exaltedness and purified it, on the other
hand he at the same time bridged over the gulf which
had opened up to the whole ancient world, Jewish as
well as Greek, between the ideal and the actual, the
good and the true. To him the holy God was not
merely the exacting lawgiver, the reckoning Lord, the
retributive judge, but He was above all the loving
Father, who sees in every man His child, the object of
Bis merciful care and wise training, the God who does
not even cast out and condemn the sinner, but who
will and can save him, deliver him from his sin, and
raise him to the good. The good is indeed the
Ideal, the kingdom of God, which is not yet actually
here, but has yet “to come * and be actual; yet this
Ideal is already an internal efficient present power, the
power of the Spirit of God, who drives demons out of
Souls; the power of faith and hoping trust, which re-
moves mountains; and the power of love, which by
serving and bearing overcomes the evil of the world
and unites men into a harmonious family of God. In
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 125
the religious idealism of Jesus, God is therefore not
merely the perfect ideal of the good, but also the Self-
realising power of the good, on which every resistance
of the world must ultimately break in pieces, and which
therefore shows itself the superior power over reality
as the true kernel of being. The synthesis of the good
and true was for the first time realised in full depth
and with clear consciousness in Jesus’ Idea of God;
and therefore it is rightly accepted by us as the highest
revelation of God which still remains authoritative,
however much the unfolding of it in conceptions and
its mediation with secular truth may always remain
the inexhaustible problem of the religious thinking of
humanity.
With this revelation of God, which had become per-
Somal life in Jesus, the national limitedness and the
legal externality of the Jewish belief in God were over-
come. The God of the prophets could now become in
the missionary preaching of Paul the world-reconciling
God of the world of the nations; and in the mysticism
of John it became the love which makes its dwelling
in the hearts of the pious, and unites them into a
fellowship of brethren and of true worshippers of God.
It was natural that this new belief in God should seek
after new forms of expression, and should express the
fulness of its contents in the language of the philo-
sophical thinking of that time. The Philonic concep-
tion of the Logos presented itself as the most natural
126 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
means for accomplishing this. By its application to
the revelation of God which had appeared in Jesus, the
alliance between Jewish theology and Greek philosophy
was concluded, and from it the doctrine of God of the
Christian Church proceeded. The historical purposive-
ness of this doctrinal development cannot be contested
even by those who by no means hold its doctrinal
formulas as final truth. This development rests upon
two grounds. On the one hand, by combination with
the Logos of speculation the religious revelation of
Jesus was divested of its accidental historical invest-
ments, such as lay in the national and apocalyptic idea
of the Messiah, which the earliest Christians had shared
with the Jews, as appears from their expectation of a
visible second coming of Christ from heaven to establish
His kingdom upon earth; and thus what was con-
tingent and particular in the historical beginning be-
came idealised and universalised by being fitted as a
completing member into the frame of the universal
revelation of God as it advanced through universal
history. And on the other hand, the metaphysical
Conception of the Logos as immanent in the world, and
Ordering it according to law, was filled with religious
and moral contents; and thus by its connection with
the person of the founder of the historical Church, the
Logos, from being a COSmical principle of nature,
became a religious principle of Salvation, the ideal of
the good which is present and active in the community,
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 127
the personified idea of the man who came from God
and who is united with God. Thus in the Christian
Idea of God these two sides have been combined from
the beginning –/the moral-religious ideal of the an-
thropomorphically represented holy Lord and merciful
Fathey–which ideal sprang from the prophetic and
apostolic preaching; and/the metaphysical principle,
which sprang from the Greek speculation of the infinite
Spirit exalted above all human limitation, the ground
of the existence and of the order of the universe, in
whom we live and move and have our being. To
mediate internally these two sides of the Christian idea
of God was the problem of the Patristic theology, and
it also lies at the basis of the formulae of the doctrine
of the Trinity, in which we can see the attempt to
connect the Greek and Jewish cognition of God in a
higher synthesis, and to guard against all deviations to
the One side or the other.
For the mediation of these two sides the whole
further history of Christian theology and philosophy
has laboured, and maturally the one side has come into
the foreground at one time, and the other at another.
The Greek fathers, especially the Alexandrians Clem-
ent and Origen, emphasised the absolute spirituality of
God in opposition not merely to all heathem and gnostic
Naturalism, but also to the Jewish Anthropomorphism.
According to the profound theologian Clement, God is
incognisable as regards His essence in Itself, because
128 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Iſe is elevated above all finite properties; but He is
cognisable according to His revelation in the Logos as
the principle both of the natural order of the world
and also of the historical religious institution of Salva-
tion. On the other hand, Tertullian, a father of the
Western Church, could not think of God realistically
and humanly enough, so much so that he had even no
hesitation is ascribing a body to God, seeing that, as he
thought, there is nothing actual that is incorporeal. A.
remarkable combination of the two sides referred to is
contained in the theology of the great Church father
Augustine. From the Neo-Platonic standpoint with
which he began, he taught the abstract simplicity of
the divine essence, in which all qualities are annulled
into an indifference, so that one can more easily say
what God is not than what He is. Yet the three fun-
damental determinations—absolute being, knowing, and
loving—are predicated of God; but these, again, are
identical with each other. As absolute Being and
Rinowing, God, according to Augustine, who in this fol-
lows Plato, is the “eternal truth,” the ground and goal
of our knowing; as Love, He is the “unchangeable
good,” the true object of our willing in so far as we are
determined to His fellowship, and can therefore find no
satisfaction in any finite good. If these determinations
in Some measure already go beyond the presupposed
absolute simplicity of the divine essence, there cannot
be brought at all into accordance with it what Augustine
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 129
has taught concerning the double decree of God, or His
will of election and reprobation. It is the Jewish
Monotheism which breaks forth in this hard represen-
tation of God’s judicial attitude towards the fall of
Adam, and in So glaring a manner as could hardly
have been considered possible in the case of a disciple
of Plato. Nevertheless, Augustine, with the two sides
of his contradictory doctrine of God, became none the
less authoritative for the ecclesiastical theology; and
not only for the medieval theology, but also for the
Protestant theology, which has never liberated itself
from this contradiction which lies within its doctrine
of God.
In the Middle Ages the monistic (metaphysical) idea
of God had remained limited to individual mystic-
speculative thinkers (Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckart,
the author of the ‘German Theology’). The same
idea was carried out in the seventeenth century with
great boldness by Spinoza. In opposition to all an-
thropomorphic Theism, he taught that God is the Only
independent Self-existing being, or the absolute Sub-
stance which presents itself to our thinking under the
two fundamental forms of reality as Thinking and
Extension, and out of which all things and souls pro-
ceed with purposeless necessity as the finite modes of
the manifestation (modi) of its infinite being. This
doctrine did not deserve the objection of Atheism
which has been often advanced against it ; it might
"WOL. I. I
130 JPHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
much rather be called Akosmism, as it appears to
merge the reality of the finite in the one substance of
the infinite. But its serious weakness is the total lack
of the conception of purpose or end, whereby a fatal-
istic and naturalistic character threatens to come into
this Pantheism, which becomes fatal to the religious
consciousness. If everything proceeds with the same
necessity from God, and if there is not a development
from lower to higher modes of existence, if all that
happens is only causally conditioned and not guided
by final causes nor striving after ends,-then, along
with all the other distinctions of worth, the moral dis-
tinctions also fall away; the Idea of the Good, the
ideal of what ought to be, becomes fiction and illu-
Sion, and there remains nothing more for man but to
renounce all and every moral ideal, and the highest
moral ideals, and to submit to the unchangeable neces-
sity of being and event. Of this nature also is the
piety to which, according to Spinoza, we are to attain
through our knowing the order of the world as conform-
able to law. But as certainly as spiritual elevation
belongs to religion, just as certain is it that such ele-
vation as we find in Spinoza's system is not yet really
religious. For elevation presupposes an ideal which
stands above reality, and hence a God can never
satisfy the religious consciousness who, like the God
of Spinoza, would only be the ground of being and
not also of the being that-Ought-to-be, who would be
THE RELIEF IN GOD. 131
only the highest truth for the theoretical spirit and
not also the highest good for the moral Spirit. But
notwithstanding this, it cannot be denied that Spin-
Oza's struggle against the popular anthropomorphic
representation of God as a limited individual Being,
who pursues His own particular purposes according
to caprice and arbitrariness, was well founded. He
thereby emphasised with great resoluteness a side of
the religious Idea of God which is but too easily for-
gotten in the popular religion, but in doing so he fell
into the opposite one-sidedness.
To the Pantheism of Spinoza Leibnitz opposed the
Theistic conception of God. God is, according to Leib-
mitz, the founder of the harmony of all individual beings
or monads, which, being without connection in them-
selves, have been brought only by God into that
ordered connection whereby they form the best of all
possible worlds. Hence God must be thought of as the
perfect ideal of our own souls; wisdom, power, and
goodness, which we have in part, are whole in Him.
As the perfect ideal, He is for us at the same time the
object of the love that gives happiness, which recog-
mises what is truly best in the will of God, and serves
Him joyfully in obedience and devotion. The cheerful
optimism of Leibnitz's view of the world rests essenti-
ally upon the conviction that the world is the work of
the infinite wisdom and goodness of God. But although
this belief in God ruled the century of the Aufklärung,
132 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
nevertheless it could not permanently Satisfy ; the
synthesis of the good and true was reached too easily,
so that neither of the two sides obtained its full
right—i.e., neither the unconditionedness of the moral
ideal, nor the infinitude of the metaphysical ground of
the world. And hence we see at the end of the
eighteenth century the tendencies separating again on
both sides. Lessing, Herder and Goethe, Schelling and
Schleiermacher went back to Spinozism, but sought to
connect it with the Leibnitzian individualism, and to
animate it in the sense of a teleological development
of the world. Kant, on the other hand, declared the
metaphysical idea of God to be incognisable, and held
exclusively to the postulate of the moral Lawgiver,
Judge, and Ruler of the world, to believe in whom
reason felt itself compelled, because only under this
assumption could it be tranquillised regarding the
realisability of the highest good. Fichte transformed
the Kantian postulate of a moral Orderer of the world
into the faith in the moral world-order, which does
not need to be grounded upon a personal God, Seeing
that it is itself the ultimate and the unconditionally cer-
tain. Hegel demanded that Spinoza's substance should
be conceived as subject, as the living world-spirit which
moves by the Dialectic of the absolute thinking through
all the forms and stages of being, which externalises
itself in Nature, which comes to itself in Man, and
which realises itself in the historical development of
THE BELIEF IN GOD. 133
the human spirit as a kingdom of truth and freedom.
This was a renovation of the Leibnitzian optimism, only
with the distinction that with Leibnitz it is the wisdom
of a personal Creator that foreordains (“pre-estab-
lishes”) the harmony of the world, whereas with Hegel
it is the universal thinking (“the Idea”) identical with
being, which unfolds itself by logical necessity into the
organism of the world, and which therefore is nothing
else through and through but the manifestation of the
Idea, the self-actualisation of the divine reason. In
this “Pamlogism,” as the Hegelian philosophy has not
been inaptly called, it however appeared that the actual
existence of reality did not attain to its full right in
two respects. If everything actual is rational, as Hegel
said, where then remains the evil and badness of the
world 2 Does not its existence appear rather to point
to an irrational ground of the world ! So asked
Schopenhauer; and he therefore put in the place of
the absolute reason the reasonless “Will” or blind
impulse of life as the ground of the world, which just
on that account is so irrational, So full of evil and
suffering, — as Schopenhauer proceeded to show in
detail, attaching himself to the Indian pessimism, and
with many a dash of cynical irony. The defect of the
Hegelian Pamlogism was found in another respect in
this, that there is no place for individual existence, for
the right of the Individual or of personality, in a world
__--~---—
which presents only a system of categories, determina-
134 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
tions of thought, or conceptions, and in which therefore
only the universal is real. Hence the Leibnitzian in-
dividualism was then revived by philosophers like
Herbart and Lotze; they emphasised the worth of
personality, and thought of God as the ideal or absolute
personality, which, however, according to Lotze, is not
to be considered as standing dualistically in opposition
to the world, but as including the world in Himself in
a way analogous to that in which our Spirit includes
in itself the totality of its representations. Finally,
the powerful advance of the natural Sciences in our
century has had as its consequence in Germany that
the Idealism which since Kant, and even since Leib-
nitz, had there its home, has been given up by many,
at least for the theoretical view of the world, and an
Atheistic Realism has been put into its place—either
as Materialism, Atomism, Hylozoism, or as Scepticism,
Phenomenalism, Positivism. But at the same time
many upholders of theoretical Materialism or Natural-
ism have nevertheless maintained the right of Idealism
in the sphere of the practical view of life. Feuerbach,
David Strauss, Albert Lange, have been the leaders of
a widespread School which holds the Idea of God to be
indeed a fiction and illusion, but whose adherents yet
hold fast to the moral ideal of the good as the final
end of human life and of history. Here the question
necessarily arises, how the good can be the purpose or
end of the world if it is not also in some sense the
THE BELIEIT IN GOD. 135
basis of the world 2 And hence we stand once more
before the old and etermal problem of the belief in God,
which has just for its object the synthesis of the true
and the good, or of the real principle of the world and
the moral ideal of the human heart.
This analysis of the Idea of God into its two con-
stituent elements has been presented lately in a
peculiarly instructive way in the controversy between
Herbert Spencer and the Comteam positivist Frederic
Harrison. The former comes through analysis of the
real world to the acceptance of an absolute reality, or
an infinite and eternal power, which must be presup-
posed as the background and bearer of all that is
relative and phenomenal, but whose qualities and rela-
tion to phenomena are for us unknowable. This un-
knowable absolute is, according to Spencer, just the
object of religion, the great mystery, in the worship of
which all religions are at one. According to the posi-
tivist, on the other hand, such an absolute being is not
existent, at least for us, and can have no significance &
whatever either for our religious feeling or for Our
scientific thinking; it is rather Humanity that ought
to be the object of the religious feeling, to it we
should feel ourselves bound through grateful piety,
and we should bind ourselves to its service in devoted
benevolence. On the one side, therefore, we have a
supreme moral ideal without a metaphysical ground;
on the other, an ultimate metaphysical principle
136 PEIILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
without a final moral purpose; and on either side we
have the one half of what as a whole forms the content
of the belief in God. Shall this antithesis be the last
word 2 Or will it not rather be the preparation for a
deeper synthesis, a purer apprehension of that belief
which is inalienable, because indispensable to humanity
—the belief in the God of whom, through whom, and
to whom are all things, to whom be glory for ever,
Amen.
LECTURE W.
TEIE REWELATION OF GOD IN THE NATURAL ORDER.
OF THE WORLD.
IT may be accepted as a recognised position that, since
the criticism of Hume and Kant, the so-called proofs
of the existence of God can no longer be maintained in
their common scholastic form. No one holds it still to
be possible to prove the existence of God from an abstract
conception of God, by means of a process of inference,
or from an abstract conception of the world to infer
its cause in a God separated from it. But, from the
fact that the old scholastic demonstrations no longer
hold good, it would, however, be very precipitate to
conclude that the question regarding the truth of the
belief in God cannot be an object of our reflection
at all. However often this question imay be put aside,
it will, nevertheless, always press itself again upon the
human mind as the greatest problem for its thought.
And especially in the present day, when the bases of
138 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
religion appear to be wavering in so many ways, it has
become a more burning question than ever. But if it
be said that it is unnecessary that we should trouble
ourselves to prove God’s existence, seeing that He
Himself does in fact prove Himself to us by His
living revelation which He permits us to experience, -
then we reply that this is just the very problem at
issue—namely, how to demonstrate the revelation of
God in human experience; how to bring it to the
consciousness of men, to awaken the understanding
and interest for it in the doubters and the indifferent,
and then to obtain from the manifold revelations in
the different spheres of life the corresponding expres-
Sions regarding the divine government and being. This
was just the sum and substance of what was always
meant and aimed at in the “Demonstrations of God”
in the earlier examples of them. They were designed
to point out the way by which mankind came to the
consciousness of God by the reflecting understanding;
and to show, from the analysis of human experience,
the justification, the good ground, and meaning of the
belief in God. In order to avoid misunderstandings
which cling to the term “Proofs” or “Demonstrations,”
we therefore rather say that our task is to describe the
revelation of God in the Natural, Moral, and Religious
Order of the World. And to-day we shall be occu-
pied in the first place with the Natural World-Order,
which is related to the moral and religious Order of
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 139
the World, as the universal is to the particular, and to
the most particular; or as the base of the pyramid is
to its middle and apex. On each of these stages of
the Order of the World we have to distinguish a sub-
jective and an objective side, a world of consciousness
and of existence, which correspond to each other in
Such a manner that neither side can be understood
without reference to the other. It is just in this re-
ciprocal relatedness and orderedness of the two to each
other that the one single ordering principle of the
whole reveals itself; and this principle is God. It is
of importance to recognise this double-sidedness of the
Order of the World, because thereby the attempt,
which has been often recently made, to put the Order
of the World itself in the place of God, is excluded
from the outset. For a conception, which when more
exactly examined resolves itself into a duality of cor-
relative conceptions, cannot possibly be the highest
concluding Idea; but it certainly contains the unfold-
ing and manifestation of the One in the many, the
revelation of God in the world of internal and external
experience. -
When the “Natural Order of the World” is spoken
of, we usually think only of the order of external
Nature, as a whole of things and effects, which exist
independent of our thinking. But David Hume has
already shown that the radical conceptions of substan-
tiality and causality, by means of which we think the
140 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Ordered world, are not given to us from without, but
are added by our own thought to the impressions of
the senses. Thereafter Kant taught that the forms
of perception and thought, by means of which we
connect the Sensations into ideas and judgments, orig-
inally belong to our mind, and he has accordingly
called our understanding on that account “the Legis-
lator of Nature"—that is to say, of the Nature repre-
sented by us, and which forms the content of our
consciousness. In fact, it cannot be disputed that the
world of which we know immediately is just the world
of our consciousness, which at all events rests primarily
upon the functions and laws of our mind. Hence the
question immediately arises, Is there corresponding to
this our subjective world of consciousness, also an
objective world of existence independent of our con-
Sciousness, or is there not ? If this question is affirmed,
we then stand before the cardinal question of the theory
of knowledge, How the agreement of our thought-world . .
with the real world, upon which the truth of our know- * * *
ledge rests, is thinkable 2 This question is simply evaded
by the subjective idealism which denies a real world and
only accepts the thought-world of our consciousness.
Although this idealistic way of thinking has in our
day not very many representatives, we will yet try to
transfer ourselves hypothetically, for a moment, to its
standpoint. Now so much at all events is clear, that
even the idealist, if he would not fall into the absur-
{
JREVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 141
dity of “Solipsism,” must at least accept a plurality of
subjects of consciousness which stand related to one
another in the exchange of thoughts, through the
medium of language. But then, it is asked, how do
these different minds come to the harmonious repre-
sentation of a nature common to them, and that is the
medium of their reciprocal action ? To this Fichte has
answered, that the agreement of finite minds in the
notion of an external world is explained by the fact
that they are only the limited forms of the manifesta-
tion of a universal reason. In a similar Sense Berkeley
had already said that the idea of external things is pro-
duced in human minds by God. But if any one per-
haps preferred to say that the similarity in the human
representations of an external nature is explained by
the similar psychological laws of our process of repre-
sentation, the question would thereby only be driven
further back. For whence, we must then necessarily
ask, this similarity of the psychological processes and
states, if the individual minds were Originally separate
independent monads, and were not bound to each other
by a universal consciousness that embraced all the
individuals 2 If, in accordance with a logical indivi-
dualism, we hold every individual Ego to be a monad
which shuts itself up in its own ideal world, and that
its representations flow on independently of any uni-
versal spiritual principle, then the agreement in the
representations of the individual Egos regarding the
142 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
common world surrounding them would be an incon-
ceivable mystery. And, moreover, we can no longer
speak of error and truth in the representations of each
individual, because there would be no universal cri-
terion by which to judge them; the course of the re-
presentations of every individual consciousness would
then be just as true as that of every other, and the
movement of the waking consciousness would be no
more true than that of one who dreamed. In short,
there would be in this intellectual anarchy, as such, no
longer any truth or any order, or a Cosmos, but only a
Chaos of many associations of ideas, running on side by
side. Therefore, even in the hypothetically assumed
case, that there is only an ideal nature in the conscious-
mess of thinking minds, we could not escape from the
question how the different subjects come to a corre-
sponding image of the world, and how they are able
to distinguish what is merely subjectively represented,
from the common or objective mode of representation—
that is to say, how they can distinguish error from truth.
This question, however, can hardly be solved otherwise
than by the assumption of a universal consciousness,
which must be the common ground, as well as the rul-
ing law, of all individual consciousnesses or minds:
But we are not able seriously to appropriate or hold
the hypothesis of subjective idealism. How high soever
we may think of our spiritual life as elevated above ex-
ternal Nature, we cannot, however, establish such an
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL ORDER. 143
absolute gulf between the two that reality should only
pertain to the former and not to the latter. We cannot
shut out the consideration that a life nearly related to
human consciousness is also found in the sub-human
World among the lower animals; and how then can we
deny them real existence 2 And, besides, seeing that
there are only graduated distinctions existing between
the animal and the vegetable manifestations, and again
between the latter and the minerals, no reason can be
seen why a real existence by itself can be denied to any
One part of the phenomena which we call “Nature.”
The view which is self-evident to the sound human
understanding, that with all our consciousness of the
world there corresponds a real world existing by itself
independent of our thinking, is certainly not merely the
simplest but also the most correct hypothesis for the
explanation of the facts of our consciousness. Wherein
“maîve Realism”—the realism of common-sense—errs,
and requires and needs justification by philosophical
reflection, is only in the opinion that the world of reality
as existing in itself entirely corresponds to the world re-
presented by us, and that the latter is only a passively
received copy of the former. This error has been re-
futed by the critical analysis of the process of cognition
showing that we build up our world of consciousness
self-actively out of the raw material of sensations, by
means of the forms of perception and thinking that are
inmate in us. The truth which we are accustomed to
144 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ascribe to this world of consciousness cannot indeed
consist in its being the exact copy of a world of reality
that has just the same colours and Sounds belonging to
it ; but the truth lies properly in this, that the sub-
jectively conditioned images of our consciousness con-
tain the representative signs, by which we know the
relations of real existences to each other and to us. As
the letters of a writing are the written signs by means
of which we are able to reproduce the thoughts of the
author, so the representations and associations of repre-
sentation in our consciousness are the sign-language by
means of which we reproduce the relations of things to
one another and to ourselves, or make the real world an
object of our knowledge. And thus arises the question
which has been already indicated, namely, How is it
possible that our connection of Sensations into repre-
sentations and of representations into judgments, which
we ourselves carry On according to Our Subjective forms
of perception and thinking, is the correct sign and cor-
relative of real things and of their relations, as they are
in themselves independent of our representing of them 2
This correspondence between the world thought by us,
and the real world as it exists in itself, upon which all
the truth of our knowing rests, appears to me only ex-
plicable on the assumption that the Order of the Real
World is subject to analogous laws of being and work-
ing, as the Order of our Ideal World is to laws of
perceiving and thinking.
RETVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 145
That it actually is so, is, in the first place, a postu-
late of our theoretical reason, without which we should
be compelled entirely to despair of all truth in our
knowing. But we also have a proof of the correctness
of this postulate in daily experience as often as we see
results, which were expected on the grounds of the laws
of Nature as thought by us, correctly appear. For
example, the astronomer may calculate a future ce-
lestial phenomenon, on the basis of the laws of the
motions of the heavenly bodies, which he has nowhere
deciphered in the heavens, but which his own under-
standing has thought out in Order by means of them to
explain and arrange the Chaos of the manifold terres-
trial phenomena. If, then, the phenomenon calculated
by him presents itself punctually at the minute to his
perception, this is manifestly a proof of the correctness
of the laws thought out by the astronomer—i.e., a proof
of their agreement with the laws according to which the
heavenly bodies actually move. Hence the laws accord-
ing to which the human understanding thinks and cal-
culates, arranges the given phenomena and anticipates
future ones, correspond to the laws according to which
things hang together and work upon each other in
the real world. How is this correspondence between
the laws of our thinking, which are not given to us
from without, and the laws of being, which are not
made by us, explained ? So far as I See, only from
this, that the two have their common ground in a
vol. I. IK
146 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Divine thinking, in a creative Reason which manifests
its thoughts partly in the Order of the real world and
partly in the thinking of our understanding as it copies
that Order. The agreement of our thinking with the
being of the world rests on the fact that it is the repro-
duction of the creative thoughts of the Infinite mind, a
reproduction which is always imperfect according to
the measure of the finite mind. The truth of our cog-
nition is a participating in the truth which God essen-
tially is. . .
This is the proper sense and the abiding truth con-
tained in the so-called “Ontological Argument,” the
tenor of which refers to the relation of thinking and
being so understood. This argument is as old as reli-
gious reflection. It is already contained in the words
of the Psalmist, “In Thy light we see light.” It forms
the hinge of the philosophy of Plato, according to which
the highest Idea, or God, is the ground both of knowing
and of being, and all true cognition is a participation in
the world of the Ideas of the Divine reason. In like
manner, according to Augustine, God is the eternal
truth, the ground and goal of all the true thinking of
man. According to Thomas Aquinas, we see and judge
all things in the light of God, in so far as the natural
light of our reason is a participating in the Divine
light. In the hands of Anselm this thought, which is
distinctly found exhibited in his ‘ Proslogium, received
the unfortunate scholastic turn, that from the concep-
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 147
tion of God as the most perfect Being, an inference
is drawn of His existence as one of the attributes
contained in the conception. This inference, which is
also found repeated by Descartes and Wolff, has been
rightly disposed of by Kant as a piece of school wit:
but his criticism shot beyond the mark and overlooked
the deeper correct thought, which is concealed under
the deceptive Scholastic form of the ontological argu-
ment. Kant, in setting up such an opposition between
Thinking and Being as that no way led from the former
to the latter at all, makes not merely the Being of God,
but likewise that of the world, unknowable. Know-
ledge being separated from Being, is limited to mere
subjective phenomena, and is consequently at bottom
robbed of all truth. The philosophy of Hegel reacted
against this exaggerated dualism, but it fell again, in
its turn, into just as exaggerated a monism in simply
identifying Thinking and Being. Thereby the problem
of the theory of Knowledge was not so much solved as
rather cut in pieces by the sword, and the distinction
between the real creative thinking of God and our
ideally reproductive thinking was so confounded, that
Strauss and Feuerbach were able to draw from it the
absurd consequence of explaining the human thinking
itself as the absolute Self-deification of speculative philo-
sophy, a view which Soon enough was bitterly revenged
by its passing into materialism. The point of the “On-
tological" argument lies rather just in this, that our
148 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Thinking and Being are indeed different, yet are con-
stituted for each other by the conformity of the laws
on both sides, and that in this agreement—or pre-estab-
lished harmony, according to Leibnitz—of the two sides,
the unity of the Ordering principle, i.e. of the effec-
tuating Thinking or the Omnipotent Reason of God,
reveals itself.
In our consideration of the Natural Order of the
World we started from its ideal side, or the side of
consciousness. The result found in this relation will
be completed and confirmed if we now also consider it
from the real side. In doing so we come to the subject
of the “Cosmological” and “Teleological" arguments.
ICant's criticism has shown on philosophical grounds
that these two arguments are untenable in their tradi-
tional scholastic form, and these grounds are further
strengthened by the Natural Science of the present day.
The “Cosmological” argument reasoned from the con-
tingency of the world to its having been produced by a
necessary extra-mundane cause; and the well-founded
objection has been raised against it by Hume and Kant
that the argument starts from an arbitrary view, for,
from the fact that every individual thing in the world
is a contingent thing—i.e., is conditioned by something
else—it does not at all follow that the same relation
holds good of the world as a whole,_that it is conting-
ent, and must have its ground in an extra-mundane
cause. It is not the contingency, but the universal and
PEVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. I.49
constant conformity of nature to law, that is the fun-
damental presupposition of the science of the present
day — a presupposition which certainly cannot be
proved, but which must be accepted if there is to be an
inductive investigation of Nature, and which is always
confirmed anew by every step in the advance of our
knowledge of Nature, so that its probability approaches
certainty. But because we in the present day know
Nature as a connected order of causes and effects bet-
ter than former ages knew it, shall the words of the
apostle on that account be less valid for us, that “the
invisible things of God from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that
are made, even His eternal power and Godhead " ?
(Rom. i. 20.)
If we hold Nature to be a system of forces which
stand in regulated reciprocal action with each other,
the ultimate riddle of the universe is thereby so far
from being solved that the question rather first arises,
How, then, is a causal working of one being upon another
at all to be explained ? The popular statement, that
an influence passes from the one to the other, is an
image which can explain nothing; for the state which
has appeared through a change in the first thing Can-
not leave this thing and pass over to a second or third
thing, and So on, but it has only as a consequence that
in the Second thing, the third thing, and so on, corres-
ponding states also appear. What we call the causal
150 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
working of things upon each other consists in this,
that upon an alteration in the One thing corresponding
alterations necessarily follow in the other things. This,
however, as Lotze has luminously shown, would be
inconceivable under the supposition that the individual
things are independent existences and were indifferent
towards each other; it becomes conceivable, however,
On the view that they are embraced as parts or members
in an all-comprehending living unity. For then the
alteration in a part is at the same time an alteration
in the state of the whole, and accordingly calls forth
the alteration in another part as its completing com-
pensation. If, therefore, the mystery of transeunt
causality is solved by this, that we refer it to the
immanent causality within an Organic whole, we come
to see in the regulated reciprocity of the individual
forces, or in “Nature,” the manifestation of a single
primary force or “Omnipotence” which unfolds itself
in an infinite multiplicity of mutually related effects.
But how shall we now have to think more precisely
of this primary force 2 Are we to conceive of it as a
material and blindly working force, or as a spiritual
and intelligent power ? The deciding grounds for
answering this question will indeed only be shown
in consideration of the moral and religious World
Order in the next lecture; yet, even upon the stand-
point of Our present more general consideration, certain
grounds may be recognised which speak for the Spiritual
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 151
character of the principle of the Order of Nature. Let
us first of all recall to mind whence our conception of
an efficient force is derived. It cannot be given to us
from without, for what we immediately perceive are
only changing phenomena; if we see in them effects
of forces, this is already an interpretation which we
derive from the analogy of the effects produced by
ourselves. The only force or power which we know
immediately and from within, is the power of our own
will ; from its working, its being checked, and its
counter-working, arises originally our conception of
efficient power, and therefore of causality generally.
By this we are assuredly justified in thinking of the
universal cause which lies at the basis of all parti-
cular things, according to the analogy of the power
of the will which is alone immediately known to us,
and consequently to think it as a spiritual principle.
Likewise the constant regularity with which things so
work upon each other that there exists an Order, a
constant unity, in the multiplicity of the processes
changing in time, could hardly otherwise be explained
than according to psychological analogy—namely, by
the supposition that the mode of the working of the
manifold forces is determined by thoughts, which have
their unity in the thinking of the Divine will that
governs the world. As in us it is the thinking reason
which comprises the multiplicity of the changing
phenomena of consciousness, under conceptions and
I52 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
laws, and which connects them into an ordered image
of the world, so we may behold in the corresponding
Order of the real world the unfolding of the thoughts
of the creative reason of God. If this analogical
inference were not justified, neither should we have
any right to hold the view that there is a real Order
of the World, corresponding to the Order of the World
thought by us, and consequently we should have no
right to ascribe objective truth to our thinking. That
we think causally—i.e., connect Cause and Effect by
a Super-temporal logical necessity—presupposes that
in the real world Cause and Effect also hang together
through an equally logical necessity, which cannot be
grounded in the temporal phenomena but only in the
Supra-temporal logical principle which rules over and
combines them. In short, the logical truth of the
principle of the sufficient reason presupposes that
the ground and law of the temporal phenomena lie
in a Divine Logos.
But our thinking is as essentially teleological as
Causal; both are grounded on the same original experi-
ence in ourselves. For the alterations which we evoke
in external states by the exercise of our will have been,
before they appeared, already present to us in more
or less clear consciousness, as internally represented
objects or ends of our activity. Along with the con-
ception of Causality there arises to us, therefore, out of
the same experience of our own activity, also at the
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL ORDER. 153
same time, that of purpose or end; the two are only
different modes of contemplating the same process.
Hence the connection of the two modes of contem-
plating things is inherently so natural and inevitable
that we only learn gradually to separate the two more
definitely, but we are never able to dispense entirely
with either of them. It was so matural for religious
reflection to see a revelation of the divine reason in the
positiveness of Nature, that we are not surprised when
we meet with this mode of contemplation in the ear-
liest antiquity. Kant rightly called the Teleological
Argument the oldest, the clearest, and the best adapted •
to the common reason, and he says that it always
deserves to be mentioned with respect. The objections
which he raises to it rather strike the popular an-
thropomorphic form of the argument than its proper
kernel. So far as the argument only proceeds from the
form of things as purposively arranged, it brings us,
Kant Said, to a mere author of this form, an Architect
of the world, and not a Creator of the world. And as
experience, nevertheless, shows us no unlimited pur-
posiveness, but much that is contrary to design in
detail, the inference of a perfect designing intelligence
is not justified,—certainly a very noteworthy objection
to the popular apprehension of the argument, in which
the conclusion drawn proceeds from the artificial con-
stitution of the world to an extra-mundane Creator of
perfect wisdom and unconditioned power. But the
154 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
main question is, whether this whole way of viewing
the subject is at all correct 2 To represent the world
as an artificial machine, and God as the skilful maker
of it, might indeed appear natural to the mechanical
way of thinking prevalent in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; but to us of the present day this
representation has become strange and impossible to be
thought. Since Herder and Goethe, we have learned
to see in Nature not a made work of Art but a living
organism whose life is unfolded and formed from within,
according to its own impulse and laws. And this way
of contemplating Nature, which was already anticipated
in genial intuition by the poets and thinkers at the
beginning of the century, has received a magnificent
confirmation in our age through Darwin's investigation
of nature. The theory of development, in its funda-
mental idea at least, is accepted generally nowadays as
one of the most certain conquests of Scientific investi-
gation. It is now clear that by it the earlier form of
the Teleological Argument has become untenable; for
if the living beings have become such as we know them
of themselves through natural causes, the question as
to an external author through whom they have been
made has begun to give way. Yet the opinion, not
unfrequently heard, that with the theory of develop-
ment the conception of purpose or end in general, and
with it all ideal principles, have been banished from
the thinking contemplation of the world, may never-
IREVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 155
theless be very precipitate. The teleological way of
viewing things, as Kant has already shown in the
‘Critique of the Judgment,’ is for us as irrefragable a
psychological necessity as the causal connection of
phenomena. The only question at issue is the correct
combination of the two, and for this question the
conception of “Development” is of the greatest
importance. f
The modern Theory of Development appears to me
So little to contradict the acceptance of an immanent
rational principle of the world, that, when rightly under-
stood, it may rather serve as a powerful support of it.
The kernel of this theory, when collateral and dispu-
table determinations are left out of view, will be found
in the following two propositions: (1) All the life of
the earth is one uninterrupted connected process of
development, which has reached its goal in man, and
from this point the natural process passes over into the
historical process; (2) all the forms of life from the
lowest to the highest are developed out of simple funda-
mental forms, under the co-operation of inner Vital
impulses and external conditions of life. That in the
case of some the external conditions of life are more
accentuated, and in the case of others the internal
vital impulses are more accentuated, may be of impor-
tant consequence in the application of the theory to
investigation in detail, but it nevertheless makes no
difference in principle. In Darwin's theory the inner
156 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
vital impulse is not wanting, however it may appear to
retreat behind the external conditions of life; for what
else is the “struggle for existence” but the exercise of
the impulse of self-preservation ? Yet the other im-
pulses will not have to be excluded — namely, those
which aim at the invigoration, expansion, and perfec-
tion of life, according to the tendency determined by
its inherent mature. All life effectuates itself in the
exercise of impulses which strive after those states in
which the living being finds satisfaction, and which
therefore correspond to its nature, and promote its
preservation and perfectionment. May it not, then, be
rightly said, that all life is determined by ends which,
although unconscious to the individual being itself, yet
as impulse and instinct predetermine from the begin-
ming the direction and the course of the development
of its life? And was not, therefore, Aristotle right
when he taught that the end is not only the last, but
also the first, and the impelling power of the whole
movement 2 / But if it holds true of the individual
being, that the final end which results from the de-
velopment of its life is also already the ideal prius of
the whole process, then we shall be able to apply the
Same thought to the whole process of the life of our
|
earth, and to draw therefrom a conclusion as to the
principle of this process. And we are justified in
doing so by the very fundamental thought of modern
biology, according to which all the life of the earth
|
|
\
}
}
f
f
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 157
forms one advancing development from the lowest to
the highest forms of existence/ If we survey the
whole of this development, we see how with the
growing differentiation and refinement of the sensible
organisation there comes in at the same time a growing,
deepening, and clearing of the psychical life, rising up
from the dull sensations of the lowest living beings to
the dawning consciousness of the higher animals, and
at last to the clear human consciousness, which objecti-
fies its representations in language, and thereby attains
and secures the independence of the spiritual life.
Shall we not, then, be entitled to draw the conclusion,
that this very spiritual life of man has been the end to
which the whole process of life on our earth strove
from the beginning and constantly through all trans-
formations of the organisation—that it was the final end
for which all previous natural existence has been only
the preparatory stage, the subservient means, the Causal
mechanism 2 But how, we ask, is it to be made in-
telligible that our earth, which was once on a time a
glowing ball, produced life which had spirit as its end,
if it were not that this spirit of the life of the earth,
in its process of becoming, had its ultimate ground in
the eternal spirit of the universal life 2—if it had not
been the purposive thought of the creative reason of
God, which realised itself in the teleological process of
the movement of all life in the terrestrial sphere of the
world, and indeed in every other sphere as well? As
158 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
little as biological science can be prevented from
searching into the causal conditions and connections of
the terrestrial development of life in detail, just as
little are we hindered, on the other hand, from seeing
in the whole of this causal mechanism the means by
which the timeless universal consciousness of the in-
finite Spirit reproduces itself in that advancing move-
ment in time in which the terrestrial life becomes
conscious. -
It may be said that this view is just a hypothesis, in
contrast to which other hypotheses for the explana-
tion of nature stand with equal right, while none of
them all can yet be positively verified. Certainly all
theories regarding the ultimate basis of life and of
its development are hypothetical, and remain hypo-
thetical to the exact science which is directed to in-
dividual phenomena. Yet I think that the hypothesis
which has just been presented has the advantage that
it admits the right which is claimed for the ideal side
of the order of nature, the facts of our consciousness;
whereas in the materialistic hypotheses, which see in
mature merely the causal mechanism of forces, or
matter without spirit and end, the fact of the knowing
spirit itself always remains an uncomprehended and
incomprehensible riddle. Now, as was said at the be-
ginning of this lecture, if there belong to the whole of
the order of nature the two sides—namely, the knowing
spirit and the nature that is to be known—then the
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 159
higher claim to truth may well be admitted to belong
to that hypothesis which is able to explain, not merely
one of the two sides while leaving out the other, but
both sides equally, and which can conceive their re-
ciprocal correspondence from the unity of their com-
mon ground.
That the scientific consideration of nature, which
is directed to the causal conformity of phenomena
to law, is not the only justifiable way of regarding it,
may be proved even from the daily experience of
common life. For the impression of the beautiful
which nature makes upon the human mind is quite
independent of the intellectual knowledge which re-
lates to causal connection; and it presses itself upon
the learned investigator of nature, who perhaps denies
all Teleology in principle and all that is Ideal in nature,
with the same necessity as on the simple sense of the
uneducated man who has never formed any thoughts
regarding the grounds of the origin of phenomena,
and yet involuntarily feels and admires their sub-
limity and beauty. Now it is of course said that
the impression of the beautiful is a purely subjective
feeling, from which no conclusions whatever can be
drawn regarding the constitution of nature. This is,
indeed, so far correct, that the aesthetic sensation is
subjectively conditioned by the disposition, not merely
of the senses, but still more of the soul of the indi-
vidual; and that the aesthetic capacity, like every
160 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
other, must also be developed and cultivated to a
certain degree in order that the individual may re-
ceive the impression of the beautiful from nature.
And yet it does not follow from this that the sen-
sation of the beautiful is something merely subjec-
tive, an arbitrary product of our fantasy, which
we groundlessly assign to external nature when we
feel our aesthetic sense excited by nature. There
must just as certainly be an objective qualification
of real nature corresponding to this our subjective
Sensation, as there are real objects and their relations
in the world corresponding to our representations and
the connections of our representations. What, then,
may that qualification of nature be which we perceive
by means of the aesthetic sensation, and which we
have accordingly to conceive as the objective corre-
late of the subjective impression of the beautiful?
Rant already pointed out, and the more recent aes-
thetics have put it into still clearer light, that the
modification of nature which is perceived by us as
beauty is its immanent purposiveness, the harmonious
relation of the parts to the whole, the rational neces-
sity which governs the free play of forces, and which
establishes unity in a multiplicity. And hence the
teleological ideal background of reality, the Shining
of the Idea through phenomena, is that which we
feel as the beauty of nature; and assuredly we could
not feel it if the receptivity for it were not also
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 161
given in the rational constitution of Our Soul. In
this there is also established that correspondence of
the inner and outer, of subjective and objective ra-
tionality, which is the ground of all our knowing of
the world. We are therefore led from this side of the
contemplation of nature again to the Same conclusion,
that the beauty of nature stands to us as a revelation
of the creative spirit, which has also lent us the
capacity to recognise the glory of His works, and to
imitate it in Creating artistic forms.
We have considered the order of nature from its
two sides, the Ideal and Real, and have come on both
sides to the same harmonious result. We have recog-
mised in it the revelation of One principle, which is
universal consciousness as well as Omnipotence, and
which is therefore the revelation of a thinking and
willing spirit, or God. But here there arises a diffi-
culty which is too important for us to leave unnoticed.
We know thinking and willing only in the form of a
human consciousness, to which the limits of finiteness
essentially belong. Consciousness is a distinguishing
of the knowing subject from the known object to
which it stands opposed, and by which it is limited.
It does not itself create its material, but finds it
presented and given to it. It relates itself passively
to the impressions of things, and is therefore depen-
dent on a presented world. In like manner, the will
is a form of desire which presupposes a want in the
WOL. I. . L
162 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
willer, and it directs itself to objects in which it
finds the material and means of its activity, and at
the same time a restraint of that activity, or a re-
sistance which it has to overcome. All this appears
to presuppose a limited individual being which is
conditioned and limited by another. How then, it
may be asked, can such determination be transferred
or assigned to God without making Him finite, or
without making Him a man enlarged to gigantic pro-
portions, which is making Him a mythical phantom ?
Certainly this is a question which requires earnest
| consideration, which at all events warns us to great
caution in the transference of human qualities to the
Divine Being. Shall we, then, under the weight of
this difficulty, simply desist from speaking of a Think-
ing and Willing of God? Shall we deny Him conscious
spiritual life, and designate Him only as the uncon-
scious soul of the world, or still more indefinitely, as
an active force 7 I fear that if we were to follow
this suggestion we should get still further away from
the truth, and fall into a still worse error in a prac-
tical respect than would be the case in following an
uncritical Anthropomorphism.
The self-conscious and Self-determining life of man
is unquestionably the highest form of life which we
know at all. Now if it be admitted that in the case
of man it is confined to the limit of finitude, and Can-
not in this human finite form find place in God, yet
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 163
it does not yet follow from this that we must deny to
God the highest that we know from our experience.
As there cannot lie less in the cause than in the effect,
nor less in the whole than in the part, the infinite
principle of the world, which produces the human
spirit along with all else and embraces them in
itself, cannot possess the spiritual energy of life in less
measure, but rather in a much more perfect degree,
than man. But what gives the Self-conscious spirit
of man its peculiar prerogative above the sub-human
life is not the side of finiteness which it has in common ,
with the latter, but that Self-activity of the Ego, which Tº
distinguishes itself as the permanent and governing
unity, from the manifold and changing contents of
--~~~~
consciousness, and which even thereby raises itself
above dependence on the matter presented to it, and
lowers it to the position of a means Serving its free
Self. The usual opinion that Self-consciousness is only
the distinguishing of the Ego from the non-Ego is not
correct; rather is the Self-consciousness primarily and
essentially a distinguishing of itself from itself—that
is to Say, of the abiding and combining unity of the
self from the plurality and mutability of its contents.
So also the will is not primarily a desire that is directed
to external things; but it is self-determination—i.e.,
determination of the manifold divided expressions of
life, by the unity of the thinking which posits ends to
itself. Now it is incontestably true that conscious-
164 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ness and will in the case of man presuppose a given
material, and therefore the fact on the One hand of their
being conditioned by another, or of passivity and fin-
iteness; but it is not less certain on the other hand
that just that which distinguishes the human spirit
from the Sub-human life—namely, its self-conscious-
mess and its Self-determination—does not consist essen-
tially of passivity, but of the spontaneity of the Ego
as existing by itself, which in the changing of its ele-
ments asserts itself as the persistent and governing
unity of that which is manifold and changeable. This
free self-activity which unfolds its inner unity into a
multiplicity of living forms and states, in the act of
distinguishing itself, abides with itself, and makes
itself actually into that which it is in itself potenti-
ally: this is the spiritual being of man by which he
rises over all merely finite and conditioned existence,
and has a certain, although still weak, participation in
that infiniteness and unconditionedness which is orig-
imal and perfect only in God. What, then, can hinder
us from thinking these qualities, which constitute the
prerogative of the human mind over spiritless nature,
as being posited in God in a perfect manner without
their human limit 2 Why should we not accept some-
thing analogous to the human spirit in God, a self-
distinguishing of His single and eternal unchangeable
Self from the plurality and changeableness of His
operations, which form the world of divided temporal
IRE VELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 165
phenomena 3 Without accepting this view it would
be difficult to escape from the pantheistic opinion,
that the unity of God resolves itself into the coexist-
ence of phenomena in Space and their succession in
time, so that we can no longer find in Him what
we sought in Him—namely, the connecting and ruling
power of the world-order. If there is “a resting pole
in the flight of phenomena ’’ not merely in our repre-
sentations but in truth, in being itself, we shall have
to seek it in the living spirit of God, who asserts
Himself as the independent and permanent Lord of
the changing phenomena—as “Ring of the AEons”—
by this, that He distinguishes in His thinking, His
eternal inner essence from His changeable working
in the world. If the world is an order of events hap-
pening according to law and purpose, it is the revela-
tion of an ordering Spirit, who governs the becoming
or process of the world with His eternal thoughts, and
who therefore is not Himself merged in its process,
but knows and effectuates Himself as eternally the
same, in distinction from the temporal beings of the
world. It is certainly not to be denied that we can-
not form a representation of the infinite Spirit whose
life is pure self-activity without any conditionedness
and dependence, because that transcends all analogy
of our experience. But what follows from this 2 May-
hap that the thought of the unconditioned spirit, be-
cause not representable in the mind, is also not true 3
166 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Certainly not ; for the principle of the world is assur-
edly not representable, under whatever categories we
may attempt it. Yet according to what has been previ-
ously adduced, what corresponds best to the need which
our thinking has to recognise in the principle of the
world the sufficient ground of the order of the world,
is the category of the thinking spirit which knows and
determines itself; and accordingly we are entitled to
hold the view that it is this very category which is
most fitted for the designation of the divine essence,
and which comes nearest the truth. But what cer-
tainly follows from the unrepresentableness of the in-
finite Spirit is the warning that we are not to attempt
to make an image to ourselves of the inner life of God,
according to human analogy. All the questions which
refer to the inner nature of God, whether it be to His
hidden decrees, or to the way in which the existence
of the world is reflected in His inner being, or to how
His eternal essence is related to the succession of time
—whether there is also in Him a remembering and a
foreseeing, or whether to Him all is eternally the same
present, without past and future, all such and simi-
lar questions pass entirely beyond the limits of our
Rnowledge. In order to be able to answer them we
should necessarily have to possess God's omniscience.
Here the words of Scripture hold true, “My thoughts
are not your thoughts; for as high as the heavens are
above the earth, so high are my thoughts above your
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 167
thoughts.” How often have these words been for-
gotten by theologians and philosophers, who have had
the hardihood in their titanic Gnosticism to analyse
the inmost nature of Deity, and to mete it out in their
formulae As a reaction against this arrogant Gnosti-
cism, the faint-hearted Agnosticism of the present day
has a relative justification. It is, in fact, true that we
are able to know God only so far as He has revealed
Himself to us through His working in the whole order
of the world, and still continually so reveals Himself.
That beyond this side which is turned to us, this
being of God for us, there lies beyond another inner
side in the being of God for Himself, is a posi-
tion which has been established to us as true by
all that has been said above. But to try to know
anything more closely concerning the What and How
of this being of God for Himself, to embrace it in
Conceptions, to picture it in images, this we ought
never to presume to do. By doing so we should inevit-
ably fall into mythological fantasies which would
draw down the Holy mystery of the Godhead into
the Common distinctness of earthly things, and put
empty fabrications in place of the true revelation of
God in the order of the world,—fictions which would
have as little value for the religious consciousness of
the present day as the myths of the Gnostics had in
the Second century. If those who deny consciousness
and personality to God mean only thereby to say that
168 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
we cannot think of God as affected with human limita-
tions, there would be nothing to object to that position.
But the designations “unconscious,” “impersonal,” may
but too easily lead to the misunderstanding that the
divine being were less spiritual, consequently more
imperfect, than the human; and against this we must
decidedly protest. This misunderstanding would, how-
ever, be avoided by using the expressions “Supercon-
scious,” “superpersonal,” and accordingly I would hold
this to be an incontestable formula, in which all those
who are convinced of the ideal spiritual essence of the
principle of the world might perhaps unite.
With this view the ecclesiastical doctrine is found
to be in essential agreement; for, as is well known, the
teachers of the Church from the outset, in their deter-
mination of the divine attributes, have striven so
earnestly to strip off the human limits that very little
of the human analogy remains. But the Church has
undoubtedly always failed to draw the necessary con-
clusions from these her correct principles. While
her theologians accentuated in the strictest way the
timeless unchangeableness of God, they yet repre-
sented His omnipotence as revealing itself now in
the Order of the world, and again without and con-
trary to it as miracle - working arbitrariness. And
thereby they left the door open to the popular an-
thropomorphism, with all the adjuncts of the belief
in miracles and magic. To remove this inconse-
REVELATION IN THE NATURAL, ORDER. 169
quence, which has run through the ecclesiastical
System of doctrine since the time of Augustine, is a
pressing task of our time. It lies as much in the
interest of the moral purity of the faith as of the
Scientific knowledge of the world, that the abstract
Supra-naturalism of the popular conception of divine
Omnipotence — that inheritance of Christianity from
the Jewish and heathen ways of thinking—should
be at last overcome, and the insight disseminated that
God is Spirit, infinite Spirit, who as such reveals Him-
self in the whole of the rational order of the world,
according to law and purpose, to which order also the
inviolable conformity of nature to law belongs. It is
not in the Occasional interruption and disturbance of the
regulated Order by individual miracles, but in the con-
Stant regularity, purposiveness, and beauty of nature,
that we have to find the sublime revelation of the
Eternal Spirit, who, according to the words of Holy
Scripture, is a “God of Order,” and who has wisely
Ordered all His works. “The heavens declare the
glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handy-
work.”
LECTURE WI.
THE REWELATION OF GOD IN THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS
ORDER OF THE WORLD.
THE Order of the world of Nature, as we saw in the last
Lecture, is not to be understood, if it is contemplated
either only from the point of view of the Ego, or only
from that of presented things or objects. In the
former case one reaches only a world of thoughts but
not the real world ; in the latter case the ideal or
spiritual constituent, which lies in the conception of
the Order of the World, remains inexplicable, and that
order is resolved into a chaos of unconceived positive
data. The essence of the Order of nature consists rather
in the correlation of the thinking Ego and the thinkable
connection of things, a correlation in which we found
the very revelation of the creative reason as the highest
unity of thinking and being. And exactly the same
holds true in regard to the moral and religious Order of
the world. It, too, is only to be understood if we keep
' THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 171
in view the subjective and objective side—the personal |
consciousness of the world and the historical com-º:
munity of the peoples and religions, in their constant
reciprocal relation to each other, and their conditioned-
ness through one another. In this very correlation,
this reciprocal tie between the personal conscience and
moral Society, mankind have always recognised the
revelation of a universal or divine will combining the
two with each other. It is obvious that we no longer
regard this divine grounding of the moral order in the
mythological manner prevalent in the childhood of
mankind—namely, as a direct divine proclamation of
laws given as on Sinai, or enunciated by divine Oracles
as at Delphi. We have long since learned that human
history proceeds everywhere naturally. But it is asked
whether the explanation of the moral law would be
already exhaustively given, if we only gave heed to the
external process through which the moral practices and
laws form and alter themselves from motives of utility
and of selfish interests; and whether there is not also
here concealed under the mechanism of the natural
motives a moral idea, a higher teleological Order, which
betrays its transcendental origin in the unconditioned-
ness of the feeling of duty 2
I have already, in the second of these Lectures,
attempted to show that the characteristic of the moral
feeling is not explained but denied, when it is made a
mere product of Society led by egoistic interests. It is
172 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
indeed true that our moral consciousness develops
itself only in reciprocity with society, that it receives
its definite contents, its knowledge of what is to be re-
garded as right or wrong, in detail, primarily from the
moral practices and tenets of society. But what the
distinction of right and wrong generally indicates—
namely, that right raises an unconditioned claim to our
obedience, that it puts our will internally under obliga-
tion quite apart from external consequences—this we
could only have learned by instruction from others,
unless we had had in our rational constitution by
nature the “Moral Sense”—that is, the capacity and
the impulse for the judging and ordering of our mani-
fold relations and motives, according to their relative
value for the rational purpose of the whole. The
“Conscience” is certainly not a sum of inmate ideas, a
Code of law born in us, for in that case the mutability
and manifoldness of the moral opinions of men could
not possibly be explained. But just as little is the
conscience merely a copy of the moral practices and
tenets of Society that have become actual at any time,
for then the unconditionedness of its obligatory and
judicial authority would be inexplicable. And par-
ticularly inexplicable would be the fact of experience
that the judgment of conscience puts itself not seldom
in direct opposition to the practice and tenets of
society; that for the sake of the higher ideal right, it
denies and combats the right that exists, as we see in
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 173
all the reformers and heroes of moral progress. An
unprejudiced consideration of these different facts of
experience will, as I believe, lead to the result that in
the conscience there are two different factors bound up
into unity—namely, an inmate or a priori factor, and an
a posteriori or empirical factor. On the inmate element
rests the always self-identical, abiding, formal character
of the judgment of conscience, the unconditionedness
with which it commands and judges; while upon the
acquired element rests the manifoldness and change-
ableness, or the historical conditionedness, of its par-
ticular contents. Kant had well considered that first
factor of the conscience, and had emphatically accentu-
ated the fact that it is the demand of the reason which
speaks to us so categorically. But Kant stopped half-
way in referring the moral law to the subjective reason
of the separate individuals, to their thought of the simi-
lar mode of acting of all, to this merely formal thinking
without any essential determination of purpose; and
as he also again identified this lawgiving reason with
the freedom of individuals, there resulted the strange
thought that the freedom of each individual gives itself
the law to which he and all others owe obedience.
But how can a law which the freedom of every one
makes, be binding upon the freedom of all ? Nay more,
how can it be unconditionally obligatory even for the
freedom of the subject himself who has made it 2 Will
it not be capable of being denied and annulled at any
174 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
time by the same freedom from which it is thought to
have sprung 2 In truth the matter stands, after all,
quite otherwise: we find the moral law as a norm
which is in mowise produced by our freedom, but which
is rather presupposed by it, and is super-ordinated to
it; and to this norm we feel ourselves bound—we owe
obedience to it whether we will or not. An authority
demanding obedience like this, to which each individ-
ual as well as others knows himself bound to subordi-
nate himself, cannot possibly spring out of the freedom
of the individual person, just as little as it can out of
the compulsion of Society which could only produce a
compulsive “must " but not the moral obligation of the
conscience. We shall accordingly recognise in the
conscience the manifestation of the universal rational
will which forms the better self, the essential nature
of man in accordance with the divine image, which
binds the individual to a purposive order of the uni-
verse, a kingdom of good or of God, and which is
therefore rightly called a revelation of the holy will
of God. t
But in Seeing in the conscience, on the side of its
a priori factor, the subjective revelation of the divine
will, we do not mean thereby to exclude in any way the
psychological mediation and historical conditionedness
of the judgments of conscience. As the laws of our
thinking, which are originally inherent in our theoreti-
cal mind, can only exert and develop themselves on the
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 175
material of knowledge that is presented by the world,
and thus rise to our consciousness, so is it also with
the norm of our moral judgments of value, which is
Originally inherent in our practical reason; it develops
itself and comes into our consciousness only in reciprocal
intercourse with society. The forms of the social order
of life which arise in the course of human coexistence,
and which correspond to the purposes of human com-
munity, awaken in the individual, as he grows up in
the midst of them, the innate rational impulse which
aims at the establishment of an inner order, at the
harmonising of the manifold impulses and motives of
our nature. This inner rational impulse corresponds
to the external order of Society with sympathetic recep-
tivity; it finds in that Order spirit of its spirit, and
recognises it therefore as a justified authority. But as
the inner moral capacity then develops and strengthens
itself under the education of the external authority, the
matured personality comes to such independence in its
moral judgment that it begins to test even the Social -
authorities and observances founded thereon as to how
far they correspond to the absolute authority, or to
what is rational and good in itself. Only in So far as
the right that exists in Society stands in harmony with
the idea of right that presses itself internally upon
such an individual does he recognise that right as
an unconditionally binding authority—a distinct proof
of the fact that this recognition has its proper basis,
176 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
not in external facts, not in the brutal violence of the
power that gives itself out for right, but in the idea
of right that unconditionally binds the conscience, of
which idea all positive right is always only an imperfect
and perfectible expression. In this Idea of Right the
religious consciousness recognises the revelation of the
holy will of God; and this Idea creates an Organism
for itself in the external right of the Social Order, in
which organism, although it is never perfectly realised,
but is always striving to realise itself more perfectly,
the religious consciousness recognises the revelation of
the righteousness of God.
The religious conviction that the divine righteousness
rules over human fates, appears to be opposed by the
experience that right often succumbs and that wrong
triumphs, that the just man suffers and perishes, while
the godless man enjoys an undisturbed prosperity. It
is from these experiences that have arisen those
doubts of the righteousness of the government of the
world which we find not merely among the heathem,
but which have likewise received touching expression
at the hands of many of the Biblical writers (as in
Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job). But belief always again
rescued itself from these mysteries of the actual world
through the hope of future adjustment; it demanded that
the proof of the retributive justice which appeared to
be missing in our present experience must show itself
in Some sort of adjustment and establishment of the
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 177
right order in this world or the next. From this
resulted the so-called proof for God’s existence drawn
from the idea of retribution. Kant appropriated it in
his well-known postulate that there must be a God who
guarantees the establishment of the highest good in the
combination of happiness with virtue. Thus appre-
hended, this “Proof” is naturally untenable, for objec-
tion is rightly raised against it by the question, What,
then, gives us, from the standpoint of the rigoristic
Rantian morals, the right to demand a rewarding of
virtue by happiness? Besides, Hume had already re-
minded us that it is a very arbitrary conclusion to in-
fer from the failing of the wished-for retribution in that
sphere of reality which we alone know, its coming in a
problematic future. Of course, viewed logically, this
is quite inadmissible; but viewed psychologically, the
judgment presents itself more favourably: for what
else ultimately is the confident demand of a future
retribution than just the childlike expression of the
firm faith that right must still remain right, and show
itself to be the victorious power over reality, whereas
wrong must be confounded ? This is the faith in the
“Moral World-Order,” which Fichte explained as the
kernel of the Kantian postulate and put in the place of
the belief in God, and which also the ethical idealists
of the present day (such as Matthew Arnold) declare
to be the kernel of religion in general.
We may certainly honour the moral value of this
WOL. I. MI
178 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
faith, and yet doubt whether it is fitted to be a sub-
stitute for faith in God. To me it cannot but appear
that the conception of the “Moral World-Order” suffers
in most of those who hold it from an obscurity which
is more or less concealed by rhetoric and a wavering
between two very different things—namely, between
the represented ideal of an order which ought to be,
and the actual yet not ideal order in the world of
experience. The latter order, as being a fact of ex-
perience, cannot be an object of faith; and besides,
it suffers from so great defects that we can be little
edified by its contemplation, but feel ourselves driven
to rise above it to the Ideal. The Ideal, on the other
hand, however perfect we may think it, always suffers
from the one defect, that it is merely a representation
of our subjective wishes and hopes, and is separated
by a wide gulf from the world of the actual. Then
the great question arises, How can the Ideal become
actual and the actuality ideal 2 The solution of this
decisive question appears to me to be hopeless So long
as there is not known, besides the unreal Ideal and
the unideal reality, a third thing in which the syn-
thesis of the two sides would be guaranteed. For if
the “Moral World-Order" were only the subjective
thought of myself and of certain other men, it would
be impossible to see what would ever entitle us to
expect its realisation in the objective world. Such
a thought would then have no more significance than
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180 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
less comes in the whole of humanity to an ever
firmer and purer existence. All the resistance which
the realisation of the good finds everywhere in detail
cannot hinder us from recognising its victorious pro-
gress in the whole of the world's history; and the very
fact that it constantly asserts itself only in conflict
with the resisting will of individuals—may more, that
their very resistance contributes as a spur and stimu-
lus to the ever richer and more powerful develop-
ment of the moral idea—enables us to recognise the
more distinctly the revelation of the divine will as
the ground and law of the moral process of humanity.
There lies a deep truth in the words of the apostle,
“For God hath concluded them all in disobedience,
that He might have mercy upon all.” The holy right-
eousness of God does not exert itself in order that it
may keep men in the unfree innocence of childhood,
and prevent any disunion of their will with the good;
but it celebrates its highest triumph in this, that it
reconciles those who are so disunited, and transforms
sinners into Saints.
We have thus already come upon the revelation of
God in Religion. That it is customary to limit the con-
ception of “Revelation ” to Religion, or at least to refer
that conception to it in quite a special sense, has so far
a good reason in its favour, Seeing that here more than
anywhere else God enters into the human conscious-
meSS immediately as God—i.e., as the one foundation
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 181
and concluding goal of the whole World-Order and of
the whole life of man,—as the Eternal One who, as it
were, unveils Himself to the finite Spirit face to face.
But the opinion held that on that account the religious
revelation is absolutely different from all other revela-
tion, and that as purely “supernatural” it stands out
of comparison with—may, even in opposition to—all
revelation in the natural and moral order of the world,
is an error of dogmatic reflection which cannot be
maintained before an unprejudiced view of religious
history. Religious revelation is also an ordered reve-
lation, mediated both by the religious self-conscious-
ness and by the religious fellowship. In the latter
the individual finds the accumulated sum of religious
experiences, which constitutes the common conscious-
ness of a community, and which find expression in their
forms of belief and worship. Through the communi-
Cation and appropriation of this religious common con-
Sciousness, the individual religious life is awakened
and formed, just as the individual moral life is by the
Social moralisation, and as the theoretical life is by the
universal fund of knowledge and culture in the sur-
rounding circle. But this capability of cultivation on
the part of the individual presupposes a corresponding
Spiritual capacity, the rational impulse innate in the
man, which as theoretical strives towards the ordering
of his representations under the idea of Truth, as prac-
tical towards the ordering of the impulses of his will
182 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
under the idea of the Good, and as religious towards
a supreme unity of all that is true and good under the
idea of God. The “religious impulse” is therefore an
exercise of the same universal rational capacity which
lies at the basis of science and morality; but it is
the potentiated closing exercise of that capacity, for it
tends not merely towards the ordering of the One or
other side of consciousness, but towards the harmonious
ordering of the whole personal life, under the highest
regulative idea, the subjective correlate of the absolute
principle of the universe. But we only become con-
Scious of this innate religious capacity within us, as in
the case of the theoretical and moral capacities, by
the fact that it actually develops itself; and, moreover,
it can only develop itself in reciprocal intercourse with
the religious community, of which the individual is a
member. This coexistence and separate existence of
the two sides, of the individual religious subject and of
the historical community, constitutes the “Religious
World-Order,” which is the highest stage of the order
of the world, and the one in which the revelation of
God completes itself in the most spiritual form. The
religious revelation is therefore to be sought neither
merely in the pious Soul of the individual, who indeed
only obtains his definite content in reciprocal inter-
course with his community; nor is it merely to be
obtained in the historical life of the religious com-
munity, which indeed only contains the sum of the
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 183
religious experiences which have been handed down
through many generations by the intercourse of the
individuals with each other. The objective religion of
the historical community is a product of the historical
development of the religious capacity of its individuals,
and is at all times capable and needful of further de-
velopment through new contributions of the individuals.
It is just in this advancing development of the religious
capacities of our race, under the reciprocal furtherance
of the individuals through the community and of the
community through the individuals, that the Ordered
course of religious revelation consists. And it shows
itself therein to be as conformable to law as the revela-
tion in the natural and moral order of the world. If
we turn our attention especially to those epochs and
phenomena of the history of religion to which the
conception “Revelation ” is wont to be applied in a
pre-eminent sense, we perceive everywhere, within as
well as without the Biblical religion, the same rela-
tion of inner and outer, personal and Social, traditional
and new, as that belongs generally to the Order of the
historical life.
It is a defect of the present realistic theory of de-
velopment that it underestimates or entirely overlooks
the significance of personality in history, and endeavours
to find the active forces of progress only in the masses.
The masses, however, are never spiritually Creative.
All new world-moving ideas and ideals have proceeded
184 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
from individual personalities, and even they have not
arbitrarily devised them or found them out by laborious
reflection, as men find out scientific doctrines by inves-
tigation; but they have received them by that involun-
tary intuition, which is also participated in by the
artistic genius, and which everywhere forms the privi-
lege of Original genius, to whose eye the essence of
things and the destination of men are disclosed. But
certain as it is that every revelation is primarily a
personal living experience, received and formed in the
depths of the individual genius, yet in the thousand-
fold echo which its communication awakens in others,
there is always betrayed the fact that there has only
come to right expression in it what had already slum-
bered unconsciously or lay darkly divined in the souls
of others. Not that on that account the revelation
is to be considered as a product of the common con-
sciousness of its time—that is, of the opinions of the
majority just then dominant. To these opinions the
prophet of higher truth stands at all times rather in a
polemical relation, as shown by innumerable examples
in history, from the time of the Old Testament prophets
down to the present day. Yet in all such cases the reve-
lation of the religious genius is the expression of what
the best men of their time have divined and longed
for, the unveiling of their own better self, the fulfil-
ment of their own highest hopes. It is just upon this
that the power of a revelation proceeding from an in-
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 185
dividual to form a community, rests. While the pro-
phet testifies by word and deed of the divine truth
which has become revealed to him, and which domin-
ates his whole personal life, he works through the col-
lective impression of his personality attractively upon
others, awakens in them the same spiritual experiences,
inspires them for the same ideals, and thus founds a
common higher life, a community of believers in which
the revelation of the One becomes the common con-
sciousness of the many. In this very power to awaken
faith, to produce a common Spiritual life in many, lies
the self-proof which the revelation needs for its truth
wherever it appears. Along with this “Proof of the
Spirit and of Power” which he who is seized by it im-
mediately experiences in his believing Surrender to it,
any other proofs from external “Signs and Wonders”
are superfluous and useless; for as all revelation is
originally an inner living experience—the Springing up
of religious truth in the heart—no external event can
belong in itself to revelation, no matter whether it be
naturally or supernaturally brought about. At most it
may be an accompanying sign of Such revelation by
which the authority of the prophet is attested. But
even the attestation of the person of the prophet is
effected much more Surely by the collective impression,
and the effect of his appearance upon the world of his
time and after-ages, than by extraordinary single miracles
which he may have performed. In the case of these
186 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
miracles it always remains very difficult, even for his
contemporaries, and still more so for those who live in
later times, to distinguish what actually happened from
the embellishment of the narrators and the additions of
legends; and then the interpretation of what happened
must still remain so problematical that a firm convic-
tion of religious truth is not capable of being founded
upon it. Let us not forget that even Jesus Christ was
So far from binding religious belief to external signs,
that He rather reproves those for their unbelief who
sought after such signs; and He referred them instead
of this to the “signs of the time”—i.e., to the prognos-
tications and warnings which the historical situation
of the present contains for the intelligent mind.
That the religious revelation is a historically ordered
revelation is shown further by this, that it never
appears unprepared or abruptly, but always “when the
fulness of the time has come”—that is to say, when
the inner and outer religious and social conditions of
its possibility are given, when the average common
Consciousness is So far matured that it is able to ap-
prehend the new ideas, when the external state of
Society is favourable to a spiritual crisis and movement,
and especially when the need of the time increases the
longing of the heart for higher truth. Then the new
appears as the “fulfilment” of the old, in the negative
and positive Sense, abolishing what was untrue in it,
and preserving and clarifying what in it was true. It
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 187
is a regularly recurring characteristic of all religious
heroes, reformers, and founders of religion, that they
never wish merely to bring in a new thing; but with
their opposition to the immediate actuality of the
present, they yet always appear to attach themselves
to the old, and even to set before themselves openly as
their end the restoration of the purer faith of the
fathers. Thus the prophets of Israel appealed to the
fathers of Israel, Jesus appealed to the prophets, and
Luther to apostles and prophets. Yet in all such cases
the attachment to the old was not simply mere restora-
tion of it, for in history there are no simple repetitions.
Old truths are put by their application to new relations
in time, under new points of view; they are brought
into new combinations; certain sides which were for-
merly important retreat into the background, new posi-
tions become central, and new consequences are drawn.
Thus out of the old there actually always arises a new
thing which now corresponds to the wants of its pres-
ent time, in the same way as the old had corresponded
to the earlier stage of human development. The con-
tinuity and conformity to law of the development, as dis-
tinguished from a radical revolution, consists in this,
that there is not simply a mere breach made with the
traditional, but that the valuable product of the past
is received and made a constituent part of higher truth,
and is therefore preserved and at the same time de-
veloped, while that which in the old had significance only
188 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
for its time is set aside, whether it be by direct conflict
or by silent repulsion. This is the immanent criticism
which carries on its function in all living development,
and not less in the development of the religious revela-
tion. That in this sphere the criticism which history
itself in its progress performs on the old is recognised
with more difficulty than in other spheres, and is in-
deed very often entirely denied, is easily explained from
the conservatism of the religious consciousness, which
fears for the security of its faith, if it were to admit
the humanly imperfect even in the history of revela-
tion and the capability of a higher perfection in every
form of development in time. And yet it ought not
to be difficult to perceive that we men are never able
to possess the treasure of divine truth otherwise than
in the earthen vessels of our limited forms of conscious-
ness, which are obscured by many an error and pre-
judice. Dr James Martineau says excellently on this
subject: “Whatever higher inspiration visits our world
must use our nature as its organ, must take the mould
of our respective capacity and mingle with the existing
life of thought and affection. How them can it both
assume their form and escape their limitation ? how
flow into the currents of our minds without being
diluted there ?” 1
However high a religious hero may tower above his
time, yet he is always in many respects a child of his
* Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 289.
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 189
age, prepossessed by its ideas and expectations. Nay
more, he can only work upon his age by the fact that
he has his spiritual roots in it, and consequently also
still has a certain share of its limitations; and hence
the new, which he reveals, can always pass only rela-
tively beyond the old, and only gradually loosen itself
entirely from its bonds. Revelation in unveiling new
truths always sets new tasks for the advancing know-
ledge of its believers. Thus Christ Himself says in the
Gospel of John : “I have yet many things to say unto
you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when
He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into
all truth.” And the apostle, who had recognised the
“new” of Christianity in its relation to Judaism more
acutely than all the others, yet also confesses of himself:
“For now we see through a glass darkly; now I know
in part.” “Not as if I had already attained, either
were already perfect; but I follow after, if that I may
apprehend.”
^ The historical order of the religious revelation, that
it is a development from lower to ever higher stages,
a development in which the new is always at Once
the fulfilment and the criticism of the old, becomes
nowhere more clearly apparent than in the relation
of Christianity to Judaism,”“Think not that I am
come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not
come to destroy, but to fulfil.” This expression, which
stands Solemnly at the culminating-point of the Sermon
190 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
on the Mount, has been authoritative for the Christian
Church at all times. It decidedly rejected from the
beginning the opinion of Marcion, that the Christian
God is another than the God of the Old Testament, as
a heresy; and it has recognised in the law of Moses
and in the prophets the revelation of the one true
God, who “at sundry times, and in divers manners,
Spake in time past unto the fathers by the pro-
phets,” and who has “in these last days spoken unto
us by His Son.” (Heb. i. 1, 2). And in fact, if a
religious revelation is to be found anywhere, it is
certainly to be found in the spirit of the Hebrew
prophets, who knew that God is the will of the morally
good. This knowledge, which is of infinite reach and
range, arose among them many centuries before Plato,
and they grasped this truth still more purely than
that profound thinker. For while in Plato the morally
good, in the genuine Greek way, still blends in one
with the beautiful, and is therefore not yet recognised
in its full purity as the sublime ideal in its deep
opposition to natural existence; in the Hebrew pro-
phets, on the other hand, God is the holy will of the
good, who, infinitely exalted above human weakness,
makes His absolutely perfect purpose to men the law
of their life, and lays claim to unconditional obedience.
And in the light of this moral ideal they have not
merely judged the life of individuals, but have also
interpreted the fates of their people and of the nations
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 191
of the world generally. Heathemism has indeed a
nature-religion and a nature-philosophy, but it has
neither a religious view of history nor a philosophy
of history; for it knew no absolute final moral purpose
to the attainment of which the fates of the nations
were to serve as means. Israel, on the other hand,
knew such a purpose of history—namely, the realisa-
tion of a kingdom of God, of a human fellowship and
community corresponding to the holy will of God.
In the light of this ideal the present always appeared
insufficient to the prophets, and consequently their
look was constantly directed to the future. Their
belief in God was at the same time the hope of a
divine future for their people and for human society;
it was the spur which prevented them from resting
Sated and Satisfied with any given things, but gave
their wills infinite energy to combat the opposition
of the present to their idea, and to keep their gaze
fixed on the ideal time of Salvation as the goal of
their longing, striving, combating, and enduring. Thus
did they become the path-finders and leaders of our
race upon its toilSome way to the moral ideal of
humanity. And because they recognised this goal as
the purpose of God, they found everywhere in the
living events of history the ruling of a purposive
righteousness and wisdom, which the course of nature,
as well as the politics of the powers of the world, was
compelled to subserve as a means in order to carry
192 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
forward the eternal end to its fulfilment—that is to
Say, as a means for the chastisement, the purification,
the education of the people of God, out of whom the
kingdom of God was to come. Thus did they become
—not for Israel alone, but for mankind—the teachers
of the religious view of the world which contemplates
all that is perishing, all that is transitory, Sub Specie
aetermitatis; which makes the brightening gleam of
hope fall upon all that is dark in the present ; and
which supports man's power of enduring and combat-
ing, by fixing his gaze upon the infinite infallible vic-
tory of the divine cause, the good and the true.
And yet even the illumined gaze of these Old Testa-
ment men of God was still confined within the limits
of their own people and of their own age. True as the
thought was, that history is the means used by the
divine righteousness for the realisation of the kingdom
of God, yet the idea of this kingdom was still imperfect,
because it was too narrowly limited to the particular
people of Israel. And from this there resulted a
sensible obscuration of the idea of God—as if God
were only the God of the Jews and not also of the
heathem, as if He had only benevolence for the
former and malevolence for the latter;-an opinion
which in the post-prophetic Judaism became that
religious pride which we encounter in such a repug-
mant form in the Pharisees of the time of Jesus. In
like manner the true thought that the will of God
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 193
is the law of our life still suffers in Judaism from a
sensible defect. While the will of God was identified
with the sum of the individual dogmas which grew out
of the priestly legislation in the course of centuries,
and when the same unchangeable authority was
assigned to all these, and their exact fulfilment was
made the chief thing, there arose that external legality
which put the truly pious disposition below the perfor-
mance of religious observances, and turned religion into
a legal relationship of performance and reward. In
such a relation no inner unity of the human will
with the divine will is reached, but man sees in God
Only the retributive Judge before whose punishment
he trembles or to whose reward he lays claim. Slav-
ish fear and self-righteous reckoning with God are the
unlovely features of this Jewish religion of law, to
which the ethical idealism of the prophets had de-
generated, and these traits strike us most visibly in
Pharisaism.
It was this side of the Old Testament religion to
which Christianity took a critical and destroying
attitude, while it revealed a new and higher knowledge
of God. “For,” says Paul, “ye have not received the
spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the
Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” In
the pure soul of Jesus the God of the prophets and
BSalms had become revealed as the merciful Father
who maketh His sun to rise on the just and the unjust,
WOL. I. N
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THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 195
of the divine spirit. He recognises, therefore, that
God does not as the holy lawgiver only command the
good, but that as the holy Spirit of love and inspiration
he creates and effectuates the good itself (as Augustine
said, “Jube quod vis et da quod jubes”). But then God is
the good not merely in the sense of a sublime far-off
Ideal, which stands in judgment over against the weak
existence of men; but this Ideal is at the Same time an
ever active reality; it is the power to realise itself
in the hearts of men and in the historical life of man-
kind; it is the power of the world, the truth of Being
in general.
If we now look back from this height of the Christian
knowledge of God to the development of the conscious-
ness of God in the history of religion, it can hardly
escape us that that high point was the goal to which
the whole development strove from the beginning, and
which is already prefigured in the religious capacity of
man. For in some form or other these two things are
always contained together in the belief in God: an Ideal
of what ought to be, and that this is, at the same time,
the power and the ground of real being. That God is
the Ideal of moral goodness, that He is the Holy Will,
was the revelation of Israel. But that this will of
Goodness is the love which communicates itself to us,
and which has constituted and guided nature and
history, in order to realise itself in humanity as a king-
dom of love—this is the revelation of Christianity, in
196 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
which all the religious presentiment and longing of
humanity before Christ comes to its fulfilment. Now,
as the end of a development must also always be
thought of as its ground and law, we shall now be
entitled to say that the love which was recognised at
the culminating-point of the history of religion as the
essence of God, was even from the very beginning the
ground of the human consciousness of God, which
indeed could only disclose itself gradually to the Con-
Sciousness of men, in the slow march of the human
development, as the content of their belief in God.
This is the sense in which we use the term when we
designate the revelation of God in the religious Order
of the World as revelation of His love.
“Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is
restless till it has come to rest in Thee.” This beauti-
ful expression of Augustine is in fact the key to the
whole history of religion. In the universal experience
that man's nature is so constituted that some kind of
consciousness of God is inevitable to him, although it
may be only a presentiment or a search, we must
recognise the original revelation of the love of God.
All human consciousness of God presupposes a self-
communication of God, a working of the divine Logos
in the finite spirit. Now as the consciousness of God
is a constitutive element of the human species, it may
be rightly said that the whole of humanity is the object
of the divine love, that it is an Immanuel and son of
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 197
God, that its whole history is a continual incarnation
of God—as indeed it is also said in Scripture that we
are a divine offspring, and that we live and move and
have our being in God. But what lies potentially in
the human consciousness of God, is not on that account
also manifestly revealed to it from the beginning. If
the heathen peoples generally attributed benevolent
sentiments to their particular protecting deities, yet
they were far from knowing the essential mature of the
Deity, as such, to be Love; rather did the course of
nature, with its incalculable vicissitudes and constantly
threatening dangers, appear to them to point to a mal-
evolent, capricious and envious, jealous and malicious
disposition in the divine powers that rule in nature.
In Herodotus the envy of the Deity still plays a pro-
minent part in human history. It was Plato who first
rejected this opinion, and recognised unenvious good-
ness as the essential nature of the Deity. But this
purer belief in God did not become popular; the en-
lightenment of Epicureanism put chance in the place
of the divine government, and held the gods to
be indifferent spectators of human fates, while the
superstitious dread of evil demons increased among
the multitude with the pessimistic mood of the time.
In the prophets of Israel there are found glorious
expressions concerning the love of Jahve to His elect
people; but beside this love stands the hate of Jahve
against the enemies of Israel. “Jacob have I loved,
198 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and Esau have I hated.” In the Psalms the religious
relationship is individualised; the feeling of the pious
man rises often to such an intimate familiarity with
the merciful and gracious God, that it comes home to
us like a Christianity before Christ. But the increas-
ing legal character of the Jewish religion brought along
with it the consequence that the fundamental view of
God was that of the just judge, and that it left no room
for love. In addition to this came the fact that So long
as the manifestation of the divine benevolence was
sought pre-eminently in external happiness, the ex-
perience of the misfortune of the just always awak-
ened those doubts of the goodness of God of which
the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes bear witness. The
idea of God in Judaism had not yet advanced to a pure
spiritual morality, and therefore could neither free
itself from the limits of the popular view, nor even
exhibit itself in contrast to the evil of the world and
the sin of man as the overcoming and redeeming power.
It was the Christian faith in God that first rose to the
pure ethical idealism which knows God absolutely as
spirit and love, as the unconditioned will of the good
which is neither bound to national limits nor with-
draws powerlessly before the sin of men, but which
rather reveals its victorious power most wonderfully to
the world of sinners itself—not as punishing justice,
but as redeeming grace which makes all new and good,
which transforms sinners into children of God and
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORDER. 199
unites the divided humanity into a kingdom, nay, into
a family of God, a fellowship of brethren who are
animated by one spirit, the holy Spirit of love.
As certain as it is that the highest revelation of God
is first to be found in this faith, it would as certainly
be a great error if we were to separate this high stage
of revelation from the other stages of it, or even to
put it in opposition to the revelation in the moral
order of the world. This error appeared in a pecul-
iarly striking form among those heretics of the Second
century who opposed the good God of the Gospel to
the just but not good God of the old covenant—heretics
whom the Church decidedly repudiated from the be-
ginning. But the same error is committed very fre-
quently in a finer form even within the Church,
wherever divine grace is represented as an arbitrary
sympathy of God with some at the cost of others, and
of the righteousness of God, as if God were to suppress
His righteousness in certain cases and make grace take
the place of right in Some individuals. This is a crude
anthropomorphism which has brought much confusion
into the Christian idea of God. The divine love, even
as forgiving grace, is always one with His holy right-
eousness; for it is one and the same Will of goodness
which in its self-communication to sinful men immov-
ably asserts its holy purpose, in releasing man from
his sin and transforming him into a new man, who
“lives in the spirit” and is thereby freed from the
200 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
guilt and damnableness of sin. The forgiveness of sin
is everywhere one with the subdual of it. The invio-
lability of the moral order of the world is therefore not
annulled even by the Christian order of Salvation. It
Only ceases to be a judging power against man, seeing
that it has itself become the living power of love in
him, which voluntarily subordinates itself as a sub-
Servient member, to the purpose of the whole. Grace
can therefore only come into operation where the
moral conditions are present for its reception, and
these moral conditions cohere with the universal state
of the moral development, as it is brought about in
the life of society, under the co-operation of the mani-
fold educative factors. The working of grace is there-
fore as little an arbitrary working as is that of Omni-
potence. As the latter is regulated by the laws of the
natural world, so is the former by the laws of the
moral world; as the divine Omnipotence reveals itself,
not in the annulment or interruption of the order of
nature, but in the purposeful constitution and preser-
vation of nature as a means for the spiritual and
moral life, even so the love of God reveals itself, not
in the annulment of the moral order of the world, but
in the purposeful government of history, through which
it becomes the education and training for the highest
end of the kingdom of God.
If we now finally reflect upon the omeness of the
whole Order of the world, how it exhibits one purpos-
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LECTURE WII.
THE RELIGIOUS VIEW OF MAN.
I. HIS ESSENTIA D, NATURE AND ITIS ACTUALITY. .
“LORD, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him 2
and the son of man, that Thou visitest him 2 ” This
utterance of the Psalmist is a classical expression of the
two aspects which we always meet beside each other in
the religious contemplation of man—namely, his low-
liness, powerlessness, and need of help, in contrast to
the divine loftiness; and again, on the other hand, his
highness and dignity in contrast to the other creatures,
his affinity with God and his being made in conformity
with the image of God. The latter side we find ex-
pressed in most religions under different legendary
forms. To it belong, in the first place, the many
legends of the divine descent of men, whether it be of
all men or at least the primeval ancestors of a par-
ticular people, or even of individual prominent persons,
heroes, kings, and wise men, of prehistoric times. To
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 205
it further belong the legends of the creation of men
by special divine contrivance. For example, accord-
ing to the Biblical legend, God, with His own hands,
formed the body of Adam out of earth and breathed
into him the breath of life, so that man thus appears
as a mixed product of earthly matter and divine spirit.
In the later legend of the creation in the Bible, con-
tained in Genesis i., God created man after His own
image and likeness as the close and crown of the whole
work of creation, with the destination to rule over the
earth and animals. By the “Image of God” is here
meant the whole Superiority of man over the sub-
human creation, his higher bodily and spiritual equip-
ment, which makes him capable of lordship over the
earth.
The same thought of the distinguishing dignity of
man is further expressed in the legends of an initial
ideal state, a “Golden Age” of innocence and happiness,
from which men sank by their own guilt into their
present sorrowful condition. Well known is the legend
in Hesiod of the Golden Age under the lordship of
Eronos, when the happy human race lived free from
cares and toils, in untroubled youth and cheerfulness,
with a superabundance of the gifts which the earth
furnished of herself: the race was indeed not immortal,
but it experienced death even as a Soft sleep. After
the dying out of this happy race, then followed the
Ages which became worse and worse: the Silver Age,
206 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the Brazen Age, and the Iron Age, each always more
imperfect than the preceding one, both in moral worth
and in natural wellbeing. In the legend of Prome-
theus, Epimetheus, and Pandora, the transition out of
the state of mature into civilisation appears on the one
hand as an achievement of the striving Spirit of man,
which knows how to procure for itself the heavenly gift
of fire. But on the other hand, it also appears as an act
of godless insolence, which the titanic man Prometheus
must atone for by torturing bonds, till, becoming con-
scious of the impotence of his defiance, he is released
out of his distress by the merciful help of the divine
man Heracles, and is reconciled with the heavenly ones;
while human weakness and wantonness—represented
in Epimetheus—are punished by the box of Pandora
out of which proceed all the evils and diseases which
had been as yet unknown to the simple life of nature.
According to the Persian legend, likewise, the first
human pair was a good creation of the all-wise Spirit,
Ahura, who had breathed into them his own breath.
But soon the primeval men allowed themselves to be
seduced by the hostile spirit Angromainyu into lying
and idolatry, whereby the evil spirits obtained power
over them and the earth, and spoiled the good creation.
According to the Hebrew legend, which seems to have
close relations with the Babylonian, the first parents
found themselves at the beginning in the Garden of
Eden under happy relationships, at peace with God and
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 2O7
mature, and in childish innocence not ashamed of their
makedness. But when they transgressed the prohibi-
tion not to eat of the tree of knowledge, then they
indeed really became knowing, for they began to be
ashamed of their nakedness; but they had to atone for
this progress in culture by the loss of the happiness of
Paradise, in place of which came labour, pain, and
death. Then, indeed, they made many useful and
artistic inventions, but with every further step in civ-
ilisation they always removed further from God. Thus,
according to this narrative too, a happy state of child-
like innocence and naturalness forms the beginning;
it is lost by man's Own guilt, and in its place comes the
career of culture with its titanic striving after equality
with God and with manifold miseries, distress, and
death. Wellhausen has strikingly summed up the
common ground-thought of all these legends in the
proposition, “It is the yearning-song which goes
through all the peoples: having attained to historical
civilisation, they feel the worth of the goods which
they have sacrificed for it.” Already the later Jewish
theology, and still more the Christian theology since
Augustine, interpreted the Sense of the narrative of
Genesis iii., contrary to the original meaning of its
words, as signifying that the primeval state was not
merely a state of childish innocence, but a state of
moral and religious perfection, wisdom, and holiness;
and that there was brought in by the Fall, not merely
208 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the external evils of life, but a complete perversion of
human nature, with loss of the divine image, and all
freedom for good, and the dominion of evil lust and of
demons.
To the scientific view, it is self-evident that all
such legends of an ideal state of humanity at the
beginning are devoid of claim to any historical value.
They contradict too palpably the fundamental law
of all human history, that mankind must gradually
win all truth and goodness through hard labour and
constant struggle with rude nature. According to all
that the Science of antiquity has enabled us to know
or to conjecture concerning the circumstances of the
oldest prehistoric period, we must think of the prim-
eval men, the further we go back, as engaged in
an ever harder struggle for existence, as slowly over-
coming nature by toilSome labour, and as only grad-
ually struggling out of the rudest conditions of life
into an elementary civilisation. The Golden Age of
the beginning is therefore, as certainly as the “mil-
lennial kingdom * of the end, an ideal image in which
the pious poetry of different peoples has deposited
the wishes and hopes in which they sought to raise
themselves above the wants of their actual life. But it
is just in this that the high significance of all these
legends consists. They testify that it is essential to
humanity to form Ideals, and to hold them up before
the reality as its antitype and the goal of its striving.
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 209
In the capability of and the impulse to the for-
mation of Ideals we may discern the distinguishing
essential mark of man. The beast follows the un-
changeable instincts of his nature, which uniformly
shape his life in every generation. It has no history,
no progress, because it is not able to form Ideals
beyond its actual condition at any time. Man, On
the contrary, has a history, a development mounting
upwards, because he is not satisfied with any given
state as ultimate and definitive; but in his thinking
he sketches the image of a better and ever better state,
and this drives him restlessly on to strive higher and
higher from one goal to another. This capability
of forming Ideals rests primarily upon the capa-
bility of thinking as such — i.e., of abstracting from
the individual given representations, and combining
them by the free activity of the synthetic imagination;
and further, upon the impulse of reason to bring the
manifold contents of consciousness into a single form
corresponding to the unity of the self, to order the
representations, feelings, and desires according to a
norm lying in the thinking Self, to shape the multiple
and confused into the unity of a harmonious whole.
This rational impulse towards the Ordering of con-
sciousness and life is endlessly active, because its goal
can never be otherwise than relatively attained—that
is, in an always only partial and ever unstable
equilibrium of the psychological powers in relation
WOL. I. O
210 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
with each other and with the external world. Hence
every Ideal, every type sketched in thought of an
Order of life that ought to be, shows itself to be in-
sufficient as soon as it is reached, and with this there
is immediately given the necessity for the formation
of a new and higher Ideal. In this infinite striving
after something better than what is, is precisely
exhibited man's destination for the unconditionally
good, for his assimilation with the perfect Ideal, or
God; and in this active destination to God is shown
his descent from God, his being formed in the image
of God, and his divine sonship. This, therefore, al-
ready dwells in man from the beginning, and forms
his true nature as man; but it is not present in him
from the beginning as an actual state of perfection,
but only as a potentiality and impulse to become
actually, through his own activity, that for which he
bears in himself the divine capacity as a rational
being. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect.” This is the infinite task of the human race,
which it is not able to fulfil at any time otherwise
than relatively and approximately, and from the ful-
filment of which it was furthest removed at the be-
ginning of its history.
If we ask now, In what does the Ideal of human
perfection consist 2 only a formal definition can be
given of it. For the real determination of that per-
fection becomes gradually more distinct to us only
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 211
with the advancing development of human nature in
history, and yet it can never be completely conceived,
because the absolutely perfect transcends all experi-
ence. The Ideal of human perfection may perhaps
be formally defined as the complete and harmonious
realisation of all human capacities in a common life
of humanity, such that in it all the several members
(groups and individuals) are ends in themselves, and at
the same time equally subservient members and in-
struments of the whole. That the Ideal is not to be
thought of as merely individual but as universal, follows
from this, that the reason which demands it is the same
universal endowment in all—namely, the divine image
in man; and that its actualisation in the individual
would not be possible at all without its actualisation
in the community, with which the individual is united
by his social instincts in such solidarity that all dis-
harmony in the formation of life in the community
exerts a hindering influence also upon the harmonious
formation of the life of the individual. But on the
other hand, the Ideal is not to be thought merely as a
social Ideal, as, for instance, a rational Order of Society,
in which the individual persons would come into con-
sideration only as means subservient to the whole,
without the Ideal of man becoming actualised in and
for his own life. In such a view it would be forgotten
that reason is only active as an impulse in the con-
sciousness of individual persons, and that its direct
212 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
aim is by subordination of the sensuous to the Spir-
itual impulses, and of the egoistic to the altruis-
tic impulses, to establish in every personal life that
harmonious order which we designate as morally good
disposition or virtue. This can of course only happen
through individuals living together with the community
to whose ends, they have subserviently to subordinate
themselves. But the value of the objective ends of
society is measured only by their furthering the per-
sonal life of all their members in the direction of
the common Ideal of humanity. These two sides of
the absolute Ideal of humanity—namely, the individual
and universal—we find combined in the Christian idea
of the “kingdom of God,” as the organised community
of the children of God. Here the individual free per-
sonalities are filled and impelled by the divine spirit
of goodness and truth; but even as such they are at the
same time devoting themselves in love to the common
end of the whole, to the will of God, which is over all
and in all, and is binding them all to each other and
making every one free in himself. Now, in So far as
the kingdom of God is the universal realisation of the
end of humanity, it forms the highest common good of
all men; and participation in it, therefore, also in-
cludes the full self-satisfaction or happiness of every
one. Personal happiness as a feeling of the inner har-
mony of life ought, indeed, not to be the final end of
our moral striving—for that should only be God’s
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 213
kingdom and righteousness—but it is withal the acces-
sory and the sign of faithful and successful labour for
God’s purpose, as Christ says: “Seek ye first the king-
dom of God and His righteousness, and all other things
shall be added unto you.”
But this again raises the question, How can the
absolute Ideal of the kingdom of God be the practical
goal of our acting 2 How are we to derive from this
universal idea definite directions for our individual
conduct 2 Have there not been at all times much
nearer and narrower ideas and goals to be striven after,
by which men were determined in their thinking and
acting 2 Undoubtedly; but let us not forget that all
the limited ideals of human striving, in So far as men
actually strove after rational ends, were and are nothing
else but stations upon the infinite way to the actualisa-
tion of the absolute Ideal. This Ideal must necessarily
resolve itself for the consciousness of men into the
manifold relative Ideals which, partly along with each
other and partly after each other, determine the living
and striving of men. Side by side with each other
we find the various Ideals of the individual peoples,
always according to their natural endowment and
place in the world. Again, in every people the moral
collective will differentiates itself according to the in-
dividual classes and Callings, according to families, and
last of all even according to individuals. These co-
existing moral goals stand to each other in a comple-
214 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
mentary relation like the parts of an organism. But
changing Ideals also appear after one another like the
changing phases in the development of the organic life.
Every age has its peculiar Ideal, its special concep-
tion of the purpose of life, its estimation of the goods
of life, and its particular labour at such a definite task
of life as is demanded by the historical situation of
its time. The more powerfully a definite Ideal of life
rules the thinking and feeling of the whole community,
So much the more does it stamp its special impress on
the morals and laws, on the political and ecclesiastical
institutions, and even on the art and science, of the age.
It strives to embody itself in the common orders of
life of the peoples, and to secure for itself lasting
dominion. But this always succeeds only for a limited
space of time. When an Ideal has attained to dominion,
and has seemingly founded its authority firmly for all
time in fixed institutions, the defects also forthwith
make themselves visible which are connected with the
dominion of every limited Ideal. Then a reaction
arises in the mood of the peoples; critical reflection
awakens; doubt of the absolute truth of the previous
Ideal of life and of the Orders of life that have sprung
from it takes possession first of individuals, and then
of ever greater masses of men, and in the conflict
with the old there arises a new Ideal, the goal of the
striving of coming generations. This in its turn again
passes through the same circle of aspiring, conquering,
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 215
f
and ruling, and of being combated and Overcome.
These transformations of human Ideals in the succes-
sion of ages form the true kernel of history, its spiritual
substance, which all external events subserve as its
means and expression.
Each of these changing Ideals is indeed for its time
the ruling authority, which rightly lays claim to the
devotion and labour of all; for it is the determinate
form in which the absolute rational destination of
humanity comes to consciousness on the stage of its
development at the time, and in which it can and
ought to actualise itself. But it is not yet on that
account in itself the absolutely true and good, whose
right would be universal and eternal; and where it
gives itself out as this, its relative right becomes un-
right, its conditioned truth becomes untruth, which suc-
cumbs to the criticism of the mind that sees farther.
On this rests the good right of all endeavours at refor-
mation. But in this connection it is not to be over-
looked that criticism of the relative Ideal of the time
and of its embodiment in the existing orders of Society
is only justified in so far as it rests upon the know-
ledge of a higher Ideal, and in So far as it will and can
serve to further the formation of the existing condi-
tions into a better Order. To such a critical reform it
is always only the leading spirits, the gifted prophets
of higher truth, who are called. They are the instru-
ments of Providence in the education of humanity
216 PHILOSOPHTY OF RELIGION.
unto the absolute Ideal. For that reason their acting,
although it puts itself in opposition to the authority
of the existing conditions, is yet not arbitrary and .
immoral, but has the highest Sanction of the divine
will, which reveals itself in their conscience as a divine
calling, before the unconditional obligation of which
all other considerations, even those of the common
duties of everyday life, give way. But how can this
higher right, whose legitimation lies at first only in
the breast of the prophet and reformer himself, be
proved to others? The public “Proof of the Spirit
and of Power” is effected only by history itself, which
makes the deeds of the reformers the land-marks
of new epochs of humanity. But before this can hap-
pen—at the beginning of the movement of reform—
who will blame the common man if he can see in the
bold innovators only violators of the holy order of
right, of moral practice, and of faith, and if he fights
for conscience' sake against what is yet in truth the
cause of God 7
What is most profoundly tragic in the world's his-
tory is that the divinely good and true can everywhere
only introduce itself into reality by hard struggle, and
that its most violent opponents are always, not the
unideal egoists, but those who cling to the Ideals of
the past and are not yet able to grasp those of the
future. They have a zeal for God, but not bf know-
ledge. If we would not become accomplices with
MAN's NATURE AND His ACTUALITY. 217
them, we must be on Our guard against the unideal
moral positivism, which would find the good only in
conformity to the order of society that exists at the
time. We should never forget that all positive right,
as well as all positive faith, is only relatively good and
true, an expression for the time of the stage of develop-
ment reached by the human mind, which is destined
still to advance to higher goals. We shall then be
able to find the criterion of the moral value of all
acting only in its having for its motive the realisation
of the absolute Ideal of humanity, through furtherance
of its normal moral development and removal of the
hindrances to it. In other words, the moral value of
our acting consists in this, that it is conscious and
willed co-operation with the divine purpose of history:
the education of mankind into a kingdom of God, in
which righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost
are to reign.
With the human capacity for the forming of Ideals,
the capacity for the bad is inseparably connected. For
the beast there is no badness, because its natural im-
pulses and instincts are the laws of its life. But in
the case of man, who has to order his desires by his
reason, who as a thinking being sets ends to himself
which are above immediate desire and independent of
it, and who derives from the common ends common
rules of acting according to which the social life of
men is regulated, there is given the possibility of the
218 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
disagreement of the self-will of individuals with the
order of the whole,_in other words, we have here the
possibility of badness. The bad, therefore, presupposes
the idea of the good, or of what ought to be. To the
man who is awakening to moral consciousness this
always presents itself empirically at first in the form
of moral practice and laws. Yet the idea of the good
is not on that account identical with the objective
moral practice of the Society of the time, but has its
deeper ground in the a priori demand of reason for a
harmonious ordering of the active manifestations of the
will, in each and in all. In the correlation of this in-
ternal endowment and those external facts of con-
science and of practice consists the moral order of the
world, in which we have already, in a former Lecture,
recognised the revelation of the holy, just will of God.
Accordingly the bad will have to be defined as the
violation of the God-willed moral order of the world,
by the self-will of individuals.
The opinion that badness is mere negation, want,
and limit, has been often repeated from the time of
Plato, and it has been especially represented by
Spinoza ; but it cannot be accepted as correct. As a
matter of fact, physical badness is not mere want of
power, for it rather consists in the disharmony of
the powers and Organs of life. In like manner, bad-
ness is not mere want of spiritual power, either of
the will or of the understanding; for it is just in the
MANPS NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 219
worst forms of badness that uncommon energy of will
and acuteness of understanding are often actually
found. In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that
badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called
the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not
always combined with the knowing of it, Seeing that
it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted
only in the want of knowledge, then those who are
theoretically most cultivated must also be morally the
best, which no one will venture to assert. And what,
then, would be the meaning of the expression of the
apostle Paul when he says, “The good that I would I
do not : but the evil which I would not, that I do ’2
This self-contradiction between the actual ego and
the better self, of the Ideal which is well known and
recognised as the better which ought to be—this self-
contradiction between rational will and self-will—is
something quite different from mere not-knowing or
deficient insight. Such a want of insight is found in
the infant child, yet no one would judge its condition
to be one of imputable guilt. Not less inappropriate
is the frequent definition of badness as Sensuousness;
for the faculty of Sense in itself is neither good nor
bad, but, like all that is natural, indifferent. Any
sensuous function only becomes bad when it appears
in a moral being in disagreement with the moral
order; and therefore it is just this violation of Order
that is bad, and not the Sensuous faculty in itself.
220 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
What is correct in this view is only this, that among
the manifestations of badness, allowing the unbridled
sway of the sensuous impulses is one of the most
frequent, but it is neither the only nor even the worst
manifestation of badness. Vices like lying and hypo-
crisy, avarice, the lust of power, jealousy, cruelty,
famaticism, do not spring out of the Sensuous nature,
and just as little can they be referred to weakness of
the spirit, seeing that they are often combined with
extraordinary strength of understanding and will : they
rest rather upon the dominion of the egoistic, and
suppression of the altruistic impulses of our nature.
This form of the bad is therefore worse than the sensu-
ous, because it is more spiritual. The proper nature
and the deepest principle of the bad unveils itself
more immediately in this spiritual form than in the
other sensuous forms—namely, as that self-wilfulness
which seeks its own, unconcerned about the moral
order or the ends and normal laws of the world as
a whole.
The doctrine of the Church has explained the origin
of badness from the Fall of our first parents in Para-
dise, and a brief state of perfect sinlessness was thought
to have preceded the Fall. How little claim this ideal
representation of the state of man at the beginning
has to historical truth has been already remarked.
But the further difficulty now presents itself, as to
how, under the assumption of a perfectly sinless be-
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 221
ginning, we are to conceive the possibility of the Fall ?
Badness could not arise out of a pure will of goodness,
because no motives to it would exist, and without
Such no imputable action is thinkable. And this has
been actually recognised by the Church Fathers, as
they mostly sought to explain the Fall of our first
parents from motives of pride, or unbelief, or concupis-
cence. But they have not considered that with the
assumption of such motives they already admitted an
internal existence of evil before the Fall, and thus
the explanation of the origin of evil from the Fall
breaks down. Nor is this difficulty diminished by
the interpolation of an external tempter, whom (since
the time of the “Wisdom of Solomon”) it has been
customary to think of as Satan, embodied in the
serpent. But apart from the fact that thereby the
first Origin of the bad is thrust away from mankind
back to the realm of spirits in the world beyond, where
it becomes utterly inexplicable, the Fall would become
not a whit more conceivable by following this circuit-
ous route through the realm of demons. For all exter-
mal incitements only become temptation by their letting .
loose an inner impulse to the bad, in the stirrings of
which the real temptation first exists. As James truly
says, “Every man is tempted when he is drawn away
of his own lust, and enticed.” Hence, even if we were
willing to accept as a fact a temptation of our first
parents by Satan, yet it must always again be regarded
222 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
as having found a point of attachment in the inner
bad lust and inclination of the first parents; and
here we stand again before the same difficulty, without
having obtained any help whatever from the hypothesis
of a tempting Satan. The position accordingly will
remain thus: that a first act of sin always already
presupposes some inner condition of being sinful; and
it therefore cannot be the first cause, but only the
first manifestation, of sin.
But just as inconceivable as the Fall itself, would
be also the consequences of it as they are described
in the doctrine of the Church. No analogy of expe-
rience extends far enough to explain the corruption
of the whole mature of the species in consequence of
the single first deed of our first parents. Habitual
tendencies of character do not proceed from individual
actions, but only out of frequent repetitions of them.
Dut that the free first use of freedom could have
abolished this freedom itself, and thereby destroyed
the moral capacity of man, is wholly unthinkable.
Nor have the dogmatic theologians of the Church
known how to help themselves out of the difficulty
of this dilemma. Either the moral capacity and free-
dom (the Divine Image) belonged to the specific mature
of man, and then it could not be lost; or it was lost,
and then it could not belong to the specific nature,
but was a mere accident of it (a donuni Superadditum,
as the dogmatic theology of the Catholic Church
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 223
teaches). The further assertion that contemporane-
ously with the moral nature of man his bodily nature
was also corrupted by the Fall and made subject to
death, presupposes that without the Fall the human
body would have been immortal—an assumption which
stands in manifest contradiction to all the laws of
the order of nature. Besides, it may be recalled that
according to the doctrine of the Bible throughout,
perishableness belongs to the nature of all “flesh,”
and consequently also to the nature of the fleshly
body of man. “Flesh and blood,” says Paul, “cannot
inherit the kingdom of God, nor can the corruptible
put on incorruption; ” yet he says nowhere that this
condition did not come in till after the Fall, but he
ascribes perishableness to the flesh generally as a
property belonging to its essential nature. Again, the
consequences of the Fall, which are inconceivable in
a natural way, have been sought to be explained by
a punitive miracle of the divine omnipotence. By
this appeal to the Supernatural the difficulties spring-
ing from natural experience would be indeed removed ;
but there arise immediately in their place almost even
greater moral difficulties, such as, How are we to bring
it into accordance with the divine justice, goodness,
and wisdom, that He should have punished the first
transgression of our first parents, who were still en-
tirely inexperienced and untried, at once with the
total corruption of the bodily and spiritual nature of
224 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the species, and consequently should have again an-
nihilated His own work of creation ? Nor can so
singular an opinion appeal for its support to Holy
Scripture. For when the apostle Paul says that
“God hath concluded all in unbelief, that He may
have mercy upon all,” he cannot possibly have been
of opinion that the sin of our first parents had been
a traversing of the divine world-plan, or that it had
brought about an alteration of the capacities origin-
ally implanted by the creation. Rather has Paul
manifestly thought of the sin of man as included
within the whole of the divine government of the
World, and of the Saving plan of redemption—namely,
as the state of the natural humanity which necessarily
precedes redemption and is to be removed by it, see-
ing that natural humanity could not, according to
the eternal order of the world, be at first spiritual,
or already so from the very beginning (1 Cor. XV. 46).
Original perfection viewed as the state of man at the
beginning is therefore as much a dogmatic fiction
as is the consequent complete corruption. To the
abstract ideal representation of the beginning Corre-
sponds the equally abstract caricature of the corrup-
tion following it. We shall rather have to think of
the state of our first parents according to the analogy
of the childlike innocence of all religions—that is,
as a state in which good and bad, the impulses of
the flesh and of the spirit, were already existent and
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 225
active. But the consequences of the distinction of the
two were then still wholly or almost wholly wanting
—a state which is as far removed from moral perfec-
tion as from moral depravity, as it stands just upon
the threshold of the passage from morally indifferent
maturality to conscious morality.
Accordingly we cannot explain the Origin of the bad
from the Fall of our first parents, which cannot be
established as a historical fact. But we can just as
little give assent to that indifferentism according to
which every man is viewed as wholly good by nature,
and as having himself caused his becoming bad by an
act of his own groundless arbitrary will. This view
starts from the indifferentist conception of freedom,
which rests upon a false abstraction. The real will is
never an empty possibility as indeterminism presupposes,
a possibility which can determine itself equally well on
any side, and which after every action would be again
equally empty and indetermined. Out of such indeter-
minateness a morally imputable acting could never pro-
ceed; for this presupposes conscious grounds of deter-
mination, and there can only be such for a will which
has its determinate content in certain impulses and
inclinations. Freedom is self-determination of the will,
not in the sense of a determination out of groundless
contingency, but self-determination on the ground of its
own determined being, its temperament or character.
As the man is, so he acts. The good tree brings forth
WOL. I. P
226 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
good fruit, and the corrupt tree can bring forth only
evil fruit. Undoubtedly all willing and doing react
again upon the being who wills and does, improving or
corrupting the condition of the character in some de-
gree. The development of the moral life, as of all life
generally, just consists in this, that “all is fruit and all
is Seed,” that inner and outer enter into constant inter-
action with each other, and that all experience and
acting enter as co-operating factors into the formation
of character, out of which again the later acting pro-
ceeds as fruit. Only in this rests the possibility of a
moral influencing of the will by education and instruc-
tion. Were every action a groundless arbitrary act of
the indifferent will, it would be useless to impress upon
man the best principles, as they would really give his
character no determined direction, and consequently
could never become permanent grounds for the deter-
mination of his acting. Then also no reliance upon
any man would be possible; for any one, although he
passed hitherto as the best of men, might the next
moment by his groundless arbitrary will decide for the
worst actions. But that the position is quite otherwise
in reality we all know from daily experience. The
more exactly we know men, the more certainly are we
able also to calculate beforehand their mode of acting
in the future. Whatever we may think theoretically
regarding the freedom of the will, in the practical in-
tercourse with men we always act and judge on the
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 227
positive assumption that the individual actions of men
are as certainly determined by their constant condition
of will or sentiment, as the fruits of a tree are deter-
mined by its nature. In like manner we desire from
the poet that he portray characters which develop
their moral nature in a series of consistent actions; and
the more he succeeds in this, so that all the individual
external manifestations of a person coalesce into the
whole of a unique and specifically determined character,
So much the more does such poetic invention make upon
us the aesthetically Satisfying impression of the truth of
life. Does there not lie in this an involuntary testi-
mony to the fact that the theory of the liberum arbit-
'rium indifferentiae is an abstraction foreign to life and
untrue 2
We have seen that the explanation of the bad from
the indifferent arbitrary will of individuals is unten-
able, on account of the psychological incorrectness of
this conception. But it may be added that this mode of
explanation also presupposes a Superficial conception of
the bad. Out of the freedom of the individual will there
could continually proceed only individual bad actions,
which through very frequent repetition might possibly
also have bad inclinations as their consequence. But
it is a very old experience, and One attested in manifold
ways by the Sacred Scriptures of almost all religions,
that evil inclinations do not first arise out of free acting,
but already precede it; nay more, that they have their
228 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
roots in the deepest ground of human nature. “For
the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.”
“Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.” “Every man
is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and
enticed.” These passages in the Bible are the expres-
sion of the same universal human experience which led
Iºant to the doctrine of the “radical badness” or of the
perversity of the highest maxims of our will—an expe-
rience which cannot possibly be explained by reference
to individual free acts of will, seeing that it rather
precedes them; for earthly man when he awakes to
moral consciousness always finds in himself already the
propensity of a Self-will that is contrary to law. If,
however, this inclination were to be explained as arising
out of the freedom of the individual, this could only be
done by means of the predeterministic theory, which
derives the origin of the bad from an intelligible act of
freedom, presupposed as prior to the life in time. Plato
had already in half-figurative allusions taught a fall
of the Souls pre-existing in the ideal world; and the
Christian Church-father Origen had attached himself
to it, without, however, finding approval on this point
among the ecclesiastical theologians. In modern times
the philosophers Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer
have explained the bad from an intelligible act of free-
dom, and indeed from the same act, which (according
to Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time
effectuates the temporal existence and condition of the
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 229
individual soul. But what are we to think of as meant
by such a mystical deed, an act through which the
Subject of it first comes into existence 2 Is it not this,
that perhaps under this singular disguise there is con-
cealed the simple thought that the origin of the bad
lies not so much in a doing of the individual freedom as
rather in the rise of it—that is to say, in the process of
development through which the natural man becomes a
moral man, and the merely potentially rational man
becomes an actually rational man 2
Let us, then, descend from the dangerous heights of
transcendental speculation to the Solid ground of ex-
perience, and let us try to discover the ground of the
bad in the psychological presuppositions of the moral
will. There is implanted in the nature of man a multi-
plicity of impulses of a lower and higher kind, which
are at first all natural, neither good nor bad, but morally
indifferent as it were, the raw material for the moral
formation of the personal life. We distinguish as the
chief kinds, the sensuous and the Spiritual, the egoistic
and the altruistic or social impulses. As the distinc-
tive nature of man consists in his spiritual capacity,
the sensuous impulses are destined to subordination
under the spiritual impulses; and as the ends of Society
are of higher value than those of individuals, the
egoistic impulses are destined to subordination under
the social. But the state of man at the beginning does
not correspond to this order, which is demanded by the
230 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
rational nature of man. Because man as a natural
being enters into existence with the mere capacity for
rationality, the lower impulses preponderate over the
higher in him from the beginning. This is natural, and
in itself is not yet bad, but the germ of badness lies
undoubtedly in this initial preponderating of the lower
impulses. For as soon as the demands of reason, ex-
hibited at first as commands of an external authority,
are addressed to the child, forthwith there shows itself
a discord between this obligation and his own will,
which seeks to assert itself in its previous sensible and
selfish direction. The real energy of the natural im-
pulses does not immediately give way before the repre-
sentations of the prohibiting foreign will, whose higher
right at the beginning is not yet recognised, and at
most is darkly felt. Nay more, the impulses disturbed
in their naïve Satisfaction by the prohibition, react at
first the more strongly against the limitation enjoined
upon them; and therefore the prohibition, instead of
breaking the egoism of the self-will, rather incites it to
defiant resistance and passionate appetency. Thus the
man awaking to moral consciousness, finds himself from
the beginning in a direction of will opposed to moral
obligation; he finds in himself the propensity of a self-
willed resistance to the moral order, which precedes all
free action. This is the “radical badness,” which
therefore has its ground simply in the fact, that in the
development of man out of naturality the lower im-
MAN’S NATURE AND FITS ACTUALITY. 231
pulses have already won a power of self-assertion and
resistance before the reason could yet come to its valid
position and authority. As this propensity of the self-
will is grounded in the specific nature of man, it may
be designated as inborn, hereditary, or “original” sin-
fulness. This universal propensity is further supple-
mented by the particular unfavourable predispositions
which consist in an abnormal strength or weakness of
one or other inclination, by which the moral order of
life is sensibly made more difficult from the outset.
These particular unfavourable dispositions likewise
rest upon hereditariness, and are therefore to be
reckoned as belonging to the innate abnormity or
“original sin.” And, finally, there are combined with
the inmate evil many other kinds of acquired evils—
bad examples of the surrounding Society, and a false
order of society, with conditions that make life more
difficult for whole social classes, by which the impulse
of Self-preservation and liberty is inevitably incited to
help itself by force or cunning, in the aggravated
struggle for existence. All moral abnormities in the
Social institutions, practices, dogmas, and Opinions, all
the errors and wrong tendencies involved in the want
of culture or of hyperculture, work with a morally de-
praving influence upon the education and development
of individuals. The innate abnormity is thus heightened
in manifold ways by acquired errors due to history; and
all this together forms a morally abnormal habit of the
232 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
will, which, taking precedence of all free acts, puts the
man under the governing power of the bad. This
tangled web of evil dispositions, woven as it is out of
many threads, forms what the doctrine of the Church
has designated “original sin,” and what Kant has
called “radical badness.” The earnest truth expressed
in these conceptions, which is entirely independent of
the mythical Fall of Adam, ought least of all to be
denied or mistaken by our time, which everywhere lays
such great emphasis upon the Solidarity of individuals
with their social milieu, and upon their “hereditary
burden.” -
On the other hand, the ecclesiastical judgment of the
natural man Suffers from exaggeration and excess, which
is mainly to blame for the fact that its true kernel has
been so frequently rejected. It is an exaggeration when
original sin is considered as personally imputable guilt;
and it is going too far when it is held to be the whole
state of the natural man, and yet the actually present
good, the “original grace,” is overlooked. That can
only be imputed to man as “guilt" which is grounded
in his own self-determination; and this is just what
original sin is not, Seeing that it has its ground beyond
the individual being and will, or at least beyond his
conscious moral self - activity. In so far as it is
grounded in the universal generic nature, it could not
be designated at all as guilt, but only as disease
(vitium). Yet in this pure naturalness it never occurs
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 233
in reality, but always in some form or other of his-
torical development, and consequently as a mixed pro-
duct of nature and of the activity of earlier genera-
tions. In so far as the latter participates in it, the
sinfulness of Society at any time is a consequence of
earlier actual sin and guilt, and consequently is itself
also actual sin and guilt, only not of the individual,
who gets it as an evil inheritance from his ancestors,
but of the whole of mankind who have co-operated
in its production for generations. Hence we may say
with Schleiermacher, that original sin is the common
deed and common guilt of the human race. But the
individual always participates in this collective guilt
in the measure in which he also takes part with his
personal doing in the collective act that is directed
to the furtherance of the bad. And this happens up
to a certain degree inevitably in the case of every
individual, who, having been born into the sinful
society, grows up under its influence to moral re-
sponsibility. Then the inherited badness will always
carry itself on in his own willing and doing, which,
in so far as it is known as what Ought not to be, is
to be imputed to him as his own actual sin and guilt.
In the conflict of the good and evil principles, which
begins immediately with the first demands of moral
authority, it is not possible that the good can always
conquer from the beginning, as the yet wholly un-
developed reason stands powerless in opposition to
234 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the Sensuous selfish inclination. Reason can only
gradually become strong in conflict with the irrational
natural impulse, while the inborn good germs are
developed through the educating influence of the good,
which is present in society. For, as on the side of
the bad the individual does not stand upon his own
footing alone, but carries part of the burden of sin
and guilt which is accumulated in society as the in-
heritance from past generations, so neither on the
side of the good has he been consigned merely to his
own natural power and capacity, but he is supported
and borne up by the common spirit of the good,
which has formed itself in the moral community under
the divine education of mankind as a historical in-
heritance from the past, and which in the advancing
conflict against the ungodly forces authenticates itself
as the victorious, world - conquering power. It is
essential to the religious point of view to think of
the conflict of the good and evil principle, not as an
individual process proceeding exclusively in the in-
dividual Soul and depending on the subjective force
of the free will, but to regard it as a universal world-
conflict passing down through history, a conflict which
God's Spirit itself carries on against all ungodly work
and being, not outside of humanity but in it and
through it, and by creating and preserving a Com-
munity of goodness and of the good as a bulwark and
weapon against the bad. And hence the Christian
MAN’S NATURE AND HIS ACTUALITY. 235
combines with the humble consciousness of his own
weakness courageous confidence in the power of God,
which is mighty in the weak. The utterance of the
Psalmist concerning man's lowliness and dignity from
which we started to-day, finds confirmation and deeper
emphasis in the words of the apostle, “Not that we are
sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of our-
selves; but our sufficiency is of God” (2 Cor. iii. 5).
LECTURE VIII.
THE RELIGIOUS WIEW OF MAN.
II. REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION.
IF it is essential to man to form ideals of a perfect life,
and if he see himself continually impeded in their
attainment by the resisting reality of things, he inevi-
tably turns his hoping gaze towards the higher divine
power, and expects from that power redemption from
the evils which oppress him, and help to enable him to
attain to his ideals. The hope of a redemptive mani-
festation of the Deity, and the striving to bring it about,
are therefore found in all religions as an essential object
of their faith and an essential motive of their worship.
Whatever may be the nature of the hope of redemp-
tion, and by whatever conduct on the human side it is
to be brought about, in every case it depends on the
way in which the Ideal is thought ; and this again is
dependent on the stage of the moral development of
men which has at any time been reached.
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 237
It is self-evident that, on the stage of nature-religion,
redemption does not yet refer to the moral evil in man,
but to the external evils in nature, which are regarded
as punishments by the enraged Deity for the violation
of his commands. To reconcile the wrath of the Deity
by compensating performances or by voluntary expia-
tions which discharge the penalty—it is to this that are
referred the manifold expiatory practices, Sacrifices,
ceremonies of purification, fastings, mortifications, and
mutilations which we find everywhere in the forms of
worship in which the presuppositions of the nature-
religions regarding the angry Deity still reign, or have
a continued influence. In so far as the wrath of the
Gods is to be referred to failures of religious observ-
ances—i.e., to the violation of the private rights person-
ally belonging to the Gods—so far do the means of
expiating their wrath also move entirely in the sphere
of ceremonial performances and penances, and are
morally indifferent, or even anti-moral, as in the case of
human sacrifices. But in so far as the Gods, in their
capacity as representatives and protectors of the com-
monwealth, are also made angry by Crimes against the
social order of the community, the need of expiation
extends to moral as well as to ceremonial trespasses,
and it operates as a powerful motive to the consolidation
of the civil order of right. The mixing without distinc-
tion of ceremonial and moral preceptS is, as is well
known, a common mark of all the oldest legislations.
238 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
The further development then proceeds in the direction
that the moral is placed in significance above the cere-
monial by the enlightened wise men and Seers, and the
possibility of an undoing of moral crimes by mere cere-
monial performances is denied. The gradual distinc-
tion of the moral from the ceremonial, the repression
and ultimate substitution of ceremonial expiation by
the moral purification of the Sense and life, and conse-
quently the transformation of the mystical conception
of redemption into the corresponding ethical conception
of education, may be designated as the kernel and the
teleological principle of the development of the history
of religion.
Anticipatory divinations of this higher ethical idea
of redemption are, however, already found on the basis
of nature-religion under the covering of symbolically
significant legends. For example, the legends of the
sacrificial deaths of Codrus and Curtius in order to pur-
chase the victory of their armies, rest indeed upon very
Superstitious representations of the wrath of the Deity,
which was only to be reconciled by a voluntary human
sacrifice ; but they contain, nevertheless, the true
thought that a redeeming power bringing Salvation lies
in the heroic sense of one who is prepared to Sacrifice
his own life for the good of his fellows. We may
also here specially recall the profound myth of Hera-
cles, the “hero and liberator,” sprung from the Gods,
who proved his power under conflicts and sufferings in
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 239
the service of troubled humanity, and who obtained
as the reward of his victory elevation among the
Olympians. He is the opposite of Prometheus. As
the latter is the man at variance with God, who by
titanic Self-will falls into guilt and calamity, so is
Heracles the man allied with God, who remains obedient
to his divine mission under all the trials of the earthly
life, and who wins thereby the victory, and this not
for himself merely, but for the bound Prometheus he
also effectuates redemption from his torture and recon-
ciliation with Zeus. It is the idea of the first and
Second Adam which we find here preindicated in myth-
ical traits. How very natural it was to find in this
mythical God-man the symbolical embodiment of the
moral idea of redemption, is proved by the fable of
Prodicus, in which Heracles becomes the hero of moral
Self-conquest who prefers the toilSome way of virtue to
that of base enjoyment.
The thought illustrated in this fable, that salvation
lies in the self-conquest of the will that is guided by
reason, forms the theme of the practical philosophy of
the Greeks from Socrates onwards. In Plato, however,
this thought obtains the ascetic turn that the Soul of
man springs from the SuperSensible world, and is not
truly at home in the earthly body, but is held in it as
in banishment, in a prison, or in a grave. Hence man's
task is to strive for redemption from this imprisonment
by raising himself with all his thinking and striving
240 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
out of the limits of the senses into the eternal world
of thoughts. The true life of the wise man is a con-
stant flight from the sphere of sense, and is therefore
a preparation for death, in which this very return of
the soul to its true life, which has already been spirit-
ually striven after, finds its fulfilment, as is illustrated
by the example of Socrates. With the Stoics this
transcendent goal of the Platonic doctrine of redemp-
tion retreats into the background; but the practical
ground-thought is still quite similar to that of Plato—
namely, that man can only attain to Satisfaction by
making himself free from all passions, by ridding him-
self of all interests which bind him to the external
world and to society, and by finding his immovable
rest and lofty freedom in the pure inwardness of his
own void self-consciousness. The Stoical ideal, as well
as the Platonic, thus lies in the ascetic liberation of
the Ego from what forms the Subject-matter of life in
the real world. Finally, in the Neo-Pythagorean and
Neo-Platonic philosophy, this dualistic asceticism has
become entirely transcendental mysticism, whose con-
tempt of the world formed the exact opposite to the
culture-ideals of the Greeks of the classical time with
its joyous sense of the world. The world of sense,
formerly full of the Gods, appeared now to be a thing
without essence and worth, an unreal and agonising
dream. Redemption from it and union with the world
beyond—the world of purely spiritual and divine life
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 24l
— had become the goal of man's longing, which he
sought to approach by all the ways available to him,
—theoretically, through the abstraction of thinking ;
practically, through the desensualising of the will ; and
mystically, through ecstasy of feeling.
A similar process, with a similar result, had, how-
ever, already been passed through, several centuries
earlier, in India. By the way of continued abstrac-
tion the Brahmanic philosophy had come to regard the
World of Sense as an essenceless appearance, as the “de-
ception of Maya,” from which the wise man had to re-
lease himself, partly through practical asceticism, and
partly through the deeper knowledge of the All-unity
of Brahma. The blessedness of the wise man is de-
scribed by the Vedanta philosophy in terms quite
similar to those used by the Stoics: No care about
the things of the world any longer troubles him who
recognises the world as an illusion ; no pain, even of
his own body, any longer affects him who is able to
recognise his own body as an illusion. The incorporeal
and unchangeable being, as the wise man has come to
know himself to be, is no more affected by pleasure and
pain; even the fruit of earlier works, of the good as
well as the bad, is done away with for the conscious-
mess of the wise man. For him who has recognised the
self as the unchangeable, and Consequently also the non-
active being, the earlier works which he has performed
under the delusion of being an actor turn to nothing-
- WOL. I. Q
242 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ness when this illusion is taken away. But the same
knowledge which makes the earlier sins an illusion
annuls also the good works, past and future.
“He who in himself his peace has found,
Is by no duty ever henceforth bound.”
With the knowledge of the unity of the Self with the
All-One, all willing and obligation have come to an
end. Thus does rest reign in the soul of him who is
redeemed by knowledge, but it is the rest of death, of
the dead and emptied heart, to which the goods as well
as the evils of life, the true ends and ideals of life as
well as the false ones, have become null and vain, and
life has thus been robbed of all true worth. To one
thus inwardly dead the outer life still rolls purpose-
lessly on for a while, although without a definite end,
as the potter's wheel continues to revolve after it has
Once received an impulse. But when at last what re-
mains of the natural impulse of life has been consumed,
the spirits of life no longer move forth into new exist-
ence, and the redemption of the wise man is completed
by his entire dissolution into the All-One. From the
same mood of weariness of the world and longing for
death also proceeded the doctrine of redemption of Gau-
tama Buddha. It theoretically drew the consequences
of the Brahmanic Pantheism, and practically made the
way to redemption accessible to all, and it raised the
ascetic ideal of life to a common rule for an organised
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 243
fellowship. The Buddhistic doctrine of redemption is
comprised in the four “Sacred truths” of suffering, of
the origin of suffering, of the removal of suffering, and
of the way to the removal of suffering. That all life is
only suffering, because all that lives is subjected to con-
stant change, because all things arise only in order to
perish again, and perish in order to return again to a
new circle of purposeless and painful existence—this
is the fundamental theme of the Buddhistic preaching.
But the ground of this endless suffering lies in the
thirst of the Soul for pleasures, for the enjoyment of
life, and for power. Suffering lasts as long as the Ego
that wills cleaves to the world of the becoming, which
is subject to the laws of causality and of transitoriness.
But what chains the will to existence is its not-knowing
of the nothingness of all existence: when this not-know-
ing ceases, the man comes to the knowledge of the eter-
nal law which condemns all willing to endless suffering,
and then his will ceases to cling to the finite. With the
insight into the aimlessness and vainness of all desire
after happiness, the desire itself is quenched; and con-
Sequently suffering is also at an end, and deep peace
takes its place. The final goal is then reached—namely,
“Nirvāma,” the extinguishing of the will which strives
after life. “The disciple who has got rid of pleasure
and desire, he who is rich in wisdom, has here below
reached redemption from death, has attained rest, Nir-
vāna, the eternal place. He who has escaped from the
244 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
impassable, hard, deceptive path of the Samsara—i.e.,
of the circling round of the becoming—he who has
crossed over and reached the shore, who has sunk into
himself without wavering and doubt, who has delivered
himself from the earthly and attained to Nirvāna,
him I call a true Brahman.” So runs one of the Say-
ings of Buddha, collected in the Dammapada. The
ideal of the Buddhistic redemption is therefore the
state of the soul which is released from joy and Sorrow,
fear and hope, which has divested itself of all wishes
and purposes, which has found the rest of full remun-
ciation in the knowledge of the nothingness of the
world and its own existence ; and this ideal is there-
fore at bottom essentially the Same as the Stoical
apathy, and as the Neo-Platonic flight from the world
and emptying of the consciousness of all definite con-
tents until complete ecstasy is reached, which is in fact
an extinguishing of the conscious Ego, at least a tem-
porary Nirvāna. ^
This is the negative redemption, which we may regard/
as an imperfect preliminary stage in the education º
humanity to the true positive redemption. That it is
not without a relative truth will be admitted by every
one who knows the near affinity of many Buddhistic
Sayings regarding the vanity of earthly things with pas-
Sages in the Bible. If man was to come to his true divine
destination, he must recognise as nothingness and vanity
the Sensuous selfish purposes of the natural life—both
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 245
of the narrowest personal and of the widest national
egoism, which in their antagonism to one another con-
tinually cross and annul each other. This recognition
was the result of the ancient development of culture,
which had proceeded from the selfish eudaemonism of
the individuals and of their natural associations; and
the knowledge of the insufficiency of these impure and
limited ideals of the natural Selfish eudaemonism was
the necessary preparation for elevation to the true
all-embracing ideal that could make all happy. The
defect, however, of this ascetic doctrine of redemption
was, that it stopped at negation without being able to
find its positive completion. In contrast to the naïve
optimism of the natural eudaemonistic affirmation of
the world, the pessimistic negation of the world was
a necessary step in advance: its error, however, was
that it stopped at the negation of the natural selfish
purposes, and did not rise to the true universal life-
purpose of humanity united in God, to a positive
highest good, in which even the finite goods are again
embraced as members of the whole and rightly put
into order. We also believe that the world with its
fashion passes away, but we know at the same time
that he who does the will of God abideth for ever,
and that our faith is the victory which has overcome
the world. This true positive redemption, prepared in
the religion of Israel, has come to fulfilment in
Christianity.
246 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
The religion of Israel, from the time of the prophets,
was practical idealism ; its fundamental characteristic
was the hope of a future time of Salvation, in which the
ideal of a just and happy people of God was to be real-
ised. That this ideal was not merely a subjective wish,
but the highest truth, was immediately contained in
the belief of the prophets in Jehovah, the just and
almighty God of Israel, and the disposer of the fates of
the peoples. But as the reality never corresponded to
that ideal, either in respect of the moral state of Israel
or in respect of its circumstances of happiness, there
thus followed from the belief of the prophets in God
the confident hope that God, by future proofs of His
righteousness and strength, would redeem His people
from all the evils of the present, inner and outer, moral
and matural. This prophetic hope assumed many forms,
according to the change of the historical position of
Israel; but there were always combined in it these two
sides: (1) The expectation that God would purify His
people inwardly by a fearful day of judgment, and that
He would help on the cause of the pious and righteous
to victory and permanence; (2) the expectation that
the people, thus purified and become pleasing to God,
would them also be victorious over their external ene-
mies, and would rejoice in the efflorescence of a period
of national power and glory which should surpass
the fairest memories of the flourishing time of David.
The former ethical side of the prophetic hope of Salva-
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 247
tion was the germ of a rich future, while its earthly
national side was the perishing husk, which was partly
stripped off and partly transformed by the advance of
the history of the Jewish people. When the national
hopes were baffled in the Exile, and under the continu-
ing foreign government of the centuries after the Exile,
the popular religion of the prophets became the heart-
religion of pious individuals, as it is expressed in the
touching songs of the Psalmists. The redemption
which the prophets had hoped for from a future revela-
tion of the power and righteousness of Jahve for the
whole of the people, the pious individual now hoped to
experience in his personal life. The undeceptions pro-
duced by the bitter reality did indeed lead individuals,
like the author of Ecclesiastes, to grave doubts; but to
Others they became the occasion of an ever deeper
and purer apprehension of the idea of Redemption. To
the pious man who consoled himself under external
Suffering with the fellowship of his God, this inner
happiness became such a paramount good that he
“asked nothing of heaven and earth’ (Ps. lxxiii.)
Here the hope of external salvation vanishes in the
Certainty of the pious man that in his love of God he
already inwardly possesses freedom from the world. Yet
this mystical forgetting of the world in the soul bound
up with God, as it occurs here and there in the Psalms,
never became, in the case of the pious Jews, the one-
sided world-negation of the Indians, nor apathetic indif-
248 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ference to the moral life of the community. For the
God of Israel is the positive will of goodness, who
reveals Himself, not merely in pious hearts, but also
in the guidance of the course of the world, as He
who will overcome wrong and establish right. The
pious Jew, in believing in this end of the divine gov-
ernment of the world, feels himself called to co-opera-
tion in this divine purpose; hence he can never isolate
himself in one-sided quietistic inwardness, but always
keeps his look open towards the whole of the people of
God; “he waits for the consolation of Israel.” Under
this point of view even the Sufferings of the pious
obtain a new profound meaning; they appear as the
means by which God will not merely prove and purify
the pious man himself, but also work out the redemp-
tion of the sinful people. The patient suffering of the
“Servant of God” is (according to Isaiah, chap. lviii.)
the ransom by which the Salvation of the people is
purchased, the propitiatory Sacrifice by which the guilt
of others is overcome and repaired. This thought, the
fruit of the experiences in Suffering of the pious in the
Exile, obtained new confirmation under the persecutions
and conflicts of the time of the Maccabees. The blood
of the heroes of faith had not flowed in vain; it saved
to the Jewish people their faith, and had even restored
to them for a short time their political independence.
Erom that time it became a universal doctrine of the
Jewish theology that the innocent suffering, and espe-
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 249
cially the martyr-death, of the just, has an expiating
and redeeming efficacy for the whole people. Contem-
poraneously with the view that the suffering of the just
does not stand in contradiction with the hope of redemp-
tion, but is rather a means of its realisation, this hope
itself rose above the earthly life to transcendent heights.
Isaiah had already said of the Servant of the Lord,
“When Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin,
he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the
pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (liii.
10). And these words suggested the expectation that
the pious martyrs will have a share, even personally,
in the victory of their cause, by means of a resurrection
from the dead. Influences of the Persian religion
worked in the same direction, and So it came that, from
the age of the Maccabees, the belief in the resurrection
of the just grew up among the Jewish people; and
thereby the idea of the future time of Salvation was
transported generally from the soil of the natural world,
and raised into the supernatural. The more the reality
always again fell short of their high-strung expecta-
tions, the more difficult it was to think of the fulfilment
of the prophetic ideals taking place in the natural way
of historical development, so much the more boldly did
the gaze of the Apocalyptic Seer raise itself to the
heavenly heights. According to the revelations of
Daniel and Enoch, the kingdom of the Saints and the
elect was to descend to the earth upon the clouds of
250 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
heaven and accompanied by heavenly hosts, and as a
new world which was to be brought in by catastrophes
of divine omnipotence and to take the place of the
present world, which is governed by demons. Thus
also among the Jews the place of the Once optimistic
idealism of the prophets was taken by a pessimistic
despair of the real world, and of the possibility of a
redemption of it by the natural way of history. The
Jewish dualism of the present and of the future world
corresponded to the Greek dualism of the sensible and
ideal world; both were the manifestation of a resigned
turning away from a reality that had become spiritless
and godless. But in thus viewing them, the essential
distinction is not to be left out of consideration that
the Greek vainly longed for a bridging over of the
abyss which separated the sensible world from the
Spiritual world, whereas the pious Jew cherished the
hope of the coming of the future world through an
act of divine Omnipotence, and in this trusting hope he
in the meantime inwardly anticipated the happiness of
the future external redemption. On the one side the
Phariseeac-apocalyptic hope of the miraculous coming
down of the kingdom of God from heaven to earth, and
on the other side the individualistic piety of the Psalm-
ists and of “them that are quiet in the land,” who,
being satisfied in their fellowship with God, ask nothing
of heaven and earth, these were the two sides into
which the historical-national hope of redemption of the
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 251
prophets had resolved itself in the last pre-Christian
century of Judaism.
These two sides of the Jewish piety — the indi-
vidualism of the heart-religion of the Psalms, and
the Socialism of the prophetic-apocalyptic idea of the
kingdom—were combined in Jesus of Nazareth into
the unity of a unique religious geniality. The intimate
union with God of the pious poets of the Psalms was
the ground-tone of His religious life; to Him it clothed
itself in the image of the most natural and most in-
timate human bond of fellowship—the image of the
relationship of father and child. But this intimate
union with God did not make Him indifferent to the
world or to the needs of His people, for He saw in
God not merely His Father, but the Father of all
men; and He believed in the destimation of all men
to become actual children of God through trust in
God and assimilation to Him. Thus heart-felt love
to God became for Him the motive of active and
patient love to the brethren; it constrained Him to
offer the rest and joyfulness which he possessed in
the consciousness of His Sonship to God, to all who
were weary and heavy laden, as a means of consola-
tion and Salvation. He turned with preference to
those who were physically and spiritually sick, and
sought by the exhortation of humble and trusting
love to awaken and animate in them the glimmering
spark of their better Selves. His love awakened love
252 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
in return; His trust in God awakened the courage
of faith, before which the evil spirits of sin and in-
Sanity fled away; and thus did the humble and meek
Teacher become the Physician of the sick, the Leader
of the blind and strayed, the Deliverer of the captives.
While He recognised in these results proofs of the
victorious power of the divine spirit, the hope of the
early coming of the kingdom of God became to Him
a certainty that its existence had already begun. Al-
though the apocalyptic expectation of a miraculous
new order of all things and the inversion of all social
relationships might still retain their hold even for
Jesus, yet it was only the popular form in which a
new thought of great reach clothed itself—namely, the
thought that the coming of the kingdom of God pro-
ceeds from within outwards, that it has its first realis-
ation in the hearts of men who feel and conduct
themselves as children of the heavenly Father and
as brethren towards each other, and that through the
constant and quiet development of these inwardly
acting powers of life even all that is external is grad-
ually transformed, and the perfect time of Salvation,
if not directly accomplished, is at least introduced and
prepared. When Jesus beheld in man the growing
child of God, and in the world the growing kingdom
of God, he did away the idle waiting for future re-
deeming miracles of Omnipotence and inaugurated the
devoted working for the present inward redemption,--
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 253
that is, education of men into true children of God.
In Selfless devotion to this common task lay now the
Sole condition and surety of the participation of every
One in the common good which God has prepared for
His children, the kingdom of God. All the individual
Commandments of the law retreat into the background
as meaningless before the one all-embracing command,
“Love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as
thyself l’ “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness l’” With the greatness of the ideal goal
grows also the demand upon willingness for sacrifice
and the capability of performance on the part of man.
For the highest good, all subordinate goods, and even
one's own self, must be sacrificed; self-will and selfish-
mess in every form must be overcome. But what
makes this demand, which appears so hard, again
an easy yoke and a light burden, is the certainty
that the way of the Cross, that of the mortification
of the natural selfish Ego, is only the way to the
life of the true Godlike Ego: “Whosoever shall seek
to save his life shall lose it ; and whosoever shall lose
his life shall preserve it.” This is the kernel of the
redeeming truth which Jesus has revealed, not through
His doctrine merely, but also, and most of all, through
His life and death. Thereby Jesus has become the
Redeemer (cat' ééoxiju) in that He first understood
redemption in its true moral sense as the freedom
in God which is to be realised by Surrender of one's
254 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
own will, and has presented it to the eyes of man-
kind typically in His person and in His life and
death. All belief in redemption was henceforth to be
tested by this ideal model.
As it is the fate of all new ideas that they must
attach themselves to traditional notions, and under
their garb obtain acceptance among men, but at the
Same time must lose much of their purity, SO has it
also fared with the Christian doctrine of redemption
from the beginning. Already in the theology of the
apostle Paul its dogmatic envelopment began with re-
demption being exclusively attached to the death of
Jesus, and this death was set forth under the point
of view of a vicarious expiation. This is easily ex-
plained from the personal relations of the apostle
Paul. As he had not known Jesus in His lifetime,
the teaching and life of Jesus could not make a de-
cisive impression upon him; his whole interest was
therefore concentrated from the outset on the death
of Jesus. The death of the Cross had been to him
at first the offence which prevented him from be-
lieving in the Messiahship of Jesus ; but after the
vision at Damascus this very death became to him
the chief thing in Christ, the end of His divine mis-
Sion, and the means of His work of redemption. The
question, in what sense the death on the Cross could
be the means of the Messianic redemption, found its
answer to him simply from the presuppositions of the
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 255
Phariseeac theology, which beheld in the innocent suf-
fering, and especially in the martyr-death, of the right-
52
eous, an expiatory means compensating for the sins of
the whole people. What could be more natural than
that Paul, from the moment when he recognised Jesus
as the Messiah, should contemplate the death on the
Cross from the same point of view as an expiatory
means of Salvation for the redemption of the sinful
world 2 But it was not merely to the Jewish people
that the expiatory effect of the death of Christ would
extend, Seeing that Jesus, according to the conviction
of Paul, was not merely the Jewish Messiah, but the
heavenly man, the ideal of men coming down from
heaven, the second Adam. Hence the martyr-death
of Jesus which had been suffered in obedience to the
will of the Father, was accepted by Him as an ex-
piation performed by the representative of humanity
for all, by which the world had been reconciled with
God; and His resurrection was regarded as the be-
ginning of the new life of a regenerated humanity.
In one respect this view may be made to appear as
if redemption had again become a Supernatural miracle,
a mysterious expiatory sacrifice, which God Himself
has carried into effect in the bloody death of His
Son for the world, in order thereby to surpass and
to Supersede all previous sacrifices; and it is not to
be denied that this more or less magical notion of
redemption has played a great part in the Christian
256 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
World. But let us not overlook the fact that under
this dogmatic shell there is still concealed the same
ethical kernel which we have recognised as the thought
of redemption in the mind of Jesus. For what gives
the death of Jesus its expiatory power is also, accord-
ing to Paul, the mind of the ideal Man and Son of
God, who sought not His own, who did not wish to
Seize His Messianic Lordship by violence, but merited
it by means of His self-humiliation and obedience to
death, even to the death on the Cross (Phil. ii. 7, 8).
And the saving power of the death of Christ only
Comes into operation in those who enter in faith into
the fellowship of His spiritual life, who spiritually
die and rise again with Him. Regarded from this
point of view, Christ's death and resurrection have
therefore the significance of a dramatic symbolising
of the cardinal ethical truth, that it is the self-sacrifice
of obedience and love by which man is released from
Sin and guilt, and becomes participative of the peace
and freedom of a child of God. In this, therefore,
Paul and Jesus entirely agree; the distinction between
them is only this, that Jesus taught the redeeming
truth immediately by His words and life, whereas
Paul has enveloped it in the dogmatic notion of the
sacrificial death of Christ suffered once for all for us,
which must be carried on in advancing ethical Self-
Sacrifice in us.
In the Church the dogmatic-supramaturalistic and
PEDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 257
the ethical doctrine of redemption always held their
place in its history side by side with each other,
although the former stood more prominently in the
foreground, not merely in the popular view, but also
among the theologians. Its most widely spread form,
which ruled for more than a thousand years, was the
mythical representation of a conflict or juridical trans-
action between Christ and the devil—a fruitful theme
for the medieval fantasy, and exhibited in manifold
variations in art and legend. Yet this myth could
not satisfy the more earnest-thinking; and hence the
Scholastic Anselm set himself the task, how to under-
stand redemption, without reference to the devil, as the
Satisfaction of the God-Man required by the violated
honour of God. His theory rested throughout on the
presupposition of the Secular and ecclesiastical morals
of his time : the violated honour of God demands
- punishment or satisfaction. The punishment can be
commuted by a performance of value, which, in the case
of the debtor who is unable to pay, can be discharged
by a kinsman. The death of the God-Man was regarded
as an Opus Supererogativum of infinite meritorious value.
This merit demands a corresponding reward, which is
Credited to the account of the human kinsmen of the
God-Man, so as to cover their insufficiency in moral
performances. The work of Christ, as Anselm con-
Strued it, was in fact nothing else than the prototype of
the meritorious performances and Satisfactions of the
WOL. I. R
258 , PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ecclesiastical Saints, and was therefore from the stand-
point of the medieval Church thought out quite logi-
cally. All the more remarkable is it that the Churches
of the Reformation could be satisfied with this theory,
notwithstanding that it stood in complete contradic-
tion to their deeper moral consciousness. If, according
to Protestant principles generally, there are no super-
erogatory meritorious works, then one would suppose
that such cannot be accepted even in the case of Jesus.
And if it is only the personal state of mind of the
individual that decides regarding his Salvation (which
is the kernel of the doctrine of justifying faith), then
one would suppose that there cannot be any vicarious
performances of one for others at all, nor consequently
any such even in the relationship of Christ to us.
These objections to the ecclesiastical dogma of re-
demption were already raised in the time of the Refor-
mation by men like Schwenkfeld, Weigel, and Frank.
“Our redemption,” said Weigel, “rests not upon what
the earthly Christ has done for us, as if we could help
ourselves without repentance with His imputed right-
eousness. The life of Christ in thee must do it :
Christ's death is imputed to no one; let him then have
the death of Christ in himself, in the crucifixion of his
old man.” According to Frank, the historical Christ is
given to us for an example and a sign of grace, that we
may lay hold of God in Him. In Christ that becomes
revealed which was formerly existing unconsciously in
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 259
the hearts of the pious. But the history of Christ must
Consummate itself in all His members; the Word must
also become flesh in us, must suffer and die and rise
again in us. The intention of these really evangelically
thinking men, to put an ethical and internal redemp-
tion in place of the dogmatic and external redemption,
could not at first be carried through in opposition to
the new dogmatism of the Protestant theology, but we
may See in them the precursors of the idealistic
philosophy of religion, which since Kant has exercised
deep influence even upon the theological doctrine of
redemption. According to Kant, belief in a mere
historical proposition is dead in itself, and is of no avail
for Salvation: the proper object of the belief in Christ
is the ideal Son of God—i.e., the ideal of the humanity
that is well-pleasing to God. This idea has the basis
of its truth and binding power in the practical reason,
and is independent of all historical traditions; but it is
brought to efficient perception through the example of
Jesus, whom we therefore may regard as if the ideal of
the good had appeared bodily in Him, without our
having nevertheless on that account to see in Him
anything else than a true man : nay more, by presup-
posing His mystical Deity, the typicalness of His moral
example would rather be destroyed. Even the dog-
matic theory that the guilt of men is vicariously ex-
piated by Christ's death cannot, according to Kant's
conviction, be correct in the proper Sense, because
260 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
guilt, as the most personal of all things, is not trans-
ferable. We are thus led to see in this theory the
symbolical presentment of the truth that the new man
in us suffers as it were vicariously for the old man; for
he takes upon himself the daily pain of self-subjuga-
tion, and bears guiltlessly in patience the manifold evils
which the old man could not but necessarily impute to
himself as punishment. Therefore, as Christ is the
exemplification of the moral idea of man, so His death
is the symbol of that moral process of painful Self-
subjugation in obedience and patience, in which the
true inner redemption of man consists. In like man-
ner Fichte said, the only proper means of Salvation is
the death of selfhood, death with Jesus, regeneration.
This is the way we must go; the history of how it has
been discovered and made plain is indeed otherwise
good, but it gives no help to going. Christianity is not
reached until that way of blessedness is recognised £LS
the sole and whole way, and what is historical is to be
given over to the understanding. If one is really united
with God, it is quite indifferent by what way he has
come to it; and it would be a very useless occupation
to be always merely repeating to one's self the remem-
brance of the way, instead of living in the thing itself.
In this philosophical doctrine of redemption there
lies a significant truth, along with a sensible defect.
The truth is this, that redemption is not a miraculous
process external to us, which was accomplished long
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 261
ago and once for all by the sacrificial death of a God
in our favour, but that it is a moral event happening
within the soul which always repeats itself, the self-
sacrifice of the will to God in obedience, love, and
º patience. This is just what we have learned to know
as the sense of Jesus' doctrine of redemption; and
this is also just what was the kernel of the Reformation
doctrine of justifying faith, which indeed is nothing
but self-surrender to the holy love of God. But the
defect in the Kant-Fichtean doctrine of redemption
Consisted in this, that it limited this ethical process of
transformation to the individual, and endeavoured to
explain it from his subjective reason and freedom
alone. In this view the decisive question remained
unsolved—namely, how the individual was of himself
to become able to release himself from his moral
imprisonment and powerlessness, and to become a new
morally free man. For by appealing to what Ought
to be, to the law of the good lying in the reason, the
possibility of its realisation was not at all explained,
seeing that the law by itself alone is able indeed to
weigh us down and to condemn us, but not to lift us
up and liberate us. Limited to the individual, the
victory of the good principle over the bad always
remains problematical, a thing of happy accident
without real guarantee. Only when the moral indi-
vidual knows himself to be the member of a com-
munity in which the good principle has actually
;
262 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
become the ruling common spirit, and shows itself
always efficient as the victorious power over the bad
in the collective historical life, – only them is the
possibility likewise given that the individual may
himself also become good through the educating power
of the good Spirit which lives in the community.
This is just the Christian doctrine of redemption.
According to it, the moral liberation and regeneration
of the individual is not the effect of his own natural
power, but the effect of the divine Spirit, who, from
the beginning of human history, put forth His activity
as the power educating to the good, and especially
has created for Himself in the Christian community
a permanent organ for the education of the peoples
and of individuals. It was the moral individualism
of Kant which prevented him from finding in the
historically realised common spirit of the good the
real force available for the individual becoming good.
The post-Kantian philosophy overcame this defect
by its turning from Subjective to objective or historic-
Social idealism. And from this higher point of view
Schleiermacher has pre-eminently understood how to
;’ combine the internality of Kant's ethical doctrine of
redemption with the historicity of the principle of re-
demption which proceeded from Jesus Christ and is
active in the Christian community. According to
'Schleiermacher, redemption is not a transcendent mir-
aculous process, but a religious moral process of con-



REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 263
sciousness, which lies in the sphere of our experience
and corresponds to the laws of our nature. That the
consciousness of God, which belongs, along with the
Sensibility, to the generic nature of man as a rational
being, must become free from its initial suppression
and attain dominion over the lower side of man—
this, according to Schleiermacher, is grounded in the
unity of the divine decree of creation and redemption,
or of the order of the world; and it therefore followed
as a consequence with inner necessity from the de-
velopment of the rational capacity of man—as it is
also, according to Kant, a demand grounded in our
reason—that the good principle shall become lord over
the bad principle. But whereas Kant derived this
victory from the freedom of the subject, and con-
Sequently made it inexplicable, or at least wholly
problematical, Schleiermacher, on the other hand,
rightly recognised that the experience of the individual,
in respect of the bad as well as in respect of the good,
stands in causal connection with the joint experience
of the community of which he is a member. The
passing from the dominion of sin to the dominion of
the consciousness of God, in which redemption just
consists, cannot therefore have its sufficient ground in
the individual, but can only be a consequence and
imitative repetition of the fundamental and typical
transition which has been effected in the common
consciousness of humanity through the historical life-
264 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
work of Jesus Christ. The perfection in principle of
the consciousness of God in Jesus was the redeeming
power which appeared in Him as personal life; and
which, proceeding from Him, is present and active as
the holy common spirit in Christendom. If it is true
that the individual life is always the abbreviated re-
petition of the generic life, and that the actualisation
of the human capacities in the individual is only
effected everywhere on the ground of their actuality
in Society, then it was certainly a happy thought of
Schleiermacher to expand the different states of the
religious self-consciousness (unfreedom and liberation
of the higher self) into phases of the development of
all religious humanity. Thereby he broke through
the narrow individualistic and non-historical horizon
of the Aufklärung, and reconciled the inner Self-
certainty of the personal spirit with the historical
common spirit of Christendom.
Upon the standpoint of this universal-historical doc-
trime of redemption (as we may call it by way of dis-
tinction from Kant's individualism), the good is not a
mere ought-to-be, an ideal without reality, the realising
of which was expected exclusively from the subjective
will, which, however, could never become capable of
its task. But the good is the universal-rational will
or divine Logos which realises itself in the course of
the history of humanity, the revelation of which has
indeed attained its highest point in Christ, but is by
REDEMPTION AND EDUCATION. 265
no means limited to Him, rather going back to the
beginning of our race. The rational capacity inmate
in us, that image of God in man, already rests upon
our participating in the divine Logos, which John for
that very reason calls quite generally “the light of
men,” the light “which lighteth every man.” And
thus every step in the development of this divine germ
of humanity, every thought which rises to the light of
truth, every good deed which furthers and preserves
the moral order, is likewise a revelation of the divine
spirit which redeems us from crude nature and educates
us into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Undoubtedly the central revelation of this spirit has
been the religious life of humanity at all times; and in
this sphere Jesus Christ is the central form towering
above all else, and His life-work is the decisive turn-
ing-point, the regeneration of humanity, the redemption
(kat' ééoxyv). But this does not exclude the fact that
we may also recognise in all the other benefactors of
humanity who have accomplished what is great and
fruitful in religion and morality, in art and Science, in
discoveries and inventions, redeeming heroes and in-
struments of the divine education of humanity. The
collected fruit of all these deeds and sufferings, con-
flicts and sacrifices, which contributed to further the
spiritual development of our race, forms the true
“treasure of grace” which is transmitted as a most
precious inheritance from generation to generation.
266 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Every individual who is born into the world of Christian
civilisation and reared in it, enters immediately into
the enjoyment of this inestimable inheritance, which
is laid into his cradle as an unmerited good, and, we
may say, as a gracious gift of the love and wisdom
that govern the world. Before the waking conscious-
ness of the spirit of the child is able to grasp the
thought of the good as law, duty, task, and ideal, it has
already long got to feel the good as the present good
of civilised life, and as the educating power of truth
and love. There also springs out of this precious gift of
“the grace of God that bringeth salvation” (Titus ii. 11)
a correspondingly high task for every individual. But
the impossible is not demanded, namely, that every one
should proceed to create the good out of his own weak
powers; he has only to give himself up willingly to
the existing spirit of the good, to appropriate it to
himself, to live into it, and to let himself be trained
by it to true freedom, in order then to work co-oper-
atingly with strengthened power for the furtherance
of the common good. “What thou hast inherited
from thy fathers, acquire it in order to possess it !”
This advancing work of appropriating and Communi-
cating spiritual goods, of letting one's self be educated
and educating others for the good, in this dedication
of the whole self to the furtherance of the universal
good, of the kingdom of God, in this work consists
the ethical redemption of all.
LECTURE IX.
THE RELIGIOUS WIEW OF THE WORLD.
I. IDEALISM AND NATURALISM.
THE thought that the world has its sole ground in God
is regarded in the Monotheistic religions as an almost
self-evident cardinal proposition. But the history of
religion teaches that this thought only grew very
gradually to maturity in the consciousness of men.
The devotees of Nature-religion did not yet know it.
As its Gods are themselves Nature-beings, they cannot
be the ultimate ground of Nature, but they arise at the
same time with it. Where men reflected in the sphere
of the Nature-religions regarding the Origin of the uni-
verse, they thought that the visible world, together with
the Gods and spirits, had arisen of themselves out of
Original germs or material elements; their Cosmogony
was one with their Theogony. The notion was widely
spread of a world-egg which, having burst, became
heaven and earth, and Out of whose contents even the
268 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Gods had arisen along with other beings. . Or they
thought of Chaos as being the first, that formless mass
in which all the germs of life, and of Gods and men,
are still together; and which then by gradual separa-
tion and combination of the individual forces, unfolded
itself into the world of the Gods and of earthly beings.
According to Hesiod's cosmogony, for example, there
was in the beginning Chaos and Eros (the vital im-
pulse). Chaos divided itself into Tartaros and the
Earth, and Earth brought forth out of herself the Sky
and the Ocean. Uranos, moved by the vital impulse,
fertilised Gaea and begot the Titans and Cyclops, but
Was mutilated by the Titan Kronos, and deposed from
his lordship. Yet neither was the lordship of Kronos
lasting; for he too was only the wild purposeless and
untamable nature-force which swallows again its own
children. He was overpowered by the youngest of
his Sons, Zeus, who shared the lordship of the world
With his brothers Poseidon and Aidoneus. But even
Zeus had still to secure his lordship from the revolt of
the giants, the successors of the Titans; and it was
Only with the conquest of these that the crude elemen-
tary forces of Nature were for ever subdued by the
rational and harmonious ruling of the Olympians, those
human Gods. Thus, according to Hesiod's COSmogony,
the present world of the Gods and men is the last
product of a gradual development of higher and higher
formations out of the primal Chaos. The same thought
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 269
was carried out by the Ionian Nature-philosophy, which
made the world arise out of one or several elements
through separation and combination, or constructed
it out of compositions of the Original simple atoms.
The first of the Greek philosophers who represented
the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering
understanding of God (the voijs) was Anaxagoras, whom
Aristotle on that account called “the first sober one
among drunken ones.”
There is not unfrequently found in the mythology
of the Nature-religions a combination of Theogony and
a divine formation of matter in such a way that the
Gods—whether all or some or one of them—are the
first products of Chaos, but then they form the rest of
the world out of it. Thus, for example, in the Indian
mythology Prajapati proceeded out of the golden world-
egg, and then became the creative former of the world.
Likewise, in the Chaldean mythology the great Gods
arose at first out of Chaos, and they then created the
other Gods and the living beings of heaven and
earth.
The doctrine first expressed among the Greeks by
Anaxagoras, that the rational spirit is the world-Order-
ing principle, is found outside of the Biblical religion
only among the Persians whose legend of Creation has
a close affinity with the Biblical account, and perhaps
even exercised a historical influence upon it. Accord-
ing to the Zendavesta, the all-wise spirit Ahura Created
270 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
the world in so far as it is good by his excellent word,
with the purpose of forming a bulwark between the
hostile kingdoms of the uncreated light and the un-
created darkness. The Creation was accomplished in
365 days and in six acts, in the course of which were
formed the heavens and the lights of heaven, water,
earth, plants, beasts, and men. Every earthly class of
beings is the copy of a heavenly ideal—that is, is the
realising of a divine idea. Ahura made the first human
pair grow out of a twin-tree, and he implanted in their
bodies their pre-created Souls. This creation of Ahura
was, like himself, perfectly good, and pure ; but it was
spoiled by the hostile Spirit Ahriman (Angromainyu),
who to the good everywhere added the bad and per-
nicious—the naïvest Solution of the question regard-
ing the origin of evil, in which the greatest difficulty
of the abstract super-naturalistic doctrine of Creation
lies.
Whereas Nature-religion made Nature the absolute
principle out of which even the spiritual and divine
was to arise, on the other hand the Biblical religion
puts in the first place the Supernatural Spirit of God
as the omnipotent principle of all becoming, and
explains the world from His will, which expressed
itself in His word of command. Yet it is not exactly
a Creation out of nothing that is taught even in
Genesis, but a formation of the world out of the initial
Chaos, which is consequently presupposed as formless
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 271
matter present to the divine creative activity. The
description in Genesis i. of the gradual separation of
Chaos into light and darkness, above and below, wet
and dry, and then of the filling up of these spheres of the
world with their appurtenant living beings in the work
of six days, has a close affinity with the Persian and
Chaldean legend. It is a religious speculation in which
reflection is already much further advanced than in
the naïver marrative of Genesis ii. While in Genesis i.
a uniform plan reigns, and the acts of Creation proceed
in a teleological Series of stages, in Genesis ii., on the
other hand, the Creation begins with the formation of
the man out of a clod of earth; and thereupon the
Garden of Eden is planted for his dwelling-place, then
the beasts are created as his helpers, and finally the
woman was formed Out of a rib of the man. Here no
regular planned progress finds place, but what is most
immediately necessary is only created as Occasion re-
quired, and in it a defect always again exhibits itself,
and this impels to further creating. Even the mode of
the creating is represented still more naively: the
beings are not called into existence by the simple word
of command, but God Himself puts His hand to the
work; He plants the garden, forms Adam out of the
earth, breathes breath into his nostrils, frames Eve out
of his rib, and afterwards makes for Our first parents
their first clothing out of skins. The striking naïveté of
these ideas Seemed to the Greek fathers to be a clear
272 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
proof that this whole narrative was not meant to be
taken literally but allegorically.
The Christian doctrine of Creation is distinguished
from the Old Testament doctrine by the significant
thought that the world was created through the divine
Logos—by which is now no longer meant the mere
word of command, but the divine Spirit which is active
in the world, and which finds the culmination of its
revelation in the Son of God, on which account the Son
Himself is also designated as the Mediator and final
end of the Creation (John i. 1; Heb, i. 2; Col. i. 16).
The meaning of this New Testament doctrine is seldom
understood in its far-reaching significance; and this is
natural, because we are not accustomed to distinguish
between the divine Logos and the man Jesus. Absurd
as would be the notion that the world was created by
and for Jesus, as profoundly true is the thought that it
is a work of the divine reason which Orders the chaos
of forces from eternity to eternity, and guides the
course of the development of the world to the final end
of a moral kingdom of spirits. That the divine idea of
man as “the son of His love,” and of humanity as the
kingdom of this Son of God (Col. i. 13), is the im-
manent final cause of all existence and development
even in the prior world of Nature, this has been the
fundamental thought of the Christian Gnosis since the
apostolic age, and I think that no philosophy has yet
been able to shake or to surpass this thought—the
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 273
corner-stone of an idealistic view of the world. The
whole idealistic philosophy of modern times is in fact
only the carrying out and grounding of the conviction,
that Nature is ordered by spirit and for spirit as a
Subservient means for its eternal ends; that it is there-
fore not, as the heathen naturalism thought, the one
and all, the last and highest of things, but has the
spirit and its moral ends over it as its lord and master.
This is the true, the only genuine Supernaturalism,
which is just as far removed from the abstract Jewish
Supernaturalism as from the heathem naturalism. For
if the Logos is the rational purposive thinking of God,
the ordering power over Nature, then Nature is an
Ordered system of final thoughts, its process of becom-
ing is a development from lower to higher, in the whole
of which every individual thing has its determined
place, and serves the whole according to the law of its
kind. As the Order of means for the ends of the spirit,
as the causal mechanism for the teleological idea,
Nature comes to its full right, asserts its inner comfor-
mity to law and purpose, and does not become the foot-
ball of an external arbitrary will or the playground
of a divine omnipotence whose “Supermatural miracles”
would put in the place of the real Nature an imaginary
super-nature, which would be no Nature at all. The
view of the world which alone truly corresponds to the
principle of Christianity is this moral idealism, which
perfectly accords with intellectual realism, being as far
WOL. I. S
274 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
removed from the Jewish fantastic-apocalyptic Supra-
naturalism as from the heathen spiritless and godless
naturalism. These two extremes are the ever-threaten-
ing enemies of Christian truth, and to them are due,
even in our own day, the conflicts between faith and
knowledge.
The Church of the second century had to guard
itself from the danger of falling back into heathen
naturalism, a danger which threatened it from Gnos-
ticism. In the course of this conflict, however, the
Church itself fell into the abstract Jewish super-
naturalism, to which it gave the harshest expression in
the doctrine that the world was created out of nothing
by a free act of the divine omnipotence in time—with
which position the reality of Nature was as much put
in question theoretically as its right was practically
denied in Asceticism. The hostility to Nature of the
medieval supernaturalistic Christianity was the opposite
extreme to the naturalism of the ancient world. With
the Renascence of the ancient culture, love of Nature,
and consequently also the study of it, began to waken
anew ; and out of it arose the collisions between the
science of Nature and the doctrine of Creation, which
have never since ceased.
The discoveries of astronomy gave occasion to the
first conflict. The Heliocentric system of the world of
Copernicus appeared to the theologian Melanchthon,
otherwise so mild, as a godless innovation which the
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 275
government ought to suppress. It cannot be denied
that in taking this view he showed more insight into the
bearing of this innovation than do most of the theolo-
gians of our day, who are wont to ignore, or at least as
far as possible to minimise, the antagonism between the
Copernican and the Biblical or Geocentric view of the
world. The opposition in fact affects not the Biblical
history of Creation only, but its consequences reach
still further. If the resting earth becomes a rolling,
globe, and the fixed vault of the heavens becomes the
infinite space of the world, then for the religious fan-
tasy, with the fixed above and below, disappears also the
frame within which it had localised the chief acts of
the divine-human drama of the history of salvation,
from Paradise on till the Second coming of Christ.
But if the external theatre in space is withdrawn from
these acts, they can no longer be represented as ex-
ternal events, and the necessity therefore appears im-
posed on the religious thinker to apprehend the divine
revelation as not in Space and not in Sense, but as a
spiritual process in the human consciousness. Further,
when it is held that the earth is no longer to be re-
garded as the centre of the universe, the position of
man in relation to the Order of the whole appears also
to be changed. As the inhabitant of a small province
of the universe, he can no longer claim that the whole
world should direct itself according to his wishes, that
from regard to his wants the Sun should stand still
276 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
several hours, or the shadow of the sun-dial go back-
wards. When the conformity to law in the movement
of the heavenly bodies was once recognised, it was a
near consequence that the processes of earthly nature
are also subject to the same conformity to law. The
progress of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries led to an entirely new Con-
ception of “Nature.” The place of final causes was
taken by mechanical causalism; the place of angels
and demons and of arbitrary acts of omnipotence was
taken by the universal inviolable law of the universe.
To this revolution in the view of nature philo-
Sophical expression was given by Spinoza. The key-
stone of his philosophy is the thought that God is the
causa imſmanens of the world, and that the divine
causality does not work with arbitrariness, but that
all its operations follow as necessarily from its nature
as the properties of the triangle do from its essence.
Regarding the traditional conception of Creation,
Spinoza judged that it turns God into arbitrariness,
and the world into chance; and instead of it, accord-
ing to him, God should be thought as the natura
naturams which unfolds itself naturally in the natura
naturata, just as every force unfolds itself in the
totality of its effects. As long as men wish to find
everywhere in nature the particular intentions of one
governor or of several, who arbitrarily direct things
with reference to the advantage or harm of men, so
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 277
long is a sound knowledge of nature impossible. The
delusive idea, that in all the processes of nature extra-
mundane powers have their hand in play, and prose-
Cute their particular intentions, is, according to Spinoza,
an asylum ignorantiaº ministering to human Selfishness,
a Superstition which makes men the slaves of their
OWn imaginations and passions; and in opposition to
which, the true piety consists in recognising God’s
revelation in the eternal laws of the world's order,
and in accommodating one's self to it submissively.
Certainly Spinoza was right in combating the abstract
Supernaturalism with its external and arbitrary direct-
ing of things according to particular intentions, and in
emergetically representing the conformity to law of all
that happens in nature, which is the principle of modern
Science. But in his polemical zeal Spinoza shot be-
yond the mark in understanding the conformity to law
of what happens so that it excludes all purposiveness,
—a view in agreement with this other that he was able
to apprehend God only as substance, as efficient force,
and not as Spirit or as active thought positing ends.
The consequence of this was, that his view of the world
had a wavering tendency towards a maturalism with
which the Biblical idealism cannot be combined.
Leibnitz sought to remove this defect by thinking of
nature as the system of both efficient causes and of
final causes at Once—the former according to its cor-
poreal manifestation, the latter according to its inward
278 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
psychical side. In like manner Leibnitz sought to
understand God's causality as free and necessary at
the same time, in so far as God has created the world
as it is, not indeed with physical but with moral neces-
sity, by choosing out of many possible worlds the best
for actualisation. This position had the effect, not in
the intention of Leibnitz himself, but according to the
way in which it was apprehended by his followers, of
opening the door anew to the Deistic separation of God
from the world, and to the arbitrary teleology which
then diffused itself and made itself ridiculous in the
popular Physico-theology of the eighteenth century.
Hence profounder minds like Lessing, Herder, and
Goethe returned again to Spinoza, yet in such a way
that they completed the abstract Monism of substance
by Leibnitz's Monadology, and the ateleological causal-
ism by Leibnitz's teleology. God is conceived as the
spirit which inwardly moves and rules Nature, and
Nature as the manifestation of His rational purposive
thoughts, as “the living garment of the Deity”
(Goethe). In Fichte's high - strung idealism Nature
lost all reality, and became the mere representation of
the mind, which in this image of its own imagination
creates the material of its moral activity. For the
rest, Fichte rejected as decidedly as Spinoza the super-
naturalistic conception of Creation: he called it the
fundamental error of all false metaphysics, a Jewish
and heathen principle by which the conception of the
IDEALISM AMD NATURALISMI. 279
Deity is fundamentally corrupted, and invested with
an arbitrariness which operates prejudicially upon the
whole religious system. It was Fichte's conception of
the moral world - order which excluded the lawless
arbitrariness of the abstract Super-naturalism. Schel-
ling's nature-philosophy restored to mature its reality,
but conceived of it as the means subservient to the
ideal ends of the spirit which develops itself through
the stages of the existence in mature in Order to come
to itself in man as spirit. Nature thus appears as the
means posited by the spirit for the Self-realisation of
the Spirit; and its becoming thus appears as the pre-
liminary history of the development of the human
Spirit.
However much the philosophy of mature may have
erred by arbitrary hypotheses and a priori Construc-
tions, yet this one merit must be conceded to it, that
it first applied the great principle of development to
nature, and thereby showed the way which can lead
men beyond the antagonism of the traditional Super-
naturalism and the mechanism which reigned in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first who
trod this so important way was Herder. In his ‘Ideas
for a Philosophy of History’ he viewed man as the
final goal to which the terrestrial Organisation strove.
Through the whole scale of beings, from the stone to
the animal, and at last to man, the form of Organi-
sation rose higher and higher; the impulses and forces
280 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
of the creatures became more multifarious in kind, and
at last they were all combined in the form of man.
The beasts, says Herder, are men's elder brothers, the
prior stages upon which formative nature exhibited
separately, in passing, what it wished to realise in man.
Man can only obtain his lordship over the other crea-
tures by combating for it. For all things are in con-
flict with each other, because all are hard beset. Every
species cares for itself as if it were the only one; but
at its side there stands another which restricts it to
certain limits, and only in this relationship of opposite
species did nature find the means for the preservation
of the whole. It is only through the equilibrium of
forces that peace comes about in the Creation. Herder
therefore conceived the becoming of the terrestrial
nature as a development of more and more complicated
organisms out of simple organisms, a development in
which even the conflict of living beings with each
other, the “struggle for existence,” played an essential
part. The question, however, as to the How 2 of the
proceeding of one form of life out of the other forms
of life, still remained undetermined in the specula-
tions of the nature-philosophers. This was supple-
mented and completed by the Scientific investigators of
nature. Lamarck, at the beginning of our century,
taught that the various species had proceeded out of
the simplest Organisms, which had arisen by original
generation through accommodation to the altered con-
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 281
ditions of life ; but he found no approval as yet in his
own time. It was first through Darwin that the doc-
trine of development obtained prominent recognition.
As is well known, he started from the observation that
in the breeding of plants and animals great varieties of
species can be attained by individuals possessing definite
properties being used for propagation, whose specific
peculiarity is then increased more and more by in-
heritance from generation to generation. From this
he inferred that it was through a similar procedure in
nature, called “Natural Selection,” that all organic
species had developed themselves out of an original
fundamental form. Natural selection was explained
by Darwin from the fact that in the universal struggle
for existence, it is always only the individuals best
adapted to their conditions of life that survive ; and as
these individuals transmit their peculiarly favourable
qualifications to their descendants with a continuous
increase of their peculiarity, the manifold species are
thus formed in the course of generations out of the
gradual accumulation of the Specific differences.
The justification of this theory of natural Science—
which we, of course, have not to examine here in detail
—appears to me to consist in this, that it is in full
earnest with the thought of the development of all
life. To every view that regards things as having been
artificially made according to accidental designs, there
is herewith opposed the insight that all that lives is a
282 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
becoming from within through proper self-activity which
unfolds the germs lying in a being according to its own
law, and makes itself in actuality that for which the
real potentiality lay in its nature. But at the same time
there must always be presupposed an inner living im-
pulse which strives after, not its preservation merely,
but also its exertion and unfolding in a definite direc-
tion. This inner factor was not quite overlooked by
Darwin, as he lays it at the very basis of the struggle
for existence as well as of Sexual attraction; but Dar-
win has ascribed less significance to this inner psychi-
cal principle than to the external conditions of life,
from which he derived all variations. In this it ap-
pears to me that there lies a one-sidedness, which, how-
ever, does not affect the theory of development as such,
but only the application to which it has been put,
and this not so much by Darwin himself as rather by
the successors of that great investigator of nature, in so
far as it has been turned by them to account in order
to found upon it a materialistic view of the world.
The opinion prevailing on this point, that through the
causal development of life all and every teleology is
excluded, is a fatal error. That causality and teleology
are rather the inseparably coherent sides of all organic
life, was already known by Aristotle, and has been irre-
futably shown by Leibnitz and Kant. What else, then,
is the living impulse of a being which struggles for
Self-preservation in conflict with the external world,
IDEALISM AMD NATURALISM. 283
than a striving after the realisation of the possibility
inherent in its essence, and therefore after an indwelling
end ? If, however, nature is a system of unconscious
correlative final causes, or forces striving towards a
goal, then it presupposes a universal purposive thought,
and consequently an end-positing reason, as the organ-
ising purposive cause of the whole. If the Darwinian
doctrine of development has been made use of in order
by its aid to derive life itself from the primal matter,
and to give an apparently Scientific grounding to
materialism, this has been an inconsiderate confound-
ing of the most heterogeneous things. David Friedrich
Strauss in his last book, ‘The Old Faith and the New,'
has set forth the opinion that motion may be trans-
formed under certain circumstances as well into sensa-
tion as into heat; but Zeller has rightly objected to this
view that the transmutation of motion into ideas not
only lacks all relevant analogy, but that this assump-
tion also involves the clear contradiction that the
embracing of the manifold into the unity of conscious-
mess would have to be explained without a single Sub-
ject of consciousness. This is generally the cardinal
error of all materialism, that it would explain the
world out of mere states and processes of external Ob-
jective being, and does not pause to think that we
should know nothing at all of this being without a
subjective consciousness, which is therefore to be al-
ways presupposed in our knowing of things, and there-
284 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
fore cannot be derived from it. How, then, could we
know anything, even of the conformity to law of the
motion of bodies, without our embracing the percep-
tions that follow each other in time, in the unity of an
act of thought which presupposes a consciousness that
continues identical with itself in the change of its ideas,
and which refers the change of its contents to the iden-
tity of its self-activity ? Moreover, it has been at length
openly confessed by the more circumspect even among
the investigators of nature, that it is impossible to ex-
plain sensation and consciousness, and therefore the
actual human world itself, by materialistic presupposi-
tions. With this all reason for any anxiety concerning
the irreligious consequences of the doctrine of devel-
opment falls away; but if its extravagances are set
aside, we may with the more freedom from bias ex-
amine its true significance for the religious view of the
world, and we may draw the balance of loss and gain
resulting from it as regards the traditional Supernatural-
istic doctrine of creation.
And first of all, from the standpoint of the doctrine
of development, the literal truth of the Biblical narra-
tive of the six days’ work of Creation—according to
which the world has been called into existence “cut
and dried" out of nothing, by means of certain divine
miraculous acts—is a position which must be given
up. Therewith we undoubtedly lose a convenient
answer to the question regarding the Whence of the
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 285
world, which seemed to be so simply solved by the six
days' work. But yet only seemed ! For it could not
escape any one who reflected in any measure upon it
that that answer was sketched from the standpoint of
a still very childish view of the world, which our
present knowledge has far outgrown. We need no
longer enter upon the details of the Biblical history
of Creation, after having shown its contradiction in
principle with the Copernican system of the world.
But even the dogmatic formulae of the supernatural-
istic doctrine of Creation are of no greater value.
With the proposition that God has called the world
out of nothing into existence, no positive thought can
be connected. “Out of nothing comes nothing,” or
what appears to have come out of it has merely an
apparent being; it is an enchanted nothing, an illu-
sionary phantasm like the dream of Maya : but such a
merely apparent existence cannot be seriously ascribed
by us to the world, for we know at least that we
ourselves and Our fellow-men are something, and do
not merely appear to be. We have also come to know
God’s being from His revelation in the order of the
world; and if the reality of the world became doubtful
to us, the being of God would also become subject to
the same doubt, and then we would have to go
through the Same dialectic again, by which the
Brahmanic Akosmism, that had explained the world
as mere seeming, led to the Buddhistic Atheism.
286 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Hence we cannot give up the reality of the world,
both on account of our own selves and on account of
the reality of God; and hence we cannot rest in the
position that the world, having arisen out of nothing,
is, as it were, an enchanted nothing. Much rather
would we prefer to say with ancient Church fathers
and modern philosophers, that the world has its sub-
stance from the will of God, and its form from the
understanding of God. Further, a beginning and end-
ing in time of the creating of God are not thinkable.
That would be to suppose a change of creating and
resting in God, which would equalise God’s being with
the changeable course of human life. Nor could it be
conceived what should have hindered God from creat-
ing the world up to the beginning of His creating. If
He had previously either not yet had the power or
not the will to do it, He would have been in so far
imperfect, and therefore not yet true God; but this
would contradict the conception of His eternity and
unchangeableness. But as regards the ending of Crea-
tion with the six days' work, this opinion is corrected
by the doctrine of the Church itself, in So far as it
designates the preservation of the world as a “con-
tinual creation,” and consequently will not think of
creation as concluded at any one time. Moreover,
geology teaches us that the earth has passed through
various periods of indefinitely long duration before it
attained a formation of its surface that was fitted to
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 287
be a dwelling-place for man; while astronomy teaches
that in the universe there are always celestial bodies
and even whole Sun-systems still arising, and therefore
that creation is not yet ended to-day. All this agrees
in leading to the conclusion that we must give up the
assumption of a creation that happened but once, and
that has begun and ended in time; and instead of it
we prefer to say rather with Scotus Erigena that the
divine creating is equally eternal with His being.
Hence the world thus viewed continues to be the
region of temporal, changeable, and transitory being,
even if this whole of risen and perishing parts has
itself never begun nor will cease to exist. If we
therefore put in the place of single supernaturalistic
acts of Creation rather the eternal and omnipresent
activity of the divine omnipotence and omniscience
in the world, then, as it seems to me, we have lost
nothing at all for the religious view of the world, but
we have won for science freedom to investigate the
efficient causes and laws in the natural connection of
things, without coming into collision with religious
presuppositions, since the divine omnipotence, as eter-
nally omnipresent, works not without but through
the Order of finite causes in conformity with law.
What leads to the endless conflicts with natural
Science is not the idealism of the religious view of
the world as such, but only its traditional investment
in that abstract Supernaturalism which makes omni-
288 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
potence work as an anthropomorphic cause without
and against the order of the whole. This anthropo-
morphic and miraculous supernaturalism invariably
calls forth the reaction of naturalism, which then re-
jects with the mythical envelope also the true religious
kernel, the lordship of the spirit over nature, and leads
to the heathen deification of material existence. If
we would protect ourselves from that unspiritual and
godless naturalism, which in fact contains the greatest
danger for religion and morality, we ought not to seek
Our refuge with the supernaturalism which puts God
Out of the world, and which on that account can never
become truly master of naturalism, because it is at
bottom itself only another refined form of it, in So far
as it rears up a second fantastic nature above the real
nature. Nay, we must rather seek escape from this
“vicious circle” in the idealism of the truly religious
view of the world, which finds the divine spirit every-
where present and active in the world,—without in
nature as creative vital force, and within in Our Own
heart as the voice of truth and love. This is what the
apostle meant when he said, “He is not far from any
one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our
being.” And it is what Goethe means in the classi-
cal passage: “What were a God who only gave the
world a push from without, or let it spin round His
finger ? It is fitting for Him to move the world
from within, to foster Nature in Himself, Himself in
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. - 289
Nature; so that whatever lives and moves and has its
being in Him, never lacks His power or His spirit.” "
A special objection to the doctrine of development
is often raised with regard to the position of man in
relation to the sub-human nature. If a continuous
natural development between the sphere of nature
below man and man is accepted, does not man then
lose his distinguished position and distinguishing dig-
mity, and is he not lowered to the level of the beasts 2
I can assign no great importance to this objection.
The religious dignity of man rests, after all, in any case
upon what he is, not upon the mode and manner in
which he has become what he is. It is his rational
capacity which makes him man, and distinguishes him
from the beast; and this prerogative remains precisely
the same in whatever way the entering of this rational
being into terrestrial existence may be thought to have
been brought about. Whether God immediately formed
him out of a lump of earth—which is, after all, no
peculiarly distinguished material—or caused him to be
gradually developed out of unnumbered generations of
the terrestrial Fauna, the one is no better and no
worse than the other, and neither of them can occasion
* “Was wār ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ?
Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Sich in Natur, Natur in Sich zu hegem,
So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist,
Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst 1”
WOL. I. T
290 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
any disparagement whatever to the dignity of man.
We do not feel ourselves at all degraded by the fact
that during our embryonic pre-existence we must pass
through various forms of lower animal existence; why
then should the human species be more ignoble if it
lived through as many thousand years of preliminary
animal stages upon earth before it entered into the
appearance of man, as the individual now lives through
days of embryonic animal pre-existence 2 Are not a
thousand years before God as one day ? Instead of the
loss that is feared, the doctrine of development might
rather indicate a gain for the position of humanity in
the universe. If man is the crown of creation in the
sense that the whole process of development in nature
has striven towards his appearance, then he stands no
longer in opposition to nature as to an alien and hostile
power, but he recognises in it a fore-stage of his own
life, a divining and yearning of the still unfree Spirit in
its animal state, for which the fulfilment and liberation
has come, and will further come, in himself. Thus has
the apostle Paul Said that the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain together until now, and waiteth
for the glorious freedom of the children of God. And
thus did Jesus see in the natural life the likeness of
the spiritual life, both of them governed by the same
eternal laws of the divine world-Order, revealing them-
selves in nature and in the life of man, only in different
stages of their development. If the pious man finds
IDEALISM A ND NATURALISM. 291
everywhere in nature the signs and wonders of his God;
if the poet sees in it the mirror of his own soul, and
hears in its manifold voices the echo of his own joys
and Sorrows; if even the philosopher beholds in the
starry heavens the image of the moral order of the
World which lives in his heart, all this is not mere arbi-
trary imagining, but it is the proper manifestation of the
harmony of nature and spirit as eternally grounded in
God. The reconciliation of these two things, long since
recognised by Christianity in prophetic intuition, and
expressed in the words “the incarnation of the Logos,”
has been raised to scientific knowledge in the modern
doctrine of development.
In this spiritualised view of nature lies also a rich
compensation for the loss of the Supernatural miracles,
which undoubtedly have no longer any place in a
World of continuous development in conformity with
law. Goethe has said that
“Miracle is faith’s own dearest child.”
And he is right; for miracle is for the childish view
of the World the most natural expression of the con-
viction that the power of God reigns throughout the
world and controls it. So long as the divine omnipo-
tence is still represented in a natural fashion as an
individual cause along with and above other causes,
... the religious consciousness clothes itself in the re-
presentation of individual miraculous operations which
292 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
break through the familiar course of nature. Yet the
boundary between miracles and nature is still a shift-
ing one so long as the conformity of nature to law
is not yet clearly known. It is with this knowledge
that miracle first ceases to be a mere extraordinary
occurrence, and becomes an absolutely supernatural
miracle contrary to law. But as Soon as the idea
has obtained this significance, it is no longer tenable
by any logical thinking, as all the philosophers since
Spinoza have acknowledged. But even the religious
faith, if it rightly understands itself, has no interest in
maintaining the Supernaturalist conception of miracle.
Schleiermacher has strikingly remarked that in his
tence should show itself greater in the interruptions
| judgment it cannot be seen how the divine omnipo-
|
|
of the connection of nature than in the unchangeable
course of it, which in fact also rests upon divine
'arrangement. Through every absolute miracle the
whole connection of nature, both forwards and back-
wards, would be destroyed, and the conception of
nature itself abolished; the divine activity would be-
come an unordered magical mode of working; God
would be co-ordinated with finite causes, and thereby
even be made finite. On the other hand, when it is
said as a defence of miracles that they are a sign of
the livingness and freedom of God, it appears to be
Supposed that God is usually unliving and unfree, .
and comes Only in the rare exceptional cases of
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 293
miracles to free life and exercise of power; but this
is precisely what a decided faith in the Omnipresent
and continually active divine government of the world
Cannot possibly admit. Besides, it would manifestly
contradict the divine unchangeableness if He should
work now according to Order and again not according
to Order, now in founding and again in annulling the
Order of the world. And in particular, as we have
recognised the Order of nature as the revelation of the
divine Omnipotence, we cannot establish such an op-
position between the one and the other as that God
would be fettered or limited by the order of mature,
and could now and again feel a need to break through
or limit this fetter. As little as God is confined
within limits by the moral order of the world, just
as little is He so limited by the natural order. Both
are in fact posited wholly and equally by His will,
and are revelations of His eternal Logos—a violation
of which would therefore be a self-contradiction of
God, which is excluded by His eternal perfection.
And as miracle contradicts the right conception of
God, so does it also contradict the conception of
Nature as the connection of causes and effects in
conformity with law. Nor can appeal to our unac-
quaintedness with the individual laws of nature alter
anything in this position; for a process which did not
correspond to Our known laws of nature, but which
was to be explained from other laws of nature still
294 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
ſ
unknown to us at the time, would on that account
not be a real miracle, a Supernatural occurrence and
object of faith, but would be a problem of natural
science, and therefore not of any direct religious sig-
nificance. Nor can any valid argument be adduced
from reference to the “elasticity of the laws of nature.”
The laws themselves are not elastic, but are inviolable
necessities of working under given conditions. Wher-
ever an expected effect does not or does not completely
appear, we there assume as Self-evident that collateral
causes concurred with the principal causes, and that
these checked or modified its operation; but even this
check still takes place always according to determinate
and calculable laws. When, for example, the astrono-
mer Leverrier perceived deviations in the path of the
planet Uranus which could not be explained from the
positions of the planets hitherto known, he did not
Satisfy himself Somehow with the assumption of elastic
laws of nature, but he thought that the cause of the
deviations lay in the influence of a planet not yet
discovered at the time, the approximate place of which
he accordingly determined; and this then led to the
discovery of the planet Neptune. Were the laws of
nature “elastic”—i.e., did their working vary in an
accidental and groundless way — then there would
neither be possible an exact knowledge of nature nor
a sure mode of action on the ground of the known
laws of nature. With such a view we should be trans-
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 295
ported out of the réal world, in which the order of
events happens in accordance with law, into the fan-
tastic world of fables and magic, where we should lose
all our bearings both theoretical and practical.
If we must accordingly deny the reality of miracles
in the strict Super-naturalistic sense of the word, we
Cannot escape from the question how we are to explain
the rise and significance of the belief in miracle in
religion ? Here, of course, it would not be in place
to give an exhaustive answer to this question, which
would lead us deep into the labyrinth of historical
investigation. I should like to give only a few sug-
gestive hints which seem fitted for the elucidation of
the religious view of the world. Miraculous legends
arise in a twofold way—partly out of the º
of the real, and partly out of the realising of the ideak º
Every occurrence, through whatever natural causes it
is to be explained, may obtain for the religious judg-
ment the significance of a “sign º’ or proof of the world-
governing power, wisdom, justice, or goodness of God.
This ideal significance, which the real cause does not
at all exclude, rests upon the Subjective interpretation
of the occurrence, which interpretation is not arbitrary
but describes the impression which the occurrence
made upon the religious sense of the perceiver. But
again, it is quite conceivable on psychological grounds
that occurrences which have made a deep and lasting
impression not merely on individuals but on whole
296 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
circles of religiously excited men, become involuntarily
'dealised, even on the occasion of their being perceived
by the first eyewitnesses, and still more in their recol-
lection of them. That is to say, the features of the
reality which are not essential, or which disturb the
ideal impression, are suppressed, and the significant
elevating features are heightened above the measure
of the reality; or the intermediate members of an
operation which withdraw themselves from the notice
of the observer are suppressed, and a Supernatural
power is put into the place of the natural causal Con-
nection. Thus arise the relative miraculous histories,
in which a real historical background is to be pre-
supposed, but which was overlaid with mythical
accessories by the idealising fantasy. It is in this
way that the numberless half-historical and half-
poetical “legends” in the history of religion may
have arisen. But the religious spirit idealises not
merely real occurrences of the external world; it also
produces of its own spontaneity ideas and ideals to
which nothing real in the outer world corresponds,
but in which only inner living experiences of the
pious Soul, its struggles and triumphs, its beliefs
and hopes, are brought to expression. These ideas
are now involuntarily invested by the fantasy in
Symbolical images which are taken from the external
world, but which, because they serve to give expression
to a SuperSensible ideal, must themselves consist of
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM. 297
Supernatural processes. Thus are formed the purely
ideal miracle-legends which have no external reality
as their foundation, but in which only inner pious
experiences, aspirations, and hopes of the Soul find a
symbolical figurative expression. Yet it must be care-
fully borne in mind that the religious fantasy, in pro-
ducing Such poetic symbolical legends, is not in the
habit of distinguishing, nor can distinguish, between
the ideal truth and its sensible investment. It becomes
conscious of the ideal truth, not in a purely spiritual
form and in abstract conceptions, but only in the
sensible form of poetic intuition; and therefore it
believes in the reality of the miraculous history pro-
duced by itself, with the same immediate certainty
with which it is convinced of the truth of the religious
idea contained in it. The history of all the higher
religions, and in particular of Christianity, is rich in
examples of such miraculous histories, in which the
historical understanding can perceive nothing but a
poetic realising of religious ideas. But in thus ex-
plaining the rise of these narratives out of psycho-
logical conditions and motives of the religious spirit of
individuals and communities, we are far from that
iconoclastic rationalism which combated miracles from
an intellectual fanaticism, and made them contemp-
tible, because it was not able to transport itself into
the religious consciousness of past times. It is just
the doctrine of development which is able to heal
298 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
again the wounds which it inflicts upon simple faith;
for it teaches us that even the highest spiritual truths
can develop themselves only gradually in the human
consciousness, and that it is a condition belonging to
the laws of this development, that the spiritual invests
itself at first in a sensible vesture, and Only gradually
frees itself from this disguise. Whoever has once
apprehended this law is as far removed from wishing
to destroy the husk prematurely before the fruit has
ripened, as from desiring to defend the shell as a thing
for ever necessary and not to be meddled with. To
the matured faith the world itself is the one great
miracle of the successive realising of the divine ideal;
and therefore such faith honours in all miracle-legends
the beautiful symbols of the one great miracle of the
divine government of the world and of the education
of humanity, that heavenly treasure which mankind
could not hide otherwise than in earthen vessels. Thus
for us too the words of Goethe hold true, that
“Miracle is faith’s own dearest child.”
LECTURE X.
THE RELIGIOUS WIEW OF THE WORLD.
II. OPTIMISM A ND PESSIM.I.S.M.
WHAT is the origin of evil? whence has it come 2 This
question has ever moved mankind, and it has been a
leading motive in the formation of religious and philo-
Sophical theories. We may divide the answers to this
question into three classes: (1) Evil has been referred
back to an extra-divine principle—namely, either to
One or many evil spirits, or to fate, or to matter—at
all events to a principle limiting the divine power; (2)
it has been referred to a want or defect in the Deity
Himself, either to His imperfect wisdom or imperfect
goodness; (3) it has been referred to human culpability,
either to a universal imperfection of human nature or
to particular transgressions of the first men.
It is easy to understand how in the nature-religions
the beneficial and prejudicial operations of nature were
ascribed to heterogeneous causes, and that the evil
300 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
malevolent Gods and spirits were opposed to those that
were good and beneficent. This dualism is found in
some form in all nature-religions; the relationship of the
evil world of spirits to the good, and the significance of
the former for man, shaped itself very differently in the
different religions, according to the more optimistic or
more pessimistic disposition or mood of the peoples in
question. In the case of Savage tribes under unfavour-
able conditions of life, such as the African negroes, or
in the case of half-civilised races which were mal-
treated by secular or priestly tyranny, like the Mexi-
cans or the Indian Çiva-worshippers, or even in the
case of the medieval Christians, the pessimistic mood
predominates So much that their religion is more an
agony of terror before the bad God than worship of
the good God. The Egyptians and Western Semites
thought less pessimistically, but always still badly
enough of the power of the bad principle. In the cult
of Osiris, of Adonis, Sandon, and Melkarth, the two
hostile principles stand side by side on such a footing
of equality that in the circle of the year alternately
the one and the other conquers without a final victory
being ever reached, and this is the purely naturalistic
view of the world as void of history and purposeless.
Among the Iranians and Persians the hard struggle
for existence which was forced upon them, by their
geographical and historical situation, is likewise re-
flected in their dualistic heightening of the universal
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 301
Indo-Germanic opposition of spirits contrasted as light
and dark, beneficial and prejudical. The concentrating
of the latter into one personal head in Angromainyu
(Ahriman), who is almost on a footing of equality with
Ahuramazda, was perhaps a consequence of the moral-
ising of the old Iranian nature-religion by Zarathustra.
Yet this dualism is not an absolute one, as the victory
of Ahura is hoped for at the end of the world. Till
then his worshippers have to take an active part in
the struggle against the hostile kingdom of spirits, by
the exercise of all religious and civil virtues. Civil
morality holds good as an essential means for the ful-
filment of the religious purpose, the victory of Ahura
over Ahriman; but both this end and means still move
essentially on the ground of the natural interests of
the people; Ahura's honour is identical with the lord-
ship of the Persian state. Corresponding to the rigid
organisation and the martial Spirit of the Persian
military monarchy is the concentration of the hostile
spirit-hosts in the personal heads—Ahura and Ahriman.
Reflection is not yet directed to the fate of individuals
in distinction from the whole of the people, or to the
discrepancy between virtue and happiness; and thus
the system still lacks the motives for the individual
deepening of the religious view of the world.
The Greeks of the Homeric time are the classical
example of maïve youthful optimism. So much the
more instructive is the Sudden dialectical change and
302 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
transition which is to be observed in their case (as in
that of the ethnologically related Indians), from the
optimistic into the pessimistic mood of life and view
of the world. To no nation had the terrestrial life
taken shape with such cheerful and Sunny radiance as
to the Greek in the youthful days of its historical
existence. The Greek mythology had transfigured the
world into an idyl, in which Gods and men conversed
with each other like beings of kindred nature. The
Gods of this poetic idyl were the ideal forms of man,
not because of the moral and spiritual perfectness of
their being, but in virtue of the perfect beauty and
inexhaustible fulness of their sensuous enjoyment of
life. The stage on which Gods and men thus met was
formed by those regions of the terrestrial world that
lay under the Sun's fairest glow. Yet no nation has
in the end so completely transformed its view of the
worth of life as the Greek nation did. The Greece
that ends in the religious speculation of Neo-Py-
thagoreanism and Neo-Platonism regarded the same
world which had once appeared to it so full of joy and
light, as a place of darkness and error, and the earthly
existence as a time of probation which cannot be
quickly enough passed through. The beginning of this
turn of view lay far back; it may almost be found
already in Hesiod's description of the ages ever be-
coming worse. The more, then, the poets and thinkers
of the classic time of Greece rose to the thought of the
OPTIMISM A ND PESSIM.I.S.M. 303
moral Order of the world, so much the more did their
observation of the misrelation between fate and guilt
become to them a painful riddle, which was not solved,
but only made more acute, by the popular belief in fate
or in the envy of the Gods. In the case of Sophocles
especially every tragedy was a new exhibition of this
mystery of the world, a new question raised as to the
unintelligible rule of the Gods. Sophocles expressed
his own doubt of the justice of the world in the words
of Antigone: “How can I, in my wretchedness, still
look to the Gods 2 whom can I invoke as a helper, as
an ally, seeing that I have drawn upon myself the
curse of godlessness by my fear of the Gods 2 * These
doubts sought at first their solution in the idea of
retribution in the world beyond, by which Hades,
hitherto thought of as indifferent, was differentiated
into places of reward and punishment. But in the
same measure in which the life in the future world
gained in interest and worth, the life in the present
world lost value. This is already distinctly betrayed
in the words of Antigone when she says that she has
to give more heed to the departed, with whom she
will always be in future, than to those of this world.
These moods and views, which were pre-eminently
cherished in the cult of the mysteries, were fully
carried out after Socrates by the idealistic philosophy.
Plato taught that the terrestrial world is only a
shadowy and deformed copy of the world of ideas, and
304 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
that our body is a prison, out of which the soul, which
springs from above, has to raise itself to the world of
ideas. The earthly life had, for this thinker, only the
significance of a preparation for the better life in the
world beyond. The Stoics likewise, although starting
from other theoretical presuppositions, yet came prac-
tically to a quite similar estimation of the matural
goods of life. The wise man, as they taught, can only
find the highest good of full rest of soul in libera-
tion from all natural passions, in the mortification of
the heart, and indifference to all cares and joys. The
rational self-consciousness returns here into itself from
all that is external as from something alien and hostile,
in order to find, in its own pure inwardness and free-
dom, harmony with itself and with the absolute world-
reason, and therewith the highest good. But in this
proud Self-glorification and depreciation of the external
world, the solitary Ego empties itself of all definite
content, even of all moral values and ends; there re-
mains only the abstract self, which is null and worth-
less in its emptiness. Hence this world-despising
pessimism of the Stoics is always on the point of
despising and throwing away even the individual's own
life, as equally worthless with the rest of the world. As
the world was formerly negated for the sake of the self,
so even the self is at last negated along with the rest of
the World. In such absolute pessimism and illusionism
did the Original absolute optimism of the Greeks end.
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 305
Quite analogous, but still more logical and extreme,
in the case of the Indians, was the passage from the
Original optimism of the deification of nature into the
final absolutely pessimistic negation of the world. Poli-
tics, religion, and philosophy here contributed in equal
parts to bring the Indian people, which had once been
full of the joy of life and activity, to contempt of the
world and to disgust of life. Their civil life was with-
out lasting and great ends—a constant change of petty
tyrants, who split up Society by the barriers of the castes,
without national common feeling. Nor did the world
beyond furnish here, as in the Greek mysteries, a scant
comfort for the Sad life of the present, as the doctrine . .
of the transmigration of Souls threatened to prolong
the circulation of wretched existence without end.
The Brahmanic philosophy had always been strong only
in the abstracting and resolving of all that is particular
into an empty universality, whose highest is Brahma.
Instead of conceiving and ordering the chaos of exist-
ence under a supreme principle, it sublimated it into an
All-One, of which nothing can be further said than that
it is the alone existing being, while the world of the
particular is empty seeming and deception. From this
speculative negation of the world Gautama Buddha.
then drew its practical and popular consequence. All
life, according to Buddha, is suffering; for it is desire
of the soul for goods that are naught, and which by
their transitoriness prepare a constant illusion. Hence
WOL. I. U
306 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
man has to make himself free from all desiring, to be-
come wishless and hopeless, in Order to find peace, rest,
Nirvāna. But with this evacuation of all the content
of life, man at last also loses himself. This conse-
quence, which the Stoics occasionally drew by practical
suicide, Buddha drew as a demand in principle, not
indeed for bodily but for spiritual self-mortification.
Whoever would become free from the evil of the illusion
of the external world, must at last also become free
from the fundamental evil, from the illusion of one's
own existence. All willing and thinking must die out
and expire from want of spiritual nourishment, and
then the peace of the Nirvāna first takes up its abode,
a peace which no breath of evil any more affects. This
is the most radical pessimism thinkable; but it contains
at the same time its own reductio ad absurdum. For
it is a self-contradiction that the self-conscious Ego
should think itself as not being, and should will as not
willing. Thus we have seen how, among the Greeks
and Indians, the Original optimism of a crude idolatry
of the world turned round at last in a quite similar way
into an extreme pessimism, which again shows itself to
be untenable, because it cannot be carried out without
self-contradiction. With this, history has itself already
pronounced the judgment that neither upon the one nor
upon the other side alone can the truth be found.
But history has also shown the positive overcoming
of both errors in the development of the religion of
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 307
Israel. This people also started from a simple optimism.
“God saw all that He had made, and behold it was
very good;’ and He gave over the earth and what is
in it to men, that they should govern it. In particular,
God chose the people of Israel to be His own people,
and He concluded a covenant with it with mutual obli-
gation. Israel was to be God's holy people, and in con-
sideration of this the possession of the land of Canaan
and all earthly prosperity was promised to it. This idea
of the covenant of God ruled the historical pragmatism
of the prophets of Israel. From this point of view
they explained the evils from which their people had
often to suffer as just punishments of God for the
unfaithfulness of Israel, but yet at the same time as
means for the purification of the people, in order to
lead it towards its ideal of a holy people of God. The
basis of their ethical monotheism forbade them to think
of a blind fate, or of the envy of the Deity. But this
explanation of evils from the retributive justice of God
sufficed only so long as the religious reflection was
limited to the people as a whole. On the other hand,
as soon as the postulate of just retribution was applied
to individuals, it was impossible to avoid seeing that
it was the most just—those who participated least in
the guilt of the people, nay, even those who had re-
sisted it most staunchly—who had often nevertheless
to suffer most, while the unjust enjoyed good fortune.
With this position there was also raised for the Jewish
308 . PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
piety the question of the theodicy, which on the basis
of ethical monotheism has its peculiar difficulty —
namely, How is the experienced misrelation of morality
and fate to be made to tally with the government of an
almighty and a just God? The author of the Book of
Job has struggled with this problem, but he was un- {
able to solve it. The explanation of the friends of Job,
that his misfortunes pointed to hidden guilt, is declared
to be false, Seeing that God Himself recognises the
innocence of Job. But the question as to the ground
of his misfortunes is simply smitten down in the poet-
ical conclusion as unjustified and insoluble for the
human understanding: “I will lay mine hand upon my
mouth and be silent, for these things are too high for
me, and cannot be understood.” In the narrative con-
clusion, on the other hand, Job is at last richly indem-
nified by reparation of all his losses. And thus the
narrator falls back again into the old theory of retri-
bution, whose insufficiency, because of its contrariety
to experience, had just been the occasion of the whole
raising of the problem. While in the Book of Job
doubt still struggles with faith, in the Book of Ecclesi-
astes despair of the just government of the world is the
ruling mood: “All things come alike to all: there is
one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the
good and to the clean, and to the unclean. So I re-
turned, and considered all the oppressions that are done
under the Sun; and behold the tears of such as were
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 309
oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side
of their oppressors there was power. I have seen all
the works that are done under the Sun; and, behold, all
is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Amid this lamenta-
tion of the present, the questioning gaze does indeed
direct itself to the world beyond; but here too it ends
with anxious doubt: “Who knoweth whether the spirit
of man goeth upward 2 ”
Yet with Such hopeless resignation the Jewish piety
could not stop; for its essence was a hopeful idealism, a
trusting in the faithfulness and righteousness of God,
who must yet at last lead His good cause and that of
His faithful ones to victory, although the way to this
goal leads through suffering. During the suffering
time of the Exile, when the most pious had to endure
the greatest Suffering, yet also contributed most by
their patient perseverance to the Salvation and establish-
ment of the people, there was formed the new ideal
of the “pious endurer” (Amav), who, under external
debasement, poverty, and oppression, nevertheless
ceases not to wait for the consolation of Israel, and
who does not allow himself to be shaken in his pious
trust in God, although he no longer himself experiences
external prosperity. The inner certainty of fellowship
with his God is his consolation and compensation even
in continuing external misfortune: “Whom have I in
heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that
I desire besides Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth :
310 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion
for ever” (Ps. lxxiii. 25, 26). Thus did the Jewish piety
purify itself in the case of individuals in the fire of
affliction from the dross of its earthly mercenariness, and
it gained in its internal deepening a self-certainty and
satisfaction which was independent of the chance of
external fatalities, and was no longer exposed to doubt.
It is true that it was indeed always only but a few
select spirits who were able to raise themselves to such
religious idealism; and even for them the hope still
stood fast that the cause of God could not be for ever
the vanquished One, but that it must some day conquer
even in the external world, and right come to power
and dominion. But the more the reality appeared to
stand in contradiction with this postulate, so much the
more did the hope of a miraculous future, when it was
contrasted with the present course of the world, direct
itself towards a super-terrestrial world beyond, to a
“kingdom of the Saints’ coming down from heaven to
earth, in the glory of which those who had died in the
intervening time should also obtain their share by their
resurrection from the dead. Since the time of the
Maccabees the Jewish faith rose above the distress of
the present to the hope of a transcendent adjustment,
which transported into the far distance its original
earthly realism and optimism. At the same time, how-
ever, this displacement of the religious ideal into a
future that was to be miraculously established, and
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 311
which did not naturally cohere with the present, had
the consequence that now the present appeared always
only the gloomier in contrast to this high-flying ideal
representation of the future. The Apocalyptic tran-
scendence of the future Messianic age had corresponding
to it, as its obverse side, the dominion of the realm of
demons in the earthly present.
As little as the hope of a resurrection, had the fear
of demons been an original element of the Hebrew
religion. Even if it were the case that the belief in
spirits was not foreign to the ancient Hebrews, it had
undoubtedly nothing to do with the Jahve-religion.
There was first formed in the post-Exilian time, probably
under the influence of the Persian dualism, the idea
of a kingdom of impure hostile spirits with Satan or
Beelzebub at their head. In Job he still stands among
the Sons of God as the accuser of the pious, but yet
strictly subordinated to God. According to 1 Chronicles
xxi. 1, Satan induced David to undertake the fatal
numbering of the people; the author of which, according *
to the earlier motion (2 Samuel xxiv. 1), had, however,
been God Himself. We see from this how the idea of
the Devil was a welcome expedient for the need of an
advanced religious reflection, to put God out of relation
to the evil and badness of the world. In the Apocry-
phal and Apocalyptic writings of the last pre-Christian
time, the demonology occupies always larger room. The
whole of heathenism was regarded by the Jews as the
312 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Sphere of the dominion of the demons; and when the
heathen empire of the Romans reduced the Jewish
people also under its sceptre, Satan appeared forthwith
as “the prince of this world,” to whom God has assigned
the present world-age, but in Order to take again into
His hands the government of the world on the occasion
of the miraculous establishment of the Messianic king-
dom in the new age. So comfortless and godless did
the actual world appear to the Jews of the last century
before the destruction of Jerusalem, that they could see
in it only the kingdom of Satan, the direct opposite of
the kingdom of God, which on that very account was
to enter into existence only through miraculous catas-
trophes. The view that the real world is very good,
from which Israel had started in the time of the
prophets, had given place here too, not less than with
the Greeks and Indians, to a pessimistic despair of the
real world. Yet what distinguished this Jewish pes-
simism from the Greek and Indian was the firm hope
that the misery would not last for ever, but that a new
better world would soon dawn, in which God would
wipe away all tears from the eyes of the pious.
Christianity also started from this Same pessimistic
view of the world, but it made it the foil of its doctrine
of redemption and Salvation. It did not weaken the
feeling for the great power of the physical and moral
evils in the world, but it put in prospect the overcom-
ing of them through the kingdom of God which is dawn-
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 313
ing, and it set its forces to work. Jesus knew by
the healing power of His word over those who were
diseased in body and soul, whom He also regarded as
tormented by demons, that the kingdom of God had
now come (Luke Xi. 20); that a stronger One had come
to rule over Satan and his kingdom, who would bind
him, and spoil his house. He saw Satan fall like light-
ning from heaven (Luke X. 18)—that is to say, He saw
his power over the world broken by the force of the
faith which in full surrender to God gives freedom
from the power of men and demons: “All things are
possible to him that believeth.” Jesus was far from
the shallow optimism which ignores the power of the
bad and expects an easy victory of the good without a
struggle. He knew that suffering was His own lot and
that of His followers in the world; but He knew also
that sufferings borne in pious obedience to God become
means for the victory of the good, for the salvation of
the individual and of the whole: “For whosoever will
save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his
life for my sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall Save
it. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered
unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for
many” (Mark viii. 35, x. 45). In this certainty of faith
that even the worst evils of the World are at last only
means for the good purposes of God, lay the victory
which has overcome the world—which in the first place
overcame it internally, in that it made the pious man
314 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
free from the terror of the world, and made him strong
for the struggle against all godless things. And the
same mood passes through the whole of the New Testa-
ment, and especially through the Epistles of the apostle
Paul. “We know that all things work together for
good to them that love God. If God be for us, who
can be against us? I am persuaded that neither
death, nor life, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God. As sorrowful, yet
always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as
having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (Romans
viii. 28, 38 f.; 2 Cor. vi. 10 f.) This is the fundamental
mood of the Christian in presence of the evils of the
world—as far removed from shallow optimism, which
does not, or will not, see the power of evil and bad-
mess, and to which much frivolity or hardness of heart
belongs, as from the despondent pessimism which de-
spairs of the victory of the good in the world, and
consequently also paralyses the power for earnest
conflict and deadens the heart in dull indifference.
The Christian view of the world proves itself to be
the true view also by the fact that it combines the
highest idealism, belief in the world-governing power
of the good, with the common-sense realism which sees
the world as it actually is. The Christian is not an
abstract idealist who in visionary optimism holds the
world simply to be excellent, all that is actual to be
rational, and even evil and badness to be mere seem-
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 315
ing, or a shadow fitted for beautifying the whole
picture. His heart is not so hard and unfeeling that
he does not feel his own and others' suffering as real
Woe; his conscience is not so obtuse that he could
approve evil and see peace where there is no peace.
On the contrary, because he never judges men and
things according to the external appearance, but accord-
ing to the internal reality, he perceives wrong and error
in much that appears to others as right and good; his
attitude towards reality is always in a certain respect
critical and polemical, because he measures it by his
ideal, and he cannot overlook the distance of the actu-
ality from what ought to be. But with all this, to
him it is not less firmly established that the world, in
spite of all its imperfectness, is the work of God, the
object of His redeeming love, the place of His coming
kingdom. On the one hand, he knows that we are not
to love the world nor what is in it, for the world with
its fashion passes away; and, on the other hand, he
believes that God has loved the world and reconciled it
with Himself, that all is from God, and through Him,
and to Him In this wonderful antinomy lies the
enigma, lies the strength of Christianity. The practical
solution of this enigma was indeed always present in
the immediate experience of the pious Soul, in the faith
which felt God’s power present in all human weakness,
in the love which put forth its hand to further the
divine kingdom upon earth, and in the hope which
316 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
Soared over the afflictions of time to the glory which is
yet to be revealed in us. Nevertheless, there lay in
that antinomy a problem for the religious reflection,
the Solution of which could not be quite Satisfactorily
attained at the very outset.
In the primitive Christianity the pessimistic polemi-
cal side of the Christian estimation of the world
Strongly predominated, and it expressed itself in an
ascetic attitude, not merely towards the life of sense,
but also towards the higher life of the world. The
primitive Christianity loosened man from the earthly
bonds and interests of Society, from family and country,
from law and State, from art and Science, by showing
him his true home in heaven. This partly arose from
the historical relationships of the society of the time,
in which even the higher human endeavours had under-
gone such deep moral corruption that no other than a
polemical attitude towards them was possible, unless
the Christian ideal was to be lowered by false compro-
mises. But the ground of the world-denying pessimism
and asceticism of the primitive Christianity lay partly
also in the abstract Supernaturalism which it had taken
possession of as an inheritance from the Jewish Apoca-
lyptic. For, according to the Apocalyptic representa-
tion of the kingdom of God, that kingdom was not to
grow out of the historical life of man, but was to break
its continuity, and to enter into existence by a direct
divine intervention from heaven. From this it followed
OPTIMISM AND PESSIM.I.S.M. 317
naturally that the present world, up to the coming of
Christ and His heavenly kingdom, still appeared as the
mere opposite of that kingdom, as a place of powers
hostile to God. Augustine called the Roman empire a
civitas diaboli ; and the whole Greek culture was, in
the eyes of Tertullian, a pompa diaboli. Thus there
was continued in Christianity the dualist-pessimistic -
view of the world which had been the final result of
the ancient development of civilisation, and this view
was carried forward in it for centuries. Not that the
specifically Christian truth of the reconciliation of God
and of the world had on that account been forgotten;
but it was, as it were, hermetically sealed in the
mystery of its dogma and worship. To the real world
outside of the Church this truth did not hold good; for
that world remained, in the eyes of the Christians,
after as before the coming of Christ, God-forsaken
and governed by demons. The terror of the devil and
diabolical magic grew in the middle ages to an even
more morbid height than it had ever reached in the
pre-Christian world, having been intensified by the
struggle of the Church with the heathemism outside as
well as within its boundaries, and by the amalgamation
of heresy with witchcraft, in connection with which the
Church used the popular superstition as a weapon for
the suppression of her opponents.
In the sixteenth century began the reaction from
this dualistic pessimistic view of the world, and it
318 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
started at the same time from two sides. In the Re-
naissance the world established its claim to the inde-
pendent worth of the goods of civilisation outside of
the Church, of scientific truth and artistic beauty; in
the Reformation Christianity loosened itself from its
ecclesiastical bonds and its ascetic enmity to the world.
The gulf between the kingdom of God and the world
was bridged over by that kingdom being no longer
limited to the Church, but extended to the moral Com-
munity generally, and by the world being liberated
from the ban of unholiness, and being recognised as
the nursery-ground of the moral goods of Christianity.
Certainly there was still much wanting to the com-
plete and logical carrying through of this view of the
desecularising and reconciliation of the world with
Christianity. There acted as a hindrance to it the
continuing authority of the old ecclesiastical dogma
with its abstract Supernaturalism, whose natural con-
Sequence was the dualism of the spiritual and the
secular. Besides this, the medieval terror of the
devil lasted in Protestantism for three centuries, and
bore its evil fruits in the horrors of the prosecutions
of witches. It was the second Renaissance at the end
of the eighteenth century that first carried out the-
Oretically and practically the reconciliation of spirit
and nature which had begun in the sixteenth century;
and in connection with it, it is easy to understand that
the recoil from the ecclesiastical supernaturalism led
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 319
at first to a half-heathen naturalism and optimistic
deification of the world. Rousseau's preaching of the
excellence of human nature and of the return to the
simplicity of the state of nature as the means of Sal-
vation from all evils, found everywhere enthusiastic
followers. But when the French Revolution had trans-
lated this theory into practice, the disillusion was the
more bitter the more naive the enthusiasm for nature
had been. Then there followed after the optimism
of the eighteenth century the poetical world-pain of
Byron, which Schopenhauer has raised to the philoso-
phical Creed of pessimism. .
Certainly one is justified in seeing in the pessimistic
philosophy of Schopenhauer and his followers a pro-
duct and reflection of the mood of the age, which, dis-
illusionised from the transcendental Utopias of abstract
idealism and sobered down, has become realistic and
resigned. Nevertheless, it ought not to be overlooked
that this philosophy is in certain respects a conse-
quence of the Kantian dualism, which held the good
to be unattainable and the true to be incognisable.
There is, according to Kant, such an absolute discord-
ance between reason and the sensibility, that the ideas
of the pure reason only entangle the understanding,
which is bound to the senses, in insoluble dialectical
contradictions, and that the moral demands of reason
find themselves in eternal conflict with the actual
desire of the sensible nature of man; so that duty
320 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and inclination can never go together, and the highest
good set up as a task by reason must always be only
an ideal goal, and never realised. If this be so; it
was a very natural inference that was drawn by Scho-
penhauer—namely, that the substance of the world is
the irrational will, and that its existence is therefore
in irreconcilable discord with the rational idea and is
consequently an evil, before whose insuperable power
nothing remains to us but the resigned “negation of
the will to live,” the Buddhistic Nirvāna. But we have
already seen how this theory led in the Indian philo-
Sophy itself to absurdity: the same thing may be here
noticed again under a new point of view. If all our
willing is an effluence of the irrational world-will, then
all our purposive conceptions or ideals are in like
manner irrational, have therefore no claim to truth
and validity, nor can they be applied as a rule for
the estimation of reality. With this, however, falls
away all possibility of a rational estimation of reality;
and consequently Schopenhauer's negative judgment
regarding the worth of the world becomes also ground-
less and arbitrary. Or conversely: if we are to be in
a position to pronounce rational judgments (whatever
be their issue) concerning the worth of the world,
then we must measure it by an ideal conception of
whose rational truth we are convinced; but if we are
able to form rational ideal conceptions, then our will-
ing cannot be wholly reasonless; but if there is reason
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 321
in our willing, which is a weak and limited effluence
of the world-will, there must also surely be reason in
the world-will; but then the world, as a product of
the rational world-will, cannot be an irrational evil,
but must be a means for the realising of the ideal,
which could not be our purposive thought, unless it
were also the primal purposive thought of the World-
will itself, and therefore the final cause of the real.
In short, pessimism as a philosophy breaks to pieces
on the inner contradiction that it denies the ration-
ality of the world and yet assumes the rationality of
its judging about the world, which is yet also a con-
stituent element of the whole; or that it denies the
tendency of the world to the good, and yet in its own
forming of ideals it proves actually the existence and
activity of that very tendency. Hence pessimism as a
form of thought always appears when thinking per-
forms its inexorable criticism on the objective world,
but the subject is so completely merged in this
critical process that it forgets itself therein, and does
not perceive that it already has in itself what it seeks
and misses without ; may more, that its seeking it is
itself a sign of the hidden existence of what is sought
for, and consequently the guarantee also of its coming
to be found.
The rising of this consciousness was the salvation
which Christianity brought to the pessimistically world-
weary humanity, with its message that the kingdom of
WOL. I. X
322 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
God is not merely a future far-off ideal, but that it is
already a present reality within, in the hearts of the
children of God. The opposition of reality and Ideal,
of the world and the kingdom of God, is indeed not
denied, yet it is no longer the whole truth, but only
One side of it, the starting-point, which is to be, and
can be, raised to unity. But the theoretical mediation
of the two sides contained in the Christian principle
was not yet possible under the presuppositions of the
Apocalyptic supernaturalism. For us it becomes pos-
sible through the conception of development, which
enables us to know in the real the becoming of the
ideal, and in the ideal the final cause of the real.
These two things stand equally established to us,
that the kingdom of God, or the ideal of the universal
highest good, transcends all bounded reality, and yet
that the reality always already participates in it in
Some measure, in So far as it contains the germs out
of which the Ideal is to develop itself. From this
point of view even the evil of the world loses its
painful sting, and transforms itself into a co-operating
means for the bringing forth of the good.
That the good can only develop itself in conflict with
its opposite, and consequently at the price of pain,
can be most clearly recognised when we reflect upon
the personal life. If man is to attain to a morally
good will corresponding to the rational Order of the
universe, the natural impulses must be restrained and
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 323
}
overcome in their immediate exercise, and made Sub-
ject to the higher end. Without the struggle with
one’s own nature, without the pain of Self-conquest,
no virtue is possible. ‘O pº 8apels áv6poTos of Tat-
8eijetat. Nor is this to be accomplished merely by a
single heroic act of renunciation of the self-will, but
the moral ideal demands daily new labour upon our-
selves and the sacrifice of Self-subdual. With every
step in the progress of moral insight grow also the
demands and tasks of the moral life; no standing
still, no idle letting alone, is permitted. It is only
the faithful one who perseveres unweariedly in toil
and conflict, who wins the crown of moral perfection.
|But what holds true of the individual life, holds in
a still greater degree of the whole life of the peoples
and of mankind. For the more complicated a moral
organism is, so much the more difficult is it to estab-
lish and to preserve the harmonious Order of its mani-
fold directions of will. Here it is not merely individ-
ual natural impulses that stand Over against each other,
but the morally justified interests of life in the dif-
ferent groups of Society struggle with each other
for the Supremacy; the wellbeing of the people as a
whole must be purchased by Sacrifice of the individuals.
The severest conflicts and sufferings for the people,
however, grow out of the progress of the moral and
religious modes of thinking and feeling. When old
practices and dogmas are felt to be untrue and unright,
324 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
and new ideals of a civil or ecclesiastical kind are en-
deavouring to obtain validity, then arises the struggle
between the existing order, which has been consecrated
by the authority of the Fathers, and the bearers of
the new ideas. Here it is not wrong that stands
against right, but it is the right of the past which
stands against the right of the future. It is the idea
which has embodied itself in the actuality of the
public life, and which has authenticated its vitality—
which indeed it has already more or less exhausted—
it is this idea which stands in opposition to the other
idea which would now first realise itself, and which
has yet to prove its capacity of life. These are the
hardest, the truly tragic, oppositions and struggles of
the world's history, out of which the bitterest pains
of humanity have grown at all times. But how could
humanity have been spared these sufferings if it is
to develop all its inmate capacities and approach
the ideal of an all-embracing harmony, the ideal of
a divine-human organism or kingdom ? “Ought not
Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter
into His glory !” This fate of the greatest of the
sons of men is typical of the fate of the whole of
mankind. Viewed in its light, the whole history of
the world appears as a single magnificent. Theodicy,
and all the sufferings of peoples and individuals are
transfigured into means of Salvation. All the battle-
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 325
fields of the world’s history, and all the martyr-pyres of
the Church's past, become sacrificial altars upon which
man has offered his sacrifices in Order to purchase his
redemption from the slavery of vanity, and his ele-
vation to the glory of the liberty of the children of
God. 9
If we can thus combine the worst evils which accrue
to humanity from its own historical development, with
the teleology of the divine Order of the world and
salvation, then the comparatively Smaller evils which
arise to it from the Order of nature will no longer
present any insuperable difficulty. In so far as man
is a natural being, he must also share the lot of all
flesh; he must suffer death and other natural evils.
And to these evils he is exposed even more than the
beasts, because he is more finely—and therefore more
sensitively—Organised, and because he is more helpless
and defenceless in his isolation than they are. But this
very physical defencelessness of his compelled him from
the beginning to enter into Social union, and led him
thereby into the path of civilisation. His more sensi-
tive organism, however, is connected with his intelli-
gence, in which he possesses the victorious weapon for
the domination of nature. The sufferings inflicted by
external nature, which the beast only passively endures,
become for man means of stimulation which incite
his senses to lasting attention and his understanding
326 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
to reflection, to meditative observation and anticipative
calculation. But by means of observation and reflec-
tion man gradually learns in the course of time by
listening to nature to make out her laws, and to employ
her forces for his own ends. The whole history of
civilisation is an advancing victory of the human spirit
over crude nature, a victory which he would never have
reached without the constant spur of physical evils.
Nature thus proves herself, not less in her beneficial
than in her prejudicial operations, the means which
excellently serves the end of the spirit, the granite
foundation upon whose fast-ordered structure man is
able to erect the edifice of his civilisation, the temple
of the eternal spirit. How then can we complain
about this order of nature which bears the whole
human existence with all its spiritual goods, because
out of its ordered course in detail there also proceeds
many a check and destruction to the happiness of
human life 2 Ought not the experience of the inevit-
ableness of natural evils, which indeed, in spite of
all the progress of civilisation, are yet not wholly
spared to any mortal, rather serve to give us the whole-
some warning that man's highest goal and good is
not to be sought in the world of Sense, but in the
world of the spirit, whose eternal good things are
not affected by the happenings and changes of the
course of nature ?
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 327
If we take all these considerations together, we shall
now be able to say that the true religious optimism,
as Christianity understands it, does not consist in this,
that the actual is to be held without further considera-
tion as good, nor that the evil in it is to be ignored; but
it consists in this, that the actual world is to be viewed
as a teleological process of development, through which
the good, the divine world - purpose, always realises
itself more and more—a process of development
from which, however, evils are so little excluded that
they rather serve as necessary and wholesome means
for the good, which can only realise itself through
their subdual. In this view of the world, in
which resignation and trust are combined, consists
also the kernel of the religious belief in Providence.
In some sense or other it is found in all religions,
inasmuch as belief in some sort of divine government
in human things is inseparably connected with the
belief in God generally. But upon heathen soil the
belief in Providence always remains wavering and
uncertain, partly because of the want of the unity
of the divine will, and partly, in particular, because
of the want of a single and moral world-purpose.
I’lato and the later Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus
Aurelius—approached most nearly to the Biblical be-
lief in Providence, yet even they did not attain to the
clear thought of a positive moral final end of the
328 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
world; and hence in their belief in Providence the
mood of resignation always again breaks through above
that of trust. It was in the ethical Monotheism of
the Hebrew prophets that the belief in Providence
first rose to the conviction of a divine government of
the world which aimed at the realising of moral final
ends. Nevertheless these ends were at first rather
national than purely and universally human. In the
Psalms the prophetic belief in Providence individual-
ised itself into the consciousness of a personal union
with God, and consequently also into a divine guid-
ance of the individual life. Christianity has spirit-
ually deepened the belief in Providence exhibited in
the Psalms, and it has partly expanded it universally;
for it has found the life-purpose of the individual in
his participation in the universal spiritual good of the
kingdom of God, the final end of the divine govern-
ment of the world. The individual belief in Provi-
dence contained in the Psalms is combined in Chris-
tianity with the social belief in which it took form
in the Prophets. Now, however, it is no longer na-
tionally limited, but is expanded so as to embrace
mankind as a whole, and so that the spiritual salvation
of all is recognised as the purpose of the divine love,
for the realisation of which the whole course of the
world is Ordered by the divine wisdom. And accord-
ing to this its religious kernel, the belief in Providence
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. 329
is unassailable, and has no refutation to fear either
from experience or from Scientific knowledge of the
World. l
The belief in Providence, however, inevitably COI) le:S
into conflict with the realistic view of the world when-
ever Providence is referred to egoistically limited ends,
which depend upon natural conditions, and which con-
Sequently could be brought about only by the inter-
ferences of an abstract supernatural Omnipotence with
the ordered course of nature. Where such interfer-
ences by Providence are expected, disillusions cannot
fail to come, and these have as their consequence
doubt of Providence generally. It is a quite natural
dialectic, in which one may almost perceive a just
Nemesis, that the presumptuous Supernaturalism which
would put the omnipotence of the government of the
world at the disposal of the individual for his own
narrow limited purposes, reverts under the disillu-
sions of actual experience into the radical unbelief of
a naturalism which recognises nothing higher behind
the causal necessity of the course of nature, and ends
in heathen comfortlessness. On the other hand, if
Brovidence is apprehended in the truly Christian Sense
that the whole natural and historical Order of the
world is the means for the realisation of the universal
highest end,-the ideal humanity,+then not only does
this religious view of the world stand in no contra-
330 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
diction with the intellectual knowledge of the connec-
tion of things in conformity with law, but the two
views complete each other, as teleology and causal-
ism form all over only the two sides of the one
truth. For the mechanism of the causal connection
is nowhere an end in itself. It is not the ulti-
mate meaning of the world, but only the ministering
instrument (unxauff) for the system of spiritual and
moral ends which stands over it. If, then, according
to the Christian belief in Providence, the whole of
the world in its course in time is ordered to serve
the highest end of the divine government of the world,
or the kingdom of the divinely-good, as the means of
its realisation, then it is self-evident that all indi-
widual happening, which belongs to the connection
of the whole and is naturally caused in it, can and
must also serve as a ministering means for that same
highest end. And seeing that in the universal pur-
pose, as the common highest good of humanity, the
true good of all individuals is also included, it is a
logical conclusion that all events which affect the
individual in his particular course of life are to be
viewed and turned to account as furthering means
also for the fulfilment of his highest personal purpose
in life. As Paul says, “All things work together for
good to them that love God” (Romans viii. 28). To
him who estimates life generally from the highest
OPTIMISM A ND PESSIMISM. 33].
tion in human point of view of the divine purpose, all
the experiences of life obtain the significance of a
God-ordered means of education and salvation. This
Sentiment, which combines resignation with elevation,
humbleness with confidence and power, is the practical
verification of the religious view of the world. “Our
faith is the victory which has overcome the world.”
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE
APR 3 () 2003

UNIVERSTY OF MICHIGAN
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