401 religious encyclopedia nationalism

Sohelling. as stimulants to morality. Later in his treatment of the ground of faith in a divine government of the world, which gave rise to the atheistic controversy, he made religion to be faith in the moral order, which in its energy and operation is God. To assume beyond this that God is a special substance is impossible and contradic­tory, and his opponents are the real atheists who have no God, inasmuch as they set up an idol which debases the reason and multiplies and perpetuates human misery. The positive religions are institu­tions which morally preeminent men have set up to effect in others the development of the moral sense. They employ symbols to present abstract thoughts to sense and propagate religion in wider circles; but the essential element is that of some­thing supersensible not contained in nature, and'the end of the development is the rational ethical faith. Soon after, however, Fichte passed from subjective idealism or the absolute Ego over to the absolute as the middle ground of philosophy. God is absolute being, in whose absolute thought nature is opposed as the unreal non ego. Religion is no longer mere morality, a mystical strain is added. The world of changeable phenomena is merely un­satisfying appearance, a mirage. To think oneself and all the universe in terms of unchangeable being is faith. True life is in God, the really unchange­able being, and this is the love of God. Philosophy and religion are identified. Finite being has a share in deity, varying according to degrees of conscious­ness. Religion is merely assertory; philosophy ex­plains the how. Hence there must underlie a cos­mic theory, so that metaphysics is the immediate element of religion, even religion itself. Schelling (q.v.), far from being religious, regarded matter or nature itself as the divine, in his natural philosophy (1797 99). But in his philosophy of identity (1800­1802),. the absolute, which is the identity of subject and object, and is the condition of the existence of every individual thing, is to him as God. Philoso­phy and religion consist in the intellectual percep­tion of the infinite or absolute in the finite. Pagan­ism consists in degrading the infinite to the finite; Christianity reverses the process. He approximates a mysticism of the kind of Jakob Boehme (q.v.) in his Untersuchungen fiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) and in his reply to F. H. Jacobi against the charge of atheism and naturalism he states that God is to him first and last; the former as impersonal indifference or the absolute; the latter as personality, the subject of existence. The usual theism was impotent and empty; the mys­tical and irrational are the real speculative. In his

" Positive Philosophy," which is religious, philo­sophical, and mystical, he would not show from the concept of God his existence, but from existence would demonstrate the divinity of that which exists. If a positive exists as transcendent, it is to be taken up with the historical religions. But religion is either mythology or revelation, i.e., incomplete or complete. Therefore positive philosophy is essentially philoso­phy of mythology and revelation. Though furnish­ing no united system, Schelling stimulated much activity in the field of philosophy of religion. Of his followers, the fantastic K. A. Eschenmayer at­tempted to convert philosophy into its negative, or religious faith; and K. C. F. Krause, who called his doctrine panentheism, sets forth fundamentally God or being as the one good, and the perception and inner appropriation of the same as religion, or the participation in the one life of God.

From the ethicized types of religious philosophy of Kant and Fichte, Schleiermacher (q.v.), in his Reden (1799), made a signal departure, and from the rationalistic as well, not without a certain degree of shallowing. The same views are essentially re­6. Schleier  produced in his Didlektik (1811) and

maeher. Der ekristliche Glaube (1821). He

finds in man as the basis of religion a particular faculty, the pious sense or feeling, for the thought of which he was indebted to Romanticism (q. v.),. By means of it there is an immediate intui­tion or feeling of the infinite and eternal amid the finite. To feel everything as a part of the whole and to become one with the eternal is religion. Piety or subjective religion is neither a matter of cognition nor action, but a determination of feeling or self con­sciousness. When it is stated that religion is based upon the feeling of absolute dependence, it follows that in this consciousness the infinite being of pod is given with the being of self. This feeling springs from the sense of contingency in everything, where­from the self and the external universe are related back to a final ground, the deity. No cognition of God precedes this feeling but every judgment of God arises from it. God is the absolute unity of the ideal and the real. As we think only in antitheses, we can not apprehend the notion of God clearly in thought. Attributes of God do not represent real aspects of his being or activity but obtain only for the religious consciousness; the same is true of per­sonality. Life, however, is the one thing necessary in God, whereby Schleiermacher escapes the inert idea of Spinoza. Pantheist he has been declared, not unjustly in view of such statements as that God could never have existed without the world. The unity of nature in relation to consciousness precludes interference or miracle. A determinist, freedom to him is no more than development of personality. Natural or rational religion is a mere abstraction. The various religions are representa­tions of the idea of religion rising in scale according to the degree of the feeling of God and the elimina­tion of differences in generalization. The influence of Schleiermacher must be taken as a wholesome reaction from the sterile rationalism and hard ethicism of the eighteenth century.

More one sided is the view of religion of Hegel whose panlogistic or even pantheistic system is the

8elision, Philosophy of

science of the evolving, absolute reason, whose evo­lution for thought and being is one and the same.

7. Hegel. Religion is a stage in the unfolding of

spirit and takes its place in the last part of his philosophy of spirit, that of absolute spirit, which is the combination of the objective and subjective spirits. This means the spirit in the form with reference to self, and the spirit which objectifies itself in right, morality, and ethics. The absolute spirit reveals itself in the objective form of sense as art; in the subjective form of feeling and representation as religion in the narrower sense, while in the wider sense the absolute spirit is re­ligion on the whole, and in the subjective objective form of truth it is philosophy, which is the self­thinking Idea, the self apprehending consciousness, the self realizing truth. The content of religion is also truth; not as it appears to the really appre­hending consciousness, but as it appears in the lower stages of representation as images and myths. Philosophy is to engage itself with religion as with art, either to operate or abolish it. This does not mean a degradation of religion, but that philosophy is to justify the exalted content of religion for the thinking consciousness and reason. Though he places representation in the forefront, this does not deny the place of feeling, which he occasionally strongly emphasizes. It is of importance to him that in feeling is the ground for the assumption of the existence of God, though inconceivable from this source; yet he would place it in the earliest stage of development. The different religions represent stages of development, of which the Christian only is the complete. Bound by his dialectic method of triads he finds three main divisions: the religion of nature, of spiritual individuality, and the absolute relig~on. Each of these has its three stages. The firsR includes the stage of immediate naturalism, that of the bifurcation of consciousness, where God the absolute power towers over the individual; and that of the transition to freedom. The second in­cludes the religions in which God is viewed as sub­ject; that of sublimity, the Jewish; that of beauty, the Greek; and of the practical, which is the Ro­man. Christianity is the absolute religion, know­ing God as externalizing himself to finiteness and in unity with the finite; revealed, realizing that God comes to consciousness in the finite ego, first apprehending God as Spirit. The nature of spirit being to posit something outside of and then to re­enter self, three forms result: God, the eternal Idea in and with itself, the kingdom of the Father; the form of manifestation, the difference, the eternal Idea in consciousness and representation, which is the kingdom of the Son; the return to itself, the atonement, the kingdom of the Spirit. If a contra­diction be pointed out in this idea of the Trinity, it remains that all the living is contradiction in itself and in the Idea the contradiction is resolved. Expressions in the idea of the Trinity objectionable to reason such as son, begotten, occur because rep­resentation can not free itself from the intuitions of sense.

The influence of Hegel in this field was more tre­mendous even than that of Schleiermacher. The left and right wings ranged themselves with refer 

THE NEW SCHAFF HERZOG

488

ence to the position to be given to religion; whether, as basis of church doctrine, it was to retain its in 

dependent right, since Hegel had de­8ese~• termined its content and that of phi 

losophy as the same; or religious dogma was overthrown by philosophical concept. The one supported theism and individual immor­tality, the other took up pantheism, inasmuch as God came to self consciousness only in man, and it accepted only the idea of the eternity of spirit in general. Distinguished on the left are D. F. Strauss and L. A. Feuerbach (qq.v.). The former, in his Leben Jesu (1835 36) and Glaubenslehre (1840 41), taught that Hegel himself early overthrew the rep­resentative form; that Biblical narrative rested mostly on myths; that Christian dogmas had to exterminate themselves in their development; and that God was not a person but an infinite substance, thought in all the thinking, life in all the living, and existence in all being. Feuerbach illustrates m his sentence, " God was my first thought; reason my second, man my third and last," his passage from Hegelian pantheism to radical anthropomor­phism or naturalism. In Das Wesen des Christen­tums (1841) religion and philosophy are claimed to be distinct, related like fancy or sensibility to thought, the sick to the healthy. Considering re­ligion in humanity in its source, it is found that its object is not to know or represent but to satisfy. The necessities, the egoism, have so ordered relig­ion that it has a thoroughly eudemonistic charac­ter. Man projects his own being into the infinite, places this opposite himself and reveres it as deity, in the hope of procuring his wishes otherwise un­attainable. Feuerbach does not mean to deny God but to rescue his reality from theological contra­dictions and absurdities. His anthropomorphism is here evident, but also his naturalism in assign­ing as the ground of religion the feeling of depend­ence upon nature and its purpose to liberate itself from this. God is contrasted with nature, but the properties attributed to him are of nature. Many philosophical thinkers attached themselves to Hegel but compromised with Schleiermacher or pursued their own courses. E. Zeller places the origin of religion in the necessities of sense or fear and hope, but estimates its value by its importance for the spiritual life. Religion is to be comprehended as neither intellectual nor moral alone, but as pertain­ing to the whole life of man. In Wilhelm Vatkel, ReLigimesPhilosophie (1888) religion is attached es­sentially neither to morality nor reason, but is a state of the inner feeling concealing within itself an insoluble mystery, and employing itself with the perfection of the ethical personality, by the prao­tical mediation of the finite with the infinite, or God. Most zealous and prolific in this department has been Otto Pfleiderer (q.v.), Religionsphilosophie (1878 94), who apprehends God as the Ego in dis­tinction from all the finite, who at the same time has all things not in, but in subjection to, himself. Thus a monotheism is to be vindicated by the over­throw of deism and pantheism. A. O. Biedermann (q.v.), in successive works, holds that religion is not wholly a matter of the representative faculty, but includes also moments of volitional acts and

489 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Religion, Philosophy of

states of feeling. Infinity is the formal and spirit­uality is the material element, and the two together constitute the idea of God, the absolute Spirit, from which the idea of personality must be far removed. On the other side, C. H. Weisse, Herman Uhici, and I. H. Fichte (q.v.) specially emphasize the person­ality of God and thus violently attack the Hegelian doctrine although much indebted to it. With still greater positiveness, they threw themselves against materialism, but availed themselves of the idea of experience in order to bring philosophy nearer to theology. Their avowed object was to demonstrate a speculative theism.

An altogether different course from that of Hegel was taken by J. F. Herbart, who wrote no religious philosophy, but expressed religious views sporad­ically in his works. Religious belief is to proceed from the view of nature. The higher organisms

9. Herbart especially argue a designing intelli­and Lotze. gene" and it can not be safely assumed that this teleological feature exists only in representation and not in nature itself. Still, no binding proof of this intelligence can be ad­duced; a natural theology is impossible; and to bring the representative concept of God in compari­son with nature or the real results in contradictions. Hence God can be more closely apprehended by the ethical predicates wisdom, holiness, power, love, righteousness derived from practical ideas tut not adaptable to a pantheistic conception. Her­bart has a high esteem for religion on account of its solacing and disciplinary efficacy. Wilhelm Dro­bisch (1840) carries out Herbart's position more fully, not without some impressions from Kant. The sense of impotence and limitation physical, intellectual, and moral gives rise to desire for liberation and the ascent above the finite. A divine existence is not only to be wished for but must be subject of proof for the sake of objective signifi­cance. The inadequate teleological argument must be supplemented by practical moral reasons of belief. The moral world ideal is to be realized as the highest good; but this is possible only if God is the cause of that ideal as well as of the means in nature necessary to its realization. J. F. Fries, fol­lowed .by E. F. Apelt and W. M. L. de Wette (q.v.), is notable for emphasizing the esthetic element for religious philosophy. In the beautiful and the sub­lime are viewed the finite as manifestation of the eternal. The esthetic view of the world subserves the ideas of faith. Of more recent thinkers the most influential in this connection is Hermann Lotze (q.v.), who produced no philosophy of re­ligion but furnishes glimpses in his lectures and his " Microcosm." He does not find the main field of religious philosophy in the analysis of the mo­ments of consciousness, but would inquire first how much light reason alone can afford concerning the supersensuous world, and then how far a revealed religious content may be combined with these fun­damental principles. The central point for him is the existence of God, for which he, however, does not furnish adequate proofs. In support of it, he lays considerable stress upon a form of the onto­logical argument: it is impossible that the greatest thinkable object does not exist; therefore, there

must be a greatest. The universal substance, at once the ground of the real and the ideal world, attains its full content first in the concept of God; and God may not be thought without personality, to which the antithesis to a non ego or actual external world is not essential. Personality is spirit already when in antithesis with its own states; that is, with its own representations, it knows itself as the simple, uniting subject upon which they are merely contin­gent. The being of the personal God appears only imperfectly in the known, empirical personality; it must, in a measure, be superpersonal, whereby the concept of.personality seems again to vanish. The relations of God to the universe, subjoined to the three categories of creation, preservation, and gov­ernment, occasion the designation of attributes (see PROVIDENCE); of which the metaphysical determine God as the ground of all reality in the finite, and the ethical satisfy the desire to find in the supreme existence also the supreme values. The religious feeling transcends cognition, in that man apprehends himself as divine being, as united with God, who conditions his being and reveals himself in him. Here Lotze approximates panthe­ism as he does also in his metaphysics, inasmuch as, for him, the single substantial cosmic ground com­prehends all individual realities. Gustav Glogaus, upon whose views a cult was established after his death, held that the existence of God was the sum­mit of all philosophy. Its certainty is deduced from that of self existence. From God are derived the ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which constitute the essence of the spirits created by God after his image. Opposing extreme intel­lectualism, he regards feeling and experience of God as the essentials of religion. The same tend­ency as Lotze's is shown by Guenther Thiele, in Die Philosophie des Selbatbemusstseins (1895), depend­ing also upon J. G. Fichte. At the root of the acts of the individual ego appearing in the succession of time is the absolute supertemporal Ego. The concept of God has its termination in the absolute Ego rising from animism to the god of the sun or the celestial sphere, and thence to the absolute sub­stance, implying necessarily the concept of the all­w ise and omnipotent Creator. Much deserving rec­ognition has been accorded to Hermann Siebeck, who in his Lehrbuch der Religionsphilowphie (Frei­burg, 1893) defined this subject to be the applica­tion of philosophy, as the science of the nature and activity of the spiritual life upon the fact of relig­ion, for its particular, distinct formulation. He defines religion as the intellectual, emotional, and active practical conviction of the existence of God and the supramundane and, in connection there­with, of the possibility of redemption. The aim of science and metaphysics is to gain a knowledge of the ground of things and their unity as an imper­sonal subject, and it arrives at the idea of a spirit immanent in the world, which may, not inconse­quently, be thought of as personality. On the other hand faith or religion concerns itself with the consciousness of a personal relation of man with the divine ground of things and with knowledge only so far as it mediates this consciousness. As this does apt lie in the empirical world, therefore faith

Religion, Philosophy of

THE NEw SCHAFF HERZOG

postulates and seeks a personal highest and abso­lute beyond the empirical unity.

A diametrical opposite to the above is Eduard von Hartmann (q.v.) in his works on the philosophy of religion Iktsreligi6ae Bewusstsein der Menschheat inn Stufengang seine, Enturickelung and Die Religion des Geistes (1882), of which the first (historical­critical) part treated of the religious consciousness of humanity in the scale of its evolution and the second

(systematic) part presented the " Re­10. Yon , ligion of the Spirit." He puts the im­8artmana. personality of God directly as postu 

late of the religious consciousness. Deity is for him as absolute Spirit one, and as such the absolute subsistence of the world. The conse­quence is cosmic monism; and this includes the real multiplicity as its internal manifold. From the ground of immanence is necessarily derived the impersonality of God. The world is in need of re­demption; hence, pessimism is justified; but since the world is capable of redemption, teleological op­timism is likewise warranted. At this point ap­peared a proposed total separation of religion or theology and metaphysics on the part of A. Ritschl (q.v.), and his followers, chief of whom are J. G. W. Herrmann and J. Kaftan (qq.v.), who are more or less attached to Kant but do not place their value­judgments of the religious perception on the same plane with their ethical judgments and do not pro­fess the derivation of these from them. These value­judgments call forth feelings of pleasure or dis­pleasure, whereby man maintains his supremacy over the world which he acquired by the help of God, or dispenses with such help for this end. The religious truths or facts of redemption must be realized in experience, without which there is no religious certainty. Certainty of the reality of God is dependent on the experience of the divine opera, tion in man, arousing feeling and will; a sense of sin and a desire for blessedness are present, to which correspond an angry God and a merciful God. Ad­ditional proofs of the existence of God can avail no more than the recognition of him as the supreme law of the world. Only the moral proof is of value. More influenced by Kant on the side of the theory of knowledge is R. A. Lipsius (q.v.), who lays stress upon the antithesis between the empirical depend­ence in the world and moral freedom within. Re­ligion is the ascent of the spirit to inner freedom in transcendent dependence upon God; a recipro­cal relation between God and man, based upon the authentication of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man or divine revelation. With ethics as the basis of religion he would break entirely.

Among thinkers of most recent date philosophy of religion is placed on a par with science of relig­ion. The Dutch scholar C. P. Tiele (q.v.) in Ele­ments of the  Science of Religion, Gifford Lectures, 1896 98 (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1897 99) and Grund­riss der Religionsvrlssenschaft (1904), in which he presents the two divisions of Morphology and On­tology of the Philosophy of Religion, took the ground that the philosophy of religion was neither philo­sophical dogma on religion, nor a confession of a so called natural religion, nor that part of the old philosophy which dealt with the origin of things; but

470

that it was a philosophical investigation of the universal phenomenon ordinarily called religion.

It is to attempt to comprehend the 11. Oontem  religious in man, and thus announce

porary its nature and establish its origin. For

Thought. this purpose it is necessary to ob­serve its historical evolution, its various tendencies, and the conditions and laws to which it is subject. An analysis is to follow; that is, a study of its various elements and revelations as psychological phenomena, in order to ascertain what is common and permanent in all religions. According to Tiele, religion is a spiritual state, or piety, which appears in word and act, representation and conduot, doc­trine and life. Its nature is worship religious re­spect to a superhuman, infinite power, as the basis of the existence of man and the world. Max Miiller (q.v.) lays far more stress upon the historical, espe­cially comparative history. He has the distinction of bringing into the science of religion the service of philology. True philosophy of religion is to him nothing else than the history of religion. He de­fines religion as the realization of the infinite, which he amends later, to the effect that only such real­izations of the infinite come under the category of religion as are capable of influencing the ethical character of man. George Runze, who emphasizes the philological basis in his Sprache and Religion (1889), would condition all thinking by the nature of ,language to construct metaphor and myth. Re­cently an abundant literature has sprung up. In Holland, L. W. E. Rauwenhoff, Religionsphiloso­phie (Brunswick, 1887), postulates belief in the supersensible. Much recognized has been L. A. Sabatier's (q.v.) Esquisse dune philosophie de la religion d'apri's la psyehologie et l'hiatoire (Paris, 1897; 6th ed., 1907; Eng. transl., Outlines of Re­ligious Philosophy based on Psychology and History, London, 1897), the tendency of which is shown by the title. In England Edward Caird in the Evolu­tion. of Religion, Gifford Lectures, 1890 92 (Glas­gow, 1893), presents the religious principle as a necessary element of consciousness; John Caird (q.v.) in Introduction, to the Philosophy of Religion attempts to reconcile faith and knowledge; and G. J. Romanes in Thoughts on Religion (London, 1895) would combine the doctrine of evolution with the concept of God. Among Italians, L. Valli, in Il fundamento psieologico della Religione (1904), has treated the subject in an individual but very sensible manner.

II. Analysis of Religion: After this historical review, it is in order to assume a position in regard to certain questions already raised: Is, on the whole,

a philosophy of religion warranted? Is

r. Method. it necessary? As soon as a scientific philosophic investigation is opened the religious side becomes a subject of inquiry, other­wise an element of first importance would be ab­sent from human knowledge. Besides, philosophy of religion must constitute a part of the whole phil­osophic system. Philosophy of religion as such in name dates from the close of the eighteenth cen­tury. Previously its problems were treated in con­nection with metaphysics or ethics. Its position is properly after the series composed of metaphysics,

471 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Religion, Philosophy o!

psychology, and, possibly, after ethics and esthetics. If it forms the conclusion of the philosophic series, then it is also the climax, since it pertains to the most momentous transactions of the soul life. As to the division, the first step is an investigation of what is essential in all religions, upon a historical and psychological basis. This is to include not only what appeals to the susceptibility of a refined re­ligious consciousness, but everything to which a possible standard of value may be applied to what constitutes the essence of religion from the lowest stages of development to the highest. As there is no common definition of religion, it depends upon every individual investigator how far he will ex­tend the inclusive limits of religious phenomena, hoping that he may not be too much at variance with universal opinion. If the nature of religion in its essence is presumably found, the next step is to estimate the truth value of religion and the rep­resentations formulated by religious persons. Should this vanish wholly and only an estimate of feeling remain, such representations could not maintain even this, for the intellect might possi­bly present them as nugatory. Here is the point of contact with metaphysics.

The activities and processes in the human soul

are to be viewed in the threefold distinction of rep­

resentation (cognition), feeling, and will; though

it is understood that these are operated by the

soul in complex combinations. This

a. Repre  division is of advantage, since the three

sentation. leading modern contributors to the

problem distinguish themselves ac­

cordingly: Kant representing the religion of ethics

or will; Schleiermacher, of feeling; and Hegel, of

the intellect. That religion was a matter of repre­

sentation, thought, knowledge, was always held,

and intellectualism prevailed from the age of Soc­

rates. Wherever religion has been recognized rep­

resentations play their part, and generally of a su­

perhuman being; in the highly developed forms, of

the transcendent spiritual being, God, the One.

However, does the possession of truth, even the

highest, constitute religion? Aristotle claimed

knowledge of the prime Mover of things, but was

not therefore religious. If any one knew God and

divine things from the innermost unity of nature,

if he even possessed absolute certainty of the be­

yond, and yet did not realize a relation with this

supramundane or universal, or had not reconciled

the variance between the infinite and himself the

finite, or did not at least make the attempt, he

would not possess what is called religion. Not

even if for knowledge were substituted faith in the

usual sense; that is not submission to the super­

human, but the lower step, as in the Alexandrine

sense of " faith " in comparison with " knowledge."

He could not be called pious, because the attitude

toward the higher or highest is not yet present.

Every religion develops representations, which

supplant metaphysics. The mystic sets the high­

est before his mind, before he sinks into it; the

Buddhist must bave representation of Nirvana;

yet either is concerned about something wholly

different.

Feeling, on the other hand, plays a part, without

which a religion is unthinkable. This occurs first in a sense of dependence, which may be upon any incidental object to which power is ascribed (fetish); or a useful or harmful part of nature

3. Feeling: (animal worship, star cult, Sabaism, and perhaps animism); or nature with its inflexible laws as a whole, regarded either as ani­mate or as pure mechanism (naturalism, Stoicism, Spinoza); or upon spirits, particularly of the de­ceased (ancestor worship, and with it totemism). See COMPARATIVE R,ELIGIGN. Many like Herbert Spencer would derive all religion from the revering of the departed or ancestors. The mythological gods probably originated from the personification of the powers of nature, as at a later stage the gods of the myths were allegorically reversed to powers of nature. By knowledge of his dualistic nature, man could conceive of the powers as persons and as spiritual, not without some degree of material form. The final view was that the infinite great­ness and power over all was a spirit upon whom man was in all things dependent, yet possessing a certain self existence  and freedom. With these representations of the powers or of dependence upon them, feelings are bound up, either of like or dislike. The latter may accompany a representation of the contraction of human power and the diminution of the sense of self, and become strong aversion, such as fear of impending natural calamity. This feel­ing is still more intensified, if the sense of guilt be added. If feeling of dependence involves no more than fear, it is not religion. In the religious fear of God the element is much reduced, and the sense passes over into obedience and reverence. Neither can it be said that fear created the gods, because it must have been preceded by the representation of superhuman powers. The sense of fear or the re­sultant pain, physical or spiritual, leads to libera­tion from necessity, or salvation, which is hoped for or petitioned from the deities. This hope of salvation, which may pass over into certainty, is bound up with great joy over the sense that a be­neficent power watches over man, so that no harm can befall him. A mode of fellowship or union with God develops, though not necessarily mystical; a vanishing of consciousness, though not a theosis; but a complete rest in God, the state of being hid in him, which constitutes blessedness. This is the climax of religion; it is joy without end. The feel­ing of dependence which starts with the utmost displeasure culminates with the highest bliss of sub­mission to God, of the dissolution of personality, as in Buddhism; in Christianity the union with God in the celestial. The ultimate aim of religion is thus a feeling of good fortune, to use the expres­sion; and as a practical concern of human spirit, religion thus corresponds to ethics.

If this be the case, desire next claims considera­tion with reference to the nature of religion. It must be admitted that religious phenomena in their evolution can not be understood without the activity of the will. Necessity, or the

4. Will. desire to escape it, impels to a relation

with the highest principle, by which

liberation, salvation from evil, or even the escape

from individual isolation from God are sought

Religion, Philosophy of THE NEW SCHAFF HERZOG 472

Religious Corporations

First, the desire seeks earthly goods, then the higher,

for this life and the next. Beside and above phys­

ical necessity appear mental anxiety, earnest con­

cern for the safety of the soul, and the desire for in­

dividual immortality. Necessity begets prayer.

Sacrifices for the most part represent the effort to

avert necessity. Specially active appear the relig­

ious phenomena when the moral precepts are taken

as the commands of God, and their violation ob­

scures the relation with the divine, or threatens

with estrangement from God, Painful remorse re­

sults; in the lower stages with fear of punishment

here or hereafter, in the upper in view of the inner

longing for the highest. The ethical life may lose

its self dependence and be absorbed in the religious

or at least be intimately complicated with it. At

all events, in the case of a man who is inwardly

religious, morality can not subsist without religion,

but he must also be moral in practise. The relig­

ious state of life will then include all of man's ac­

tivity, all of life; so that it may be observed as a

continuous service to God. A conclusion of relig­

iousness can not be made from acts which out­

wardly seem moral, not even those known as the

forms of worship, often divided into prayer and

sacrifice. To these performances belong the most

manifold ceremonies, which are characteristic of