artistic light, when it sees that the primitive man, besides investing a natural object with human properties, further considered him as following a quasi-human career. What is significant in such immature attempts at religious thinking is the inevitable tendency on the part of man to assert his own being and to establish human values in the midst of environment apparently of nature alone. The fact that the mind still clings to the natural object does not demonstrate that his feelings are purely naturistic, but rather reveals an element of contrast and competition, whereby the soul puts itself upon the proper plane. In the same way that art seems to imitate nature, while it is really transcending and perfecting the several natural elements of landscape, human body, and historical event, so does religion surpass nature by meeting her upon her own ground.

Religion is secure in the hands of the primitive man because he is poetical. Philosophy and science may be far removed from his considerations, because the age of humanism has not yet dawned upon him, but his mind is able to see into nature and into himself, and the free treatment which physical and psychical facts receive only reveals the spontaneity of a soul which is aware of its transcendent position in the world of immediacy. No logic of abstraction or ethics of the ideal can participate in this naive condition of the nature-man, but poetry adapts itself to his spiritual needs, which it satisfies only to awaken vaster desires. An age, like the present, whose positivism seems to relate it to nature, can express but the letter of the primeval, and it is only in history that we may now secure its inimitable poetry. Where modern barbarism fancies it is exercising a "healthy animality," it is only exhibiting its own decadence, while the egoism of the

blond beast" possesses none of the redeeming elements of naturism. Still less in our virtues do we moderns rehabilitate the primitive traits of religion, and to speak of a revelation made to an age of " blood-iron," whose language

is the stridency of modern English, is another symptom of degeneration.

The savage, as such, is less and more than science imagines him to have been. Whatever may be the result of anthropological investigations, it may be assumed that the primitive still reacts upon the world in a human fashion, and assumes a standpoint which, instead of possessing the centric and commanding position of the man of culture, is rather eccentric and characteristic. Upon the side of both naturism and spiritism it seems to be the extraordinary which calls for recognition, and which makes excessive demands upon the human soul, and in the childhood of the race it is safe to say with Goethe, "The miracle is the dearest child of faith." Yet even this Goethe, whose scientific sympathies and poetic insights should have ever inclined him toward the highest view of the phenomenal universe, shared with Voltaire, himself a believer in the orderly world of Newton and Shaftesbury, an instinctive horror of the Lisbon earthquake. Regularity in the natural order, and smoothness in the course of human events, are not calculated to elicit the peculiar sense of divinity in the world about mankind, so that the grounds of theism are not the sources of religion. Nevertheless, what should be emphasized, at this juncture, is not the bizarre or catastrophic, in the form of an earthquake or a fit of madness, but the striking effect which this has upon the naive spirit of man. The startling occurrence in nature, or the alarming condition of some member of the tribe, makes its dread appeal to a consciousness otherwise stolid. Man, who stands in need of just such shocks, if he is to become himself and assume his humanity, thus sees that the world of immediacy, without and within, is subject to such uncertainties and surprises, whence he learns that nature cannot contain the soul, whose genuine life must be found elsewhere. A pessimistic regard toward nature in the world and in man has the effect of indicating the path to that which is of intrinsic worth and world-significance.

By such peculiar means the primitive man realizes himself and distinguishes his being from that of the external world. The man of culture transcends nature by aligning an ideal unity of the total universe, while with the primitive man such an assertion of independence comes only when the fantastic and exceptional seem to violate the order of things physical and psychical. Yet it may be assumed that even the primitive man has secured for himself an a priori principle of belief, inasmuch as his mind is now depending upon something which is beyond experience. The unwonted in nature here takes the place of that "natural supernaturalism" which philosophy discusses under the head of the noumenon, and the extraordinary event assumes the form of causa occasionalis before the entirety of nature can become the causa formalis of cultured theology. In the consciousness of the nature-man, the view of nature is not wholly æsthetical, because it is put forth in a utilitàrian spirit, nor is it logical, since it argues from the concrete and exceptional; nevertheless it is human, and has in it the possibilities of development, and we may safely assume that religion has had a genuine beginning in the midst of the fantastic elements which enter in to characterize the worshipper's mind.

In the career of human religion the positive element must receive recognition, just as the actual origin of religion must be reckoned with as one of the factors in religious thinking. But such a concession to history implies a limitation which must not be transgressed; hence the scientific thought of the day, which has recently espoused the cause of religion, must see that its share in the work is confined to the phenomenalistic realm. True it is that the externals of religion have a symptomatic value, inasmuch as they reveal the internal condition of human consciousness; yet their evidence can never be convincing in itself, any more than the origin of religion, while highly suggestive of the end of human faith, can prove anything concerning its ground. The age of the Enlightenment,

in its zeal for static "nature," set all history at naught, and thereby precipitated the problem of culture; shall the age of culture repeat this well-known error, and thus idealize the primitive man, and search for vestiges of primitive faith in the religion of the present? Freely let us admit that we live in an age of degeneration, but why should we desecrate our thinking by a form of religious thinking which seeks to retain all the elements of barbarism which are at all possible, and aspire, in theory, to return to the distressing conditions of the primitive man? Far wiser is it to make the man of culture the standard, and thus employ the positive in religion, not at its inception, but at its culmination, in the forms of world-religion. Before our philosophy may reap the benefits of living, universal religion, we must raise and consider another question which, like the argument from origins, concerns the very character of religion; it is the problem of progress, in the form of development in religion.

2. The Development of Religion

Having found it possible to interpret spiritual religion in terms of positive phenomena, and having seen, moreover, that the actual beginning of religion, where that is found to consist in the extraordinary, is compatible with philosophy, which is necessarily timeless, we may now assume the problem of progress in religion. Modern thinking has never handled this question satisfactorily. First there was a tendency to distrust anything which stood in need of development, and the static speculation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries postulated an immovable natura. Then, after suitable reaction contemporary with the social changes of the late eighteenth century, there followed a genetic form of philosophy which has never failed to emphasize the merely temporal passage from a primitive condition to one more perfect. To one who cannot abide by the mechanical views of Newton

and Spinoza, and who has metaphysical scruples against the evolutionary formulations of Hegel and Darwin, the situation becomes acute, just as the philosophic spirit engendered becomes intense, since it tinctures more than one phase of speculation.

1. The theory of development does not fail to arouse questions concerning the validity of fundamental principles of thought. For logic to exist and exert its proper influence, it is necessary to assume the validity of the concept whose meaning shall be fixed, and without such a principle of identity thought can hardly be conceived of as obtaining. The theory of the concept thus involves something permanent in such terms as "plant" and animal," man" and "brute." Yet this point of view seems to be askance in contrast with the theory of “transmutation of species," and where Darwinism does not wholly disturb the poise of our conceptual reasoning, the Hegelian dialectic participates with the result of wearing away what seem to be fundamental differences among our ideas. And just as the validity of logic seems to suffer at the hands of genetic philosophics, so the value of ethics appears to share the same fate, and the permanence of conscience, as a moral criterion, is as badly threatened as is the essence of the concept. Logic and ethics, which upon other considerations will find it necessary to change their traditional forms of expression, are not exempt from the problem of development which is so keenly felt by religion.

With art and law, the heraldic figures which reinforce religion laterally, the same question of time-passage and essential progress arises, and yet it does this without arousing any undue alarms. In the school and forum progress is to be expected, and with all the native love of tradition and precedent, there is no great shock occasioned when departures enter in. These forms of culture are so closely bound up with our most human ties that movement and variation are not so startling as is the case with philosophic disciplines, which, by a process of idealization,