does not let us look into its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively perceptible.

It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion, the one to a real, the other to a full content.

Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in our organization. Now from our organization originate not only all modes of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions, impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual, and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite of

the superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground. of historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further development.

In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things is higher than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as an impersonal is certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest cause

of all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified that it is able to bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he

not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalm XCIV, 9.)

§ 4. Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin: Carneri. Eduard von Hartmann.

To the Austrian philosopher Carneri in his "Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus" ("Morality and Darwinism "), three books of Ethics, Vienna, Braumüller, 1871, we shall have to give a place of his own.

Inasmuch as religion and the beautiful are to him but a preliminary stage of truth which has to dissolve itself into philosophy-a philosophy which, inclined to monism, prefers to call itself pantheism-he takes a position in reference to religion similar to that toward materialism, namely a negative position. But inasmuch as he still grants to religion in a subjective sense, to "religion in the form of piety," a lasting position and truth (religion, he says, has truth, but the positive God of religion has no reality, page 114), and inasmuch as he ascribes to it not only a transitory pedagogical value for the masses, which are not yet elevated to the height of philosophic reasoning, but a value also for the philosopher-namely, the value of religiousness and of piety-he rather belongs to the second and third of the before-mentioned groups.

Carneri, in his "Three Books of Ethics," gives us a whole philosophic encyclopedia. In thoughts sometimes rich, but without regularly arranged and quiet reasoning, and in full command and employment of modern terms which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an independent way

in all its fundamentals, as regards its contents takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial view which he has in common with Häckel who, among other things, repeatedly says that faith begins where knowledge ceases. Dialectical motion is everything to him. In pursuing this dialectical motion, he gives us a multitude of outlooks into all imaginable realms of knowledge and life, but he always follows at the same time the formula of dialectical motion, and, where the difficulties of the real world are most invincibly opposed to this dialectics, knows, like his master, with almost chivalric ease, to mingle and confound abstract formalistic reasoning and thoughts naturally following from the given thought. Want of clearness in general makes the reading of this otherwise not unimportant book very difficult. On a Darwinian foundation in his conception of nature and its development, he puts a Hegelian structure into his conception of human spiritual life, but finally lets mankind, although it is the highest form of appearance in this development, sink back into death and destruction.

The God of this view of the world is the causal law; the conception of this causal law is the worship of the philosopher-a God, of course, so incapable of filling and quieting a mind longing for God-a worship so leathern that Carneri himself cannot get rid of the opinion that, with such religious ideas of reform, he will finally lose the last reader of his book. The aim of the