tologism, and the curious instance which it affords of history repeating itself. This repetition is not so curious, however, when we look into the proximate conditions by which it was brought about. Like circumstances, like results. There has been a growing dissatisfaction for some years past-say fifteen to twenty-with absolute idealism; with its tendency to uncontrolled speculation; with the all too subjective character of its methods; and especially with the persistent habit which professors of this particular brand of philosophy all seem to have, of tunnelling under experience for reality instead of looking for it on the surface-level of consciousness. Pragmatism expressed this dissatisfaction in no uncertain voice, and disturbed the absolutists in their dogmatic slumbers, long enough at least to make them open and rub their eyes. But pragmatism itself was so half-hearted in the measures of relief which it proposed, that it provoked a counter reaction in the present vigorous movement of neo-realism, which is slowly feeling its way back from the recesses of idealism to the world of external relations. Pragmatism, it has been said, was not a philosophy, but a clever attempt to avoid one. However this may be, the fact remains that pragmatism, despite all the practical opportunism which it incidentally at least professed, did not furnish an adequate object capable of winning and holding the worship of man. For this reason as for others, neo-realism is crowding it off the stage at the present writing. The need of bringing philosophy back to a closer contact with reality was never so widely felt in modern times as now. The psychological climate has again changed. Is it any wonder then that, in response to such a situation, ontologism should find all the stars again propitious for its reappearance? It has always had the alluring air about it, of bringing mystery from heaven to earth, of letting us touch the intangible, and lift the veil, as it were, from the very face of the Unseen.

No one acquainted with the monopoly of modern thought by monistic idealism can fail to appreciate the effort now being made to dissolve this philosophical "trust." Its dissolution is the pressing need of the hour, if philosophy is to be reformed and given a new orientation. But we have our fears that the solution proposed by Professor Hocking would really prevent the trust in question from continuing under a change of name. It is indeed true that we have the idea of Another, and that we are in direct relation with a reality not ourselves. But that this reality with which we are in immediate relation is the reality of God rather than that of things, does not

at all follow. It is altogether too much to claim that the idea of God is a premise, not a conclusion. Idealism has been so long trying to solve the problem of the world from the divine side, that it is time we became more modest, and considered the immediate human origin and character of our knowledge and of our problems in the world about us.

Granting that the idea of God arose in no superstitious ignorance of the causes at work in the upheavals of nature, but rather in a sense of the mysterious as something knowable, if not known, would the rejection of this ignorance-theory of Spencer's, due wholly to his blunder in mistaking the manifestation of an idea for its actual source and origin, entail as a necessary consequence the admission of ontologism as the only philosophy that grew out of the facts or fitted into them? Is there no middle ground? And if, as the author avers, the consciousness which we have of God, of Nature, and of Other Selves is common, is this common consciousness analogical or univocal? And if the latter, have we really the distinctive idea of God brought before us for consideration, are we not rather dealing throughout with the indeterminate idea of being-in-general, which is not the primal fount of reality at all? And are the "wholes" which we know, and spend our lives rounding out and filling in, proofs of our knowledge of the actual Infinite, or of something else vastly different in nature from this? The author says "there is indispensable truth in the tendency to incarnate God in His works, and to think of Him as there where His activity is and His objects are."* He does not consider it "wholly wrong" to speak of God as to speak of God as "an object among objects." All of which statements, it seems to us, come perilously close to identifying the idea of God with the idea of being-in-general. At any rate, the author clears no middle ground, nor does he anywhere seem to take into due account that external experience, in contact with which our internal experience originally arose, and still arises. According to him, the idea of God is a report of experience, coming from idea masses proximately, and from some elemental experience originally. The thought of Nature as dependent on Spirit is some quick embodiment of an elusive but genuine experience. Accordingly, "the ontological argument is the only one which is wholly faithful to the history, the anthropology, of religion.Ӡ

On the truth of this last statement we would take issue with the author. It seems to the reviewer too ambitious and too

exclusive to be capable of establishment, and the reasons for thinking so are three. First of all, the history of religion does not so conveniently lend itself to any such interpretation. In the second place, the rational proofs of God's existence rest on considerations quite other than the author supposes. And, finally, the facts of experience are implacably at odds with the ontological supposition of the author, that God is the first object known, or that knowledge of Him comes to us in some simple, direct, passive manner of recognizing His presence. A few words on these three points in turn.

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The widespread existence of polytheism in the history of religion is a fact which cannot be lightly dismissed, on the theory that "polytheisms are aborted monotheisms."* Abortive pantheisms would be much nearer the truth. The supposed tendencies of polytheism toward monotheism are speculative rather than practical, metaphysical rather than religious. They existed among the educated class and left the mass of mankind unaffected. "A polytheism that is not in some sense a henotheism," says the author, "has yet to be discovered." Even so, nothing would follow. god supreme over all the members of a college of deities is entirely different from the one and only God of the lowest forms of monotheism. Henotheism is so much a political idea and result, that a most generous amount of supposition is required to see in it any elements of real religious unity or progress. We cannot take it for granted that universal, unwavering progress in religion is true. There has been decline as well as advance. What common laws of progress, for instance, would explain the unique fact of Jewish monotheism? None.

Only in Israel, among a non-political people, does the idea of one only God appear as an object of immediate belief, not due to metaphysical reflection or political syncretism. Elsewhere monotheism is not, as in Israel, a religious movement leavening the average mass of mankind, but a metaphysical movement confined to the cultured few, and discernible only in their speculations. In the history of religion among the nations at large, the idea of a single supreme Being is the result of long metaphysical speculation, and not an experience of which the religious consciousness has direct, immediate intuition. Evidences there are of a primitive monotheism, and of a primitive revelation made to man-evidences of a purely historical character. These evidences, however, are all of *Page 325.

an existing belief in monotheism, and not of a monotheistic idea gathered from experience in the immediate manner claimed by the author. We are at a loss, therefore, to account for his dogmatic assurance, both as to the facts and their interpretation, when he says: "There is no such thing in history as a primitive monotheism: but there is a permanent singleness in the thought of deity which man forever departs from, through loyalty to the variety of deity's manifestations."* To which we would venture the reply, that a permanent singleness in the thought of deity is not the permanent thought of a single deity by any means. Polytheism was, therefore, not on the way to monotheism, nor a series of abortive attempts at it, but rather a succession of lapses in another direction altogether.

To explain it we shall have to abandon as too speculative, abstract and arbitrary, all theories of the derivation of monotheism from polytheism. To suppose, as the author does, that the latter was simply a roundabout process clearing the ground for an intuition of Deity, is to project a modern theory into ancient data indifferent to it. A merely natural religion historically never existed. The widely-different religions that appeared in the course of history cannot be exhibited as manifestations of some one, single, underlying, simple form working its way up from rude beginnings to polished perfection, according to the conditions of time and place. The contradictory character of the various religions cannot be dissolved, by supposing that a permanent singleness of thought, subjectively vague and abstract enough to fit all, objectively definite and concrete enough to fit none, was really at the bottom of the whole matter. Objective differences yield themselves to no such subjective unification. The comparative method, by suppressing differences, gives us only a composite photograph of religions. The direct method, by restoring the differences suppressed, furnishes us with a series of individual photographs, distinct, irreducible. The two methods must supplement each other, or we shall mistake resemblances for identities before we are through with our investigation.

It is more in accord, therefore, with the exigencies of method and the variety of the historical data, to leave the facts in their original complexity, than to treat them as instances of the unfolding of one idea, especially as this one idea is a product of comparative analysis, and not of direct examination. When left in their original objective complexity, the facts of the history of

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religion plainly show that a spontaneous knowledge of God preceded all attempts at scientific demonstration. Reason was at work, before reasoning came into play. Historically speaking, apart from the fact of a primitive revelation, the idea of God seems to have been due to the activity of all man's powers in concert, reason playing an active part in its acquisition, through the unnoticed working of the principle of causality, which, as the author well says, is "no mere form relating events without an objective counterpart." Man had a right principle then as now, inherent, undemonstrated, universal. But he misdirected and misapplied it, owing largely to the fact that he had as yet no conception of the unity of Nature as a whole. The result was widespread belief in a number of superior beings instead of belief in one supreme Reality; multiplication rather than unity. The facts lend themselves without forcing to this interpretation.

Nor, in accounting for the natural origin of the idea of God, apart from the fact of its revelation, should we commit the fault of severing man from his concrete context in the world of things, and read backward into history, as so many do, a late Cartesian method and point of view. The inner experience of man, primitive or modern, should not be divorced from the outer experience which is its permanent well-spring. The two should go together in theory as in fact. The latter is a source of the idea of God no less than the former. We live in a world of things as well as in a world of persons, and physical nature as distinct from human is a mirror of the divine. In fact, the idea of being does not come to us in the first instance as an experience of our own selves severed and sundered in Cartesian fashion from the world of things about us: it comes to us from the world of objects and the world of selves in mutual relationship and reaction. The point of departure for all our knowledge is the visible world, and this fact should receive recognition, notwithstanding theories to the contrary. And when it does, we shall see that priority, if it be anywhere, is here, and not in the recognition of other selves, or of the Supreme Self which is God. The order of being is not the order of knowing. God Who is the first in the order of existence, is not thereby the first in the order of knowledge. The process of knowing Him is therefore not a process of gazing directly into the essence of His Being, but a process of seeing the rational necessity for His existence, if the world of things is to have an explanation, and the world of persons a more than human aim and destiny. The in