beings. The world is not taken for God, nor God for the world; but the distinction is not yet drawn out in an abstract form by the understanding. The higher object is simply present in a peculiar feeling of an invisible, infinite something, with which the world-consciousness also is bound up, and this only implies the possibility of distinguishing the divine from the world. Just as little is this higher object viewed at first as a plurality of persons. How long mankind continues in this condition of comparatively childlike simplicity, depends very much on the question how early the mode of life conducts the consciousness of the world and self to a higher point of development. The patriarchal age may be named; and the reminiscences of most nations point back to such a simple form of faith, when the gods, who afterwards fill up their field of consciousness, were not even born, but when the one, certainly as yet indefinitely held Divine, is worshipped without name.1

But this indeterminateness of the beginning cannot be permanent. Consciousness of self and the world must distinguish itself more definitely from God-consciousness, and to this end a continuously operative activity of God must be conceived as directed. But then two paths are possible. Either, consciousness advances in unison with the aim of revelation, and, transcending the merely quantitative distinction of God from the world given in the category of power, rises to the perception that God is not merely the Supreme, or One, because as it happens no other god is His equal, but that He is the Only one, beside whom no other can be, because He, and nothing else, absolutely and by His very idea is selfexistent, and therefore must be conceived as the Creator, from this point advancing to ever richer and richer spiritual definitions. Next, the stage of conscious Monotheism is attained, i.e. monotheism that consciously excludes its opposite, and by the force of the ethical principle thoroughly vanquishes the possibility of retrogression to the standpoint of natural religion. Or, the definite carrying out of the distinction between world-consciousness and God-consciousness, which

1 See above, p. 239. So not only among the Semites, but also among the ancient Hellenes. Cf. also Schelling, Vorl. über Philosophie der Mythologie, where he treats most instructively of the different species of monotheism.

Wherever

must ever be aimed at by God, is left undone. this is neglected, instead of being done, wherever the spirit fails to attain the necessary elevation belonging to progress in knowledge of God, there acquiescence in the non-separation of the two elements is an act of decision. The previously

innocent non-differentiation of the two becomes now a definite assertion of their non-distinctiveness or confusion, which is always associated internally with sin, spiritual sluggishness, and mistaken activity on the finite side. In the next place, this confusion, already pantheistic in principle, will continually operate as an assumed hypothesis, though it will not necessarily issue in a natural religion destitute of ethical import. The phenomena and elements of nature, such as the heaven, sun, moon, stars, ether, air, light, fire, sea, are capable of being a natural symbolism of the invisible and spiritual apprehended behind or in them.

5. But the confounding of the divine and the world may again assume two opposite forms, without, as will be apparent at the close, there being any essential difference between them. In this respect we see two main differences among mankind, the oriental and occidental form. The former is more directly addressed to the divine, of which it has a profound impression. The aspect of personality retires, the objective, divine element not being usually conceived as friendly to freedom.

Where this element is conceived as One, it is itself defined in a physical manner; and it is especially the upper world, the heaven or the starry system, in which the Divine is contemplated. Thus the Divine is simply the nameless Alone, the limitlessly Infinite, the antithesis to the concrete world and its plurality, which is but a perishable, fragmentary existence. Nay, so lacking is the consciousness that the world and man have substantiality, that the disposition shows itself to treat them as mere illusive reality in the divine, and merge them in the illusion. In this absorption, which is as it were a taking back of the Cosmos, is discerned the one religious salvation, emancipation from the world of illusion. The Divine is in this case treated as the Whole and alone Substantial, the universal Life or the power in which, when the truth comes to be known, individuality and freedom vanish; for the finite is here withal regarded as the undivine.

The extreme of this tendency is Acosmism. To this category belong Brahmanism and Buddhism.

On the other hand, for the occidental spirit the emphasis falls upon the concrete, especially earthly, world, upon the human subject and his freedom, ascent being made from this point to personal deities. Here anthropomorphism and limitation of the divine find wider range of extension. Whereas in the east the confounding of God and the world would leave but one divine substance as the sole existence in all that is phenomenal, here consciousness of the world and self, personality, in the first instance preponderates.

Observation.-The above analysis proceeds on the principle that everywhere the positive (here a consciousness of God or sense of God) must exist before its contrary, the good before the corruption of the good. Polytheism is not merely a defect, an imperfect religion, but already an abnormity and affirmation of an error. For this very reason the history of religion cannot have begun with that which certainly is the lowest stratum of its domain, with perversion, which is a lower stage than mere imperfection. Fetishism, when it has become a matter of a stock, is the perversion of religion. Although originally a real sense of God may have been connected with a definite individual object, yet where, for example, a stock is made into a Fetish, not merely does a confounding of the divine with a finite individuality take place-with this of itself such a sense of God as does not exhaust the Deity in this individuality would be compatible -but there even the sense of dependence-that basis of religion-turns into the opposite, a sense of freedom. The Fetish - worshipper, while no doubt crediting his Fetish with higher, secret powers, desires by its help to play the magician, and demeans himself, when it does not humour his fancy, as its lord and master, punishing it, casting it away, and the like. There religion no longer exists, because even its last remnant, the sense of dependence, has succumbed to barbarism, and freedom in the form of caprice has taken its place. Mere freedom in relation to nature and natural things, whatever peculiar powers may be ascribed to these, is not religious in character, although it may have a moral significance. Supposing, on the other hand, a religious feeling of dependence to exist, no doubt the chief point determining the value of different religions is, whether and to what extent a consciousness of the moral and of freedom is combined with that feeling.

§ 66.

The confounding of God and the world in its two chief possible forms (§ 65), which constitutes the innermost essence of heathenism, does not indeed preclude heathen religions from having a history or onward movement, in which they enrich themselves with ethical contents. Moreover, they remain subject to a law. But heathenism is not able in virtue of this law to exhibit a rectilineal progress on to the consummation of religion, but merely a circular movement through opposite extremes, a fact involving its historical confutation.

1. Heathenism, although intimately implicated with Nature, which remains essentially the same, and to some extent with its periodical revolution, is still by no means a merely stationary natural religion, but there is in it, at least in its more considerable forms, movement and historical progress. Although heathenism is not to be explained primarily by the law of nature, not even of the nature of man, but by caprice, a sinful preponderance of consciousness of the world or self over God-consciousness, by self-willed creature-love in opposition to dependence on God and devotion to Him, still even a tendency originally based on caprice is in turn governed by a law embracing even what grows wild. In his Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling endeavours to trace out this subordination to law, and his most fertile thought is to the effect that the religions of the nations are to be regarded as one vast process, of which different nations, in connection with Nature around them and with their history, have become the representatives accordingly as different endowments have fitted them to apprehend one and another element of the idea of God. He consequently views even the divisions of mankind, the forming of particular nations, as a process standing, in its inmost nature, in connection with a modification of the God-consciousness. As far as we are concerned, the results just gained (§ 65) supply a starting-point for discerning the main lines or factors of the movement in heathen religions

as well as the law prevailing in them, by means of which, with all their diversity and division, they form one vast religious process. Let us consider this movement first in the oriental, and then in the occidental, religions of heathenism.

The purely oriental method, in excluding from the supreme existence all fixed distinctions and determinations, is unable to attain a decidedly spiritual character in respect to the divine. Accordingly in it, in the first place, the broad boundless heaven, then the elements-air, water, fire-those formless, universal principles, play a great part, primarily indeed as symbols or modes of existence of the sole existence, which is not conceived as exhausted in the sensuous phenomenon, although blended therewith. Even man has nothing really substantial in himself, but is a mere wave as it were in the universal life, or an unfree being subject to the universal world-order, bound over to obedience. This doctrine must needs, as comes out most positively in the form of Hindoo piety, be the death of independent life, and therefore of morality, unless a progressive culture of the self- and worldconsciousness here intervene as an auxiliary. Personality thus gaining in importance, the attempt begins to conceive in personal form, or to personify, the indefinite sole existence, which as such cannot be apprehended, which is everywhere and nowhere, nay, can scarcely be distinguished from nothing; and this is done, in keeping with the physical character of the religion, for the most part after the type of the two sexes. Nevertheless, this attempt does not in the east take the shape of finding a definite personal form for the divine, as in the west with its prevailing tendency to the subjective; but it stops at personifications of a symbolical character, which, continuing to multiply ad infinitum, are scarcely held together by a few generic ideas. And when finally, in the course of further development, subjectivity and freedom begin to act with greater energy, as was the case in Buddhism,-the last form of the Hindoo religion,-these precarious personifications without moral import are again abolished, while retrogression to the one indefinite existence is felt to be so unsatisfactory and useless that this is now denied and treated as nothing. The heightened sense of freedom causes the personifications to vanish into an abyss as a mere figment of human imagination. In