beings. This is to play at hazard, for, without insisting on what ancestors "considered objectively" may be, it has been found precisely that the religion of the ancient Chinese Empire is the most perfect type of organized animism, and that it regarded even the material objects out of which it made its gods as the inseparable manifestation, the envelope, or even the body of invisible spirits.[1]
How shall we explain it that after the works of Tylor, Spencer, Max Müller, Réville, and Tiele, a thinker as intelligent and well-informed as Mr. Harrison can still pause at a thesis long ago passed by by science? It is, we believe, a remarkable instance of the influence which Auguste Comte still exerts over his orthodox disciples, and which can only be compared with that of Aristotle over the scholastics of the middle ages. We know that Comte borrowed from President De Brosses the hypothesis of primitive fetichism, and that he introduced it in the series of three states (fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism), through which religion in his view had invariably to pass.
We think, then, that Mr. Spencer is right in representing the evolution of the idea of God as tending to render the object of worship less and less sensible to man, more and more incapable of falling under our senses. But this process of abstraction must stop somewhere, else even the existence of God will at length become its victim, and that would evidently go beyond the Spencerian doctrine. The whole problem consists, then, in knowing where this stopping-place is to be found; and, according as we start from spiritual theism, from pantheism or from agnosticism, we shall be able to reach a different solution without really departing from the line of religious development.
Mr. Spencer, on his side, estimates that the end will be reached when the idea of God has been divested of all limitation and of every condition. There will then remain for us the one absolute certainty, that man "is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed."
Is there nothing here but a pure negation, as Mr. Harrison asserts? The terms of the formula themselves prove that the question is of what may be supposed to be the most positive thing in the world—the stuff of which the Universe is made. Mr. Spencer speaks repeatedly of the Unknowable as the power that manifests itself at the same time in the Universe and in the Consciousness, as the Supreme Reality which is concealed behind the changing course of phenomena. He attributes to it, as Mr. Harrison recognizes, unity, homogeneity, immanence, unlimited persistence in time and space. He assigns it, for modes of action, the laws of the Universe; he sets it face to face with phenomena, both internal and external, in the relation of substance to manifestation, if not of cause to effect. Still more, the Comtist critic
- ↑ See, notably, Tiele, "Manuel de l'histoire des Religions," translated by M. Maurice Vernes, Book II; and in the "Revue de l'Histoire des Religions," the "Religion de l'Ancien Empire Chinois," by M. Julius Happel (Vol. IV, No. 6).
