Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/253

Rh and with a protest against either being opposed to revela tion (Characteristics, vol. ii. p. 209, ed. 1727). Kant, in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, explicitly distinguished and opposed deism and theism, but in a very peculiar manner. " The person who believes in a transcendental theology alone is termed a deist; he who acknowledges the possibility of a natural theology also, a theist. The former admits that we can cognize by pure reason alone the existence of a supreme being, but at the same time maintains that our conception of this being is purely transcendental, and that all that we can say of it is that it possesses all reality, without being able to define it more closely. The second asserts that reason is capable of presenting us, from the analogy of nature, with a more definite conception of this being, and that its operations, as the cause of all things, are the results of intelligence and .free will. The former regards the supreme being as the cause of the world whether by the necessity of his nature, or as a free agent, is left undetermined; the latter considers this being as the author of the world " ( Werke, ii. 491, edited by Rosenkranz, Meiklejohn's tr., 387-8). The account here given of deism seems neither self-con sistent nor intelligible, and applies, equally well or equally ill, to every system atheistic, agnostic, pantheistic, ideal istic, or materialistic which admits the existence but not the intelligence or personality of an Urwesen, eternal being, or first cause; and the account of theism excludes all reference to revelation, and applies to every form of what has been regarded as deism. In recent theology deism has generally come to be regarded as, in common with theism, holding in opposition to atheism that there is a God, and in opposition to pantheism that God is distinct from the world, but as differing from theism in maintain ing that God is separate from the world, having endowed it with self-sustaining and self-acting powers, and then abandoned it to itself. This distinction is real, and perhaps the best attainable. At the same time many called deists must be admitted not to have taught deism thus understood; for example, most of the " English deists " did not deny that God was present and active in the laws of nature, but merely denied that He worked otherwise than through natural laws. If by deism be meant belief in a personal God who acts only through natural laws, and by theism belief in a personal God who acts both through natural laws and by special interven tions, this distinction also is real, and may be useful. The chief objection to it is that deism when so contrasted with theism does not denote, or even include, what theologians have generally agreed to call by the name.

The present article will treat specially of theism in the sense of monotheism, but not to the exclusion of the relations between theism thus understood and theism in other acceptations.

Monotheism has been very generally assumed to have been the primitive religion. Lord Herbert, Cudworth, and others have elaborately defended this opinion in the past, and it still finds learned advocates. On the other hand, the vast majority of recent anthropologists hold that religion originated in some rude phase of polytheism, and that monotheism has been everywhere preceded by poly theism. Schelling, Max Miiller, and Hartmann have main tained that the starting-point of religion was henotheism, an imperfect kind of monotheism, in which God was thought of as one, only because others had not yet presented them selves to the mind, a monotheism of which polytheism was not the contradiction, but the natural development. Pantheism has also been frequently represented to be the earliest phase of religion. All these representations, how ever, will be found on examination to be very conjectural. The present state of our knowledge does not warrant our holding any view regarding the nature of primeval religion as established. The data which carry us farthest in our search for the historical origin of religion are undoubtedly the names expressive of the Divine which have been pre served in the most ancient languages. They show us how men conceived of the Divinity long before the erection of the oldest monuments or the inscription of the oldest records. Language is much older than any of the state ments in language. But language by no means carries us Evidence back to primitive man, or even to the historical origin of of lan ". the idea of deity. The Egyptian word nutar and the ^ a e "** names of the Egyptian gods found in the oldest Egyptian inscriptions prove that at a date long before the Egyptians wrote history, or are known to have worshipped animals or ancestors, they conceived of Divinity as power, and their deities as great cosmic forces; but, as that word and these names cannot be shown to have belonged to man's primitive speech, they cannot show what was man's primitive religious belief, and do not disprove that the forefathers of the people who first used them may have had some lower and ruder conception of the Divine than that which they convey. There are, according to Dr Legge, no words in the Chinese language known to be older than ti, fien, shang-ti, and these words are good historical evidence that the Chinese conceived of the Divine, thousands of years before the Christian era, as a universal ruling power, comprehending the visible heavens, and an invisible, infinite, omnipresent force, manifested in the azure of the firmament, possessed so far of intellectual and moral qualities, and working towards ethical ends. There is no evidence that when the Chinese first used these words they worshipped fetiches, but neither is there evidence to the contrary, and even if there were it would not disprove that the ancestors of the Chinese had passed through an era of fetichism. All members of the Semitic family of languages have the word El, or some modifica tion of it, to denote deity, and hence we may conclude that the Semites had the word in this sense before they separated and became distinct peoples, but not that the idea of God originated when the word was first thus employed. All members of the Teutonic group of languages have the word God, or some slightly modified form thereof, and all members of the Slavic group of languages have the word Bog, or some modification thereof, to express the same conception: it does not follow that either Teutons or Slavs had no idea of deity until the former so applied the word God, and the latter so applied the word Bog. Both Teutons and Slavs are Aryans, and there is an older Aryan term for deity than either God or Bog. The Sanscrit (leva, the Latin deus, and the northern ti, tivar, are forms of a word which must have been used by the Aryans to express their idea of the Divine when, in a prehistoric age, they lived together in their original home; but we are not entitled to infer that even that prehistoric Aryan term is the oldest word for deity. It may not be older than the primitive Semitic word or the primitive Turanian word, or the nutar of the Egyptians, or the fien of the Chinese, or the earliest designations for the Divine in the earliest African and American languages. And there may have been Divine names older than any of these. The science of language has been able to recon struct in part a prehistoric Aryan language, and may similarly be able to reconstruct a prehistoric Semitic language, a prehistoric Turanian, and perhaps a prehistoric Hamitic language. Should it proceed thus far it will probably perceive that all these prehistoric languages arose out of a still earlier prehistoric language in which also were words expressing ideas of the Divine. There may be many strata of language buried too deep for human excavation in the abysses of unrecorded time. By no