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Rh the physical and in the moral order. There is a curious irony of history in this fact. Religious belief preceded philosophy by countless ages, and has remained independent of its support until a comparatively recent date. Such religious belief, founded only upon a credulous acceptance of tradition, is at last rapidly decaying in civilized communities, and religion is concentrating itself upon certain broad philosophical considerations as its only enduring support. Philosophy is, as it were, an afterthought of believers. It did not bring religion into existence, yet it is somehow hoped that it will avail to prolong that existence when other sources of vitality are exhausted. Long before Thales had initiated the long train of thought that culminated in Plato and Aristotle religion had flourished in Greece, and it continued to sway the popular mind quite independently of the rise and fall of systems. With the wider diffusion of education, however, and the multiplication of every kind of literature, the necessity of a philosophic basis for religious belief is frankly recognised. Though the unthinking masses still continue, as they did twenty thousand years ago, to accept without question the myths and legends which their priests impress upon them, the number of those who demur to such curiously servile acceptance has grown enormous. Hence, not only is there a wide tendency to fall back upon fundamental Theistic positions before the advance of literary and historical criticism, but it is also clearly recognised that those fundamental positions—the existence of God and the nature of the human soul—must be logically established before there can be any question of entertaining a supposed revelation from God to the human soul. It is the duty of philosophy alone to establish those positions. The vicissitudes, therefore, of the philosophical world are of the first importance in estimating the contest between Rationalism and religious tradition.

History repeats itself perhaps more truly in philosophy than in any other branch of human affairs. In other sciences, at least, the mere secular accumulation of experiences ensures some progress in the course of ages; but the purely speculative character of philosophy makes a circular movement possible. We are certainly not advanced beyond the position of the philosophical world in Greece