Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/278

262 things are divine. This is, at least, semi-critical, while pantheism is wholly uncritical. Philosophy, however, differs from both of these in affirming a progressive realization of rationality in the world-process. It claims to see enough of the process to have caught its whence and whither, and thus to have an instrument of criticism and a canon of valuation. Briefly stated it is this: the First Principle of the Universe is Personality, or thinking, loving will, going forth in a temporal process with the teleological aim of returning with a whole commonwealth of souls educated into his own image. The First Principle is Reason and the temporal process is toward Reason, each phase manifesting some phase of rationality. The world of human history manifests this rationality no less, nay more, than the world of natural history. History is neither an immediate work of God, nor is it an apostasy from God. It is a process from and to God, a process of the education of man into rationality, or the concrete freedom of the Sons of God in his kingdom. On God's side it manifests his Providence; on man's side it is humanity making itself, or coming to a practical consciousness of its rational freedom. Enough of this has been attained to give us an estimate of the past and a forecast of the future. Man is what he now is by virtue of those authoritative beliefs and institutions, religious and political, which have held society together and educated it. Some of them have been very rudimentary teachings of that essential intelligence that constitutes the essence and the destiny of man. God "hath determined the times before appointed," the organic epochs of peoples and eras, the ganglionic centres, which sum up and express the spirit, the rationality of various times and peoples.

This of course implies an historical and psychological study of the origin and growth of all human institutions. But it also implies a philosophical or teleological estimate of all human history. Our First Principle interprets it as the reason of humanity organizing and instituting its needs and ideals in its onward stumbling to and fro between its own true character and its passing caricature. History is thus interpreted as a series of intelligent events, a progressive eduction of the rationality of man