Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/279

No. 3.] in his institutions, in state, art, and religion. Wherever two or three are met together to consult about and devise a common good, and wherever this common good widens in extent and deepens in quality, there is seen the implicit spirit of rationality, outering itself. As in nature nothing is without interest, significance, rationality to the student of science, so in human history, no creed, cult, or institution is without interest and significance. As the student of nature traces the increase of rationality from the lowest form of inorganic matter up to its most organic form in man, so does the student of philosophy trace the increase of this rationality from the lowest form of ethical and religious life, up to its most organic, fulfilled form in the Incarnation and its extension in the life of the world. Up to the Christ, was the course of the world's history B.C. Up into Christ, has been its course through all the centuries A.D. In Christ was the perfect revelation of the character of the First Principle, the goal and the starting-point of all true human history. Throughout the process this final cause dominates all empirical causes, using them only as plastic materials for its own self-formation. The merely historical method may easily invalidate any dogmatic theory of innate ideas and conscience, or any mechanically jure divino origin of rational institutions, but the philosophical method easily recovers them for the divine world-order. Man may be historically derived from the beasts, but he is none the less more than a beast, more than the mere sum of antecedent empirical conditions of his genesis "out of the dust of the ground." Even science gives up the task of explaining the higher by the lower form, and finds in self-consciousness the ultimate explanation of nature. Nor, on the other hand, is the real value of the family, the state, and the church, to be found in their being traced back to some mysterious ab extra divine origin. Their value at any time consists in their adequacy to educate and express the highest current and nascent forms of human well-being or concrete freedom. This end is their real beginning. . Their phase of rationality is the measure of their worth, and the measure of temporal rationality is the idea of concrete corporate