Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/351

Rh In a style always familiar, vivid, and captivating, he discusses in this volume the discovery of soul in man and the universe, or Anthropological Religion. In the first and second lectures, he vindicates freedom of religious discussion as conceived by Lord Gifford in founding the lectureship. In the third and fourth, he gives a résumé of the course on Physical Religion, restates his theories of the origin of the concept of cause and agency in nature, and again deals with comparative mythology and the universality of belief in the Infinite as exemplified in the Indo-European religions. In the sixth lecture he arrives at one of the foci of the argument of the book, — the discovery of soul in man and in the universe. This is developed positively in the seventh lecture, while the fifth and sixth are mainly occupied with the theories of Herbert Spencer concerning animism and worship of ancestors. These are vigorously excluded from confidence as one-sided and partial accounts of the origin of religion. In similar wise, fetishism, totemism, euhemerism are rejected as wholly one-sided explanations. Animism or spiritism, and consequently fetishism, always presupposes the anima in man. Ancestor worship is an important ingredient in ancient and modern religions, but is not, as Mr. Spencer contends, the root of every religion. Belief in departed spirits and worship of ancestors always presupposes soul in man and nature, and is combined among the Aryan peoples with prior belief in gods. In like manner in the eighth lecture the theory that Soul in man and nature is suggested by dreams and shadows and apparitions or ghosts, is treated as extremely one-sided. Primitive man, before he could arrive at the fancy that his soul was like a dream or an apparition, must have already possessed the concept of a soul. The ninth lecture is quite extensively a survey of burial rites among the peoples illustrating his argument. The tenth lecture discusses the general opinion of mankind concerning the departed, as bearing upon the author's postulates, and the eleventh lecture passes in review the theories as to the state of posthumous souls entertained by the Greeks. The last two lectures contain a statement of the results of the argument. The three streams of development of the idea of the Infinite or Divine unite and discharge themselves into the great current of Christianity, itself a natural though special and crowning revelation. For Professor Müller, believing that history is a revelation of the Infinite along the three lines of Physical, Anthropological, and Psychological Religion, sets aside local or temporal miracles in all ages as inferior and unnecessary, and anticipates with impatience the banishment of these unscientific beliefs from the realm of theology. He accepts, however, the fact of the resurrection of Christ as not indeed contra naturam, but as an unexplained natural phenomenon.

It may be added that De Pressensé, in his Origins, and in his later