Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/653

637, friendship is also elective and aristocratic. Fear forms no element in it, but is, on the other hand, the basal element of all camaraderie and of all gregarious sociability. There is no antagonism between friendship and true egoism, but there is a real antinomy between friendship and sociality. The former places free sympathy between individuals upon much higher plane than humanitarian abstractions and social conventions.

The progressive emancipation of all civil institutions from religious authority is a universal and important phenomenon of history. This tendency may be observed in the loss of temporal power by the Church during the Middle Ages, and the growth of nationalities as independent powers. Along with this divorce of civil and religious authority, has gone a similar process of separation in the intellectual world, involving the secularization of philosophy, science, and art. To the same general tendency toward freedom from authority may also be ascribed the abolition of serfdom and slavery, the emancipation of woman, and the general growth of individual liberty. The type and foundation of all authority is to be found in the authority of the Divine Being conceived as the ruler and sovereign of man. It is ultimately to the transcending of this conception that the emancipation from authority in all its forms may be traced. Throughout most of the Hebrew Scriptures God is conceived as a ruler, whose decrees are just because commanded by Him. Authority of this kind is degrading to free moral beings. Real authority can exist only if it coincides with absolute reason and justice. In so far as man is a moral being, the only authority which he can obey is that of justice itself, and not an external Being imposing a Divine Will upon him. It is in this sense that we are to interpret the teaching of Christ: God is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. This conception of God proved too lofty, however, and 'spirit' has been interpreted to mean a being without a material body. This dualism current in Christian thought is in reality a materialism. The only true idealism is found in the identification of God with absolute justice and reason, the realization of which is the end and source of all phenomenal existence. Such an idealism is represented by Plato. God does not exist as a Being independent of the world, but is the pure Idea which constitutes the true reality of the world. As the principle of authority rests on the conception of God as ruler, so freedom is to be connected with the idealistic conception of God as immanent Reality. True freedom is not the power to act wholly without restraint; it is autonomy, the subjection to no authority save that of reason. Reason, however, is not to be conceived as merely individual, but as the Absolute Reason whose realization constitutes man's real being. Along with this transformation of the concept of freedom must go a similar transformation of the meaning of authority. Freedom is the ideal