Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/104

90 That man has started from a lower form of life with divine potencies of mind, morality, and religion, and under providential guidance has pursued an ever advancing career of psychic and religious historic development, culminating in the realization of Christianity, is not, for Dr. Kellogg, a true or cheering conception of human destiny. The facts of sin and redemption are not irreconcilable with evolutionary religion; but the lecturer, in his loyalty to the truth of those facts, assumes that they are. The relics of a venerable tradition which certainly are found in literatures much older than the story of Genesis, and which the Hebrew writer was inspired to mould into theistic form, are made to stand as literal authority for the 'fall of man.' It is upon the authority of this account that man is claimed to have been an intelligent monotheist and to have lapsed into animism, fetishism, and polytheism. History, according to this view, is a pessimistic story of man. Primitive man, starting upon his march through time with a true conception of the Divine Unity and in holy fellowship with God, in spite of this stupendous advantage, enters at once upon a continuous descent, and "animism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and all other forms of religion or religious philosophy, must be regarded as various forms of degeneration from that primitive faith" of monotheism.

Anthropologists are more and more convinced that the psychology of the individual and that of the race reveal the same laws of development. The lower stages of conscious life of the individual cast light upon the early stages of primitive consciousness. Aristotle, with penetrating genius and using such materials as he could command, shows how one form of the mental manifestations constitute the basis of another. And the analogy is now made apparent, by a sound and Christian theory of evolution, between the life of the individual and that of the race in successive generations.

In the first Lecture, the question is asked, "What is Religion? " and various definitions are examined in a satisfactory way. The definition of Dr. Kellogg may be accepted as, on the whole, the best one. The second Lecture, on Fetishism and Animism, reveals at once the conviction of the author that these stages of belief are not steps of an upward, but of a downward movement. The third Lecture deals with Herbert Spencer's ghost theory, which requires no special notice, as hardly any one dealing now with the History of Religion accepts it as more than a partial account of the origin of Religions. The fourth Lecture is devoted to a criticism of the theory of Professor Max Müller, that of Henotheism. If Professor Müller in the ardor of popular discourse is sometimes delphic in his statements, it is not difficult, I think, to understand his argument in the main. His theory of the origin of the concept of Deity, and of religion, has always seemed to