Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/18

4 work in this process, that human prejudices and the tenets of the schools played an important part, and that not infrequently mere caprice and accident, strategy and force, gave the victory to one or the other of the contending parties. With what right could doctrines which have thus originated lay claim to infallible authority and exemption from philosophical examination? It was not strange that an understanding trained and strengthened by the discipline of scholastic methods should finally reflect on its right of independent thought and criticism, and begin to exercise this right in regard to the content of transmitted doctrines. The dogmatic or scholastic Philosophy of Religion gave place to a sceptical Philosophy of Religion, which is represented by the rationalists (nominalists) of the later middle ages, and in a more decisive manner by the rationalists (deists, free-thinkers) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This third form of the Philosophy of Religion is, it is true, in purpose and result the opposite of the preceding school. Its aim is not to prove the truth but the falsehood of traditional doctrines, not to establish but to destroy the authority of the historically given religion. But, with all its sceptical radicalism, it shares with its opposite the assumptions of a wholly uncritical and unhistorical dogmatism. If the scholastic Philosophy of Religion was positive dogmatism, that of the rationalists may be characterized as negative dogmatism. The former school accepted uncritically historical traditions as authoritative, while the latter just as uncritically set up its own subjective opinions of religious truth, and did not hesitate to manipulate and pronounce judgment on the facts of history in accordance with its own standpoint. The sceptical philosophy is as far from being a true comprehension of historical religion as the scholastic. Both fail to distinguish between religious doctrine and religion itself, and both lack the key essential to a thorough understanding of history. That is to say, they had not yet reached the notion of the gradual development of the religious spirit towards truth, and the thought that the symbolic concepts of different ages are expressions of different stages in that evolution. These religious traditions, measured by the narrow