Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/19

1.] standard of rationalism, were absurd and unmeaning. Rationalism did not imagine that with the husk it was rejecting a higher and more essential truth than was contained in its own scanty abstractions. The fault of rationalism was not that it dared to think rationally, but that it did not think rationally enough to understand and appreciate the objective reason in religious history. It was a necessary transition period. The mind had first to become conscious of itself and of its essential rationality, in order to find itself again in the world of history and to recognize the reason immanent in the historical development of humanity. It was not until the conception outlined by Lessing and Herder had been fully developed by Hegel that philosophy was able to attain a thoroughly clear conception of the facts of religion. The profound thought of development, as of a process in which an immanent ideal principle realizes itself under different forms and through different stages, which Hegel was the first to apply to history, has since become dominant in all fields of science and has proven itself very fruitful, especially for the history of religion. We have learned to perceive the pulse-beat of the human heart seeking God, even when rationalism could see nothing but illusion, superstition, and deception; and, on the other hand, we have come to recognize human limitations and frailties where the dogmatism of the churches found nothing but divine truth and infallibility. This evolutionary view of history, grandly conceived and developed by Hegel, may be regarded as a permanent achievement which no philosophy of history may henceforth ignore. But on the other hand, Hegel's Philosophy of Religion suffered from a one-sided intellectualism that made impossible a complete understanding of religion, which is not a matter of the head, but of the heart. On the one side, this view led back to an uncritical dogmatism, and on the other to an unhistorical radicalism — consequently just to the one-sided views above described, beyond which the principle of evolution itself should have reached. This intellectualism of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion has been overcome by Schleiermacher, who regarded feeling, in independence of knowledge and action, as the essence