Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/20

6 of religion. Just as Hegel's evolutionism holds the historical key, so Schleiermacher's analysis of the religious consciousness furnishes the psychological key, to the comprehension of religious phenomena. Thereby the foundation is laid for a critico-historical Philosophy of Religion, which overcomes both the dogmatism and the scepticism of former standpoints.

What, then, is the positive problem of the Philosophy of Religion? In the first place, simply the knowledge of religion in respect to its essence and development as a fact of the historical experience of mankind, or an activity of the human spirit which has its ultimate ground in God. The Philosophy of Religion, like all philosophy, must make the phenomena of real experience its starting-point, and must go beyond them and penetrate to their transcendental grounds, which are themselves not phenomenal at all, but necessary postulates of thought. Its problem, therefore, is of a twofold nature: first, the historico-psychological examination of religion as a fact of human experience; secondly, the metaphysical investigation of the relation of man to his religious object, i.e., to God and to his manifold revelation in the world, which is implied in this fact. The union of these two sides takes place in some form in all philosophical disciplines, but in the Philosophy of Religion the need of such a synthesis is more immediately evident, since in religion itself the relation to God is given as a psychological fact, which requires explanation as to its foundation, justification, truth, and necessity. But this is the business of a metaphysical investigation. The more closely this is related to the historico-psychological investigation, the more completely it carries out the fundamental tendencies there discovered, and reveals a principle which explains the experienced correlation between the subjective and the objective in an absolute unity which embraces the correlative parts, the better will it fulfil its task, and the more will all appearance of arbitrariness and chance disappear. The thinking subject will thereby experience that satisfaction which always results from the discovery of a rational connection between phenomena.

In the first place, then, as we have stated, the Philosophy of