Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/23

1.] in common with the earliest and rudest nature-worships that the essential idea of religion is to be established. If we accept the notion of an organic development in religion, there is indeed a kind of necessity which is predicable as well of the lowest as of the highest religions of the world. The former contains something which cannot be left out of the perfect idea of religion, something which is its necessary presupposition; and the highest religion, while it transcends, at the same time must take up and comprehend all that is true and valuable in the lowest. But, if this be so, so far from the universal truth in religion being that which is common to all religions, there is not a single idea in the highest or perfect religion which remains what it was in those which preceded it. In all organic development the perfect organism, while it comprehends and absorbs, at the same time annuls and transmutes all that pertained to the earlier and imperfect stages of life. Manhood presupposes, but does not retain, physically or mentally, the characteristic qualities of youth or childhood or infancy. That which really is common to all the stages of human life is therefore not to be reached inductively, but by grasping that idea which gives to all its successive forms and aspects the character of one organic whole. In like manner a merely empirical consideration of the various religions of the world or even of their historic succession and relations, however important as supplying the materials for a science of religion, does not in itself constitute such a science or give us that which is really universal in religion. To reach that we must be able to go beyond the mere historical forms and to see beneath them the idea which is ever advancing to its fuller realization, which, at each successive stage of its progress, loses nothing but leaves nothing unchanged, and fulfils the past only by transmuting the past. The perfect or absolute form of the idea, so far from giving us that which is common to all other forms, will thus retain in it unchanged not a single element which belonged to them. While it explains the latent significance of all that was true in the imperfect religions, it will transcend, and, by transcending, annul or destroy them."