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1.] morality and science break away from religion altogether, they are tossed about like a rudderless ship on the billows of the times. They are thus cast irresistibly hither and thither between the Scylla of an egoism where the self proudly disregards the real world and social limitations, and the Charybdis of an altruism in which the personality resignedly subjects itself to lifeless matter and the brutal multitude. A psychological analysis of the theoretical and practical consciousness furnishes the commentary to these undeniable facts of history. It shows that all our knowledge, moral volition, and action is concerned with the antithesis between self and world, and seeks the synthesis of this antithesis through the ideas of the true and the good. This mediation, however, is possible only on the supposition of a higher original unity, of a transcendental ground of ego and world, of spirit and nature, of individual and society, which from the beginning of the race has revealed itself in our consciousness of God. Thus the relative ideals of science and morality presuppose the reality of the absolute ideal — the truth of the religious consciousness of God — as their ground of possibility and as a guarantee that they are capable of realization. Herein we have the deepest reason for that indissoluble union which in spite of all differences and conflicts is always found to exist between religion, morality, and science.

In establishing and explaining this fact, the Philosophy of Religion has fulfilled its first task, i.e., to understand religion as a fact of experience. At the same time, it has taken the first step towards the solution of its next problem. That is to say, it enters upon the metaphysical investigation of the relation implied in that fact, namely, the relation of man to his religious object, to God and his manifold revelation in the world. This relation is doubtless always given in religion as a subjective idea of human consciousness. For, in truth, no religion is without some notion of God. Hence the unavoidable question arises, whether and how far this religious conception of mankind corresponds to truth. It has indeed been said of late that this problem regarding things which we can never know does not concern the philosopher of religion, that he has to confine