Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/34

20 animal life, in accordance with the principle of natural selection — all these are questions of knowledge which science must solve, but which do not concern religion as such. For this is concerned only with the fact that nature, whatever its process of development, is dependent on God and fulfils his purposes in regard to us. The fundamental truths of religion, then, are not affected by any answer which may be given to the above-mentioned questions. Indeed, an order which, through the smallest and most insignificant means, eventually produces the highest, would be a sublime manifestation of divine omnipotence and wisdom. So, even though man has sprung from lower forms of life, he may nevertheless be the goal towards which the process of nature has tended from the very beginning, and in which creative reason produced the light of consciousness, the thinking spirit, consequently its own image.

In the legends of Paradise, and the fall of man, which, by the way, have their analogies in several religions, the Philosophy of Religion can recognize only symbolical expressions of man's two natures, the spirit and the flesh, the ideal, godlike disposition and the lower animal nature. Religious poetry symbolizes the opposition and conflict between those two principles, which are inherent in the very nature of man — in so far as he must by an act of freedom raise himself above the sphere of natural phenomena to a spiritual ideal — by representing them as particular events in time, or historical occurrences. The question is not concerning a compromise between those primitive legends and a scientific history of our race. It is rather to discover the profound ethico-religious thought hidden in these legends, and to demonstrate that it has been actually realized in the history of civilization and of religion.

At this point the Philosophy of Religion glances at the historical progress of religion and recognizes in the growth of the religio-ethical spirit the revelation of the educating wisdom and love of God. (This treatment of the history of religion is perhaps more correct in method than that which regards it as the starting-point and foundation of the philosophy of religion. This latter view may, it is true, be justified on the grounds of