Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/592

576 dogma society would not find itself without a common faith. For science has established new beliefs. Intellectual freedom, reliance upon the effectiveness of critical methods, confidence in the power of human reason, these have produced a scientific creed, which, as actual events show, is quite capable of arousing enthusiasm and increasing solidarity in the social group.

The philosophy of religion, concerned with the subject-matter of theology, psychology and anthropology from a new point of view, originated with Kant. Instead of treating religion by investigating the existence and attributes of God and His relation to man and the world, as did the older theology, he began with human consciousness, its interests and needs, and gave a spiritual interpretation to life. Theism, under the influence of Greek metaphysics on Christian experience, had sought to explain the universe as a whole intellectually and philosophically in terms of mind and consciousness, or by a personal attitude and spiritual experience, seeing all things in the light of a divine idea and recognizing God to be bound up with human consciousness. These two types of theism overlap and the history of their interaction is the history of theology, natural and revealed, which have in turn become discredited. Hence the shift from theology to the philosophy of religion, a branch of philosophy giving us a theory of religion which starts from specifically religious experience and rises from this to inquire into the significance of man's life and ideals, and of the cosmos which contains them. Dealing with facts of religious experience, it is the business of this philosophy of religion to go beyond theology, psychology and anthropology, interpret and estimate the validity of their facts, and bring its results into harmony with the ethical and metaphysical philosophy, thus giving an interpretation of the whole. And for such an interpretation and evaluation, a philosophy of religion is necessary.

We have become accustomed, thanks to the sharp abstractions of science, to look upon mind as made up of isolated streams and its unifying continuity as resulting from our dependence upon the physical world for our immediate wants. In civilized man the relation is reversed; body is the instrument of mind, the individual's ends are found more and more related to those of his fellows. The immediate acquaintance of mind with mind may be likened to our conception of the electrical field of energy with its immaterial continuity. Individual minds fuse in the group mind as tones fuse into chords. No man lives unto himself; we live only in situations, and it is because the leader and the led are controlled by the same values that the relation exists. We find the same variety in the types of unity which dominate social minds as among