Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/87

] scientific interpretation of that principle is being so extensively applied,—applied to the moral and religious life, as well as to the physical life of man. By his careful and broad view of the process of evolution, in itself and in its implications, Professor Caird saves religion not only from its enemies, who would naturalize it and thus, in explaining, explain it away, but also from the mistaken zeal of its friends, who seek to defend it by showing that it is supernatural in the sense of being unnatural. For the naturalism of its enemies and the supernaturalism of its friends, Professor Caird would substitute a spiritual view of religion—part of a total spiritual or idealistic philosophy which includes nature itself in spirit. His method is an extension of the transcendental method of Kant, which insists upon penetrating behind the facts, events or phenomena which by the empiricist are superficially called 'experience' to the conditions or presuppositions of that experience. Nor is it difficult to show that the grand implicate or presupposition of human experience is the idea of God, and that the story of the evolution of religion is just the story of how this implicit idea of God has gradually become explicit in human consciousness. Instead, therefore, of levelling down, or reducing the higher forms of religion to the lower, we must level up, and find in the lowest the promise and potency of the highest, because the highest is in the lowest already striving after realization.

But we must examine Professor Caird's view of religious evolution more closely. Taking religion in its broadest possible sense as meaning man's "ultimate attitude to the universe," to "his whole natural and spiritual environment," he distinguishes three main stages to the course of its evolution, corresponding to the three main factors of universal reality. In the first and second of these stages, religion has not yet assumed its own proper form, but is, so to speak, experimenting with the possible lower forms, until its failure with them forces it to seek a higher medium for its life. The first step is the objective, when the mind rests in nature as the ultimate reality, and calls the world divine. This is the stage of pantheism, and especially of Greek religion. In the second stage, the subject distinguishes itself from the object, man separates himself from the world, the soul finds its true life in the sphere of the ideal and the ought, and its religious fellowship is with a holy God who dwells apart. This is the stage of "ethical monotheism," "a period in which the form of self-consciousness prevails and determines both the consciousness of objects and that of God" (I, 191). "The