Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/180

Rh theory of socialism and administered in the socialistic interest to the remotest detail.

Finally, pessimism has, as a rounded philosophy must have, its Philosophy of Religion. According to this, religion is the consecration in myth and mystery of the meaning that philosophy puts rationally. Religion therefore undergoes an evolution side by side with the development of philosophy. Accordingly pessimism sees all religions arrayed in two successive groups, — the Religions of Illusion and the Religion of Disillusion. The former break up again in accordance with the Three Stages. Paganism is the religion of the first stage; Christianity, untainted by rationalism, the religion of the second; “free religion,” “liberal Christianity,” the “positive religion,” “ethical culture,” the “church of humanity,” — all the manifold experiments at making a “religion” whose interest is to be centred in this world alone, — constitute the religion of the third. Over against all these stands Hartmann’s “religion of the future,” the Religion of Intelligence (die Religion des Geistes), as he likes to call it, whose priests are to celebrate the doctrine, solemnise the rites, and inspire the devotees of the great Nirvâna — the eternal Silence and Blank.

These are the main lines of the theory that enlists the adhesion of the throng of jaded or faded