II. The Idea of the Perfected Commonwealth.
Certain national temperaments predispose to individualism, others to communism. The social relations governed at first by divine law. Later, morality represents this law. The religion of conduct. The religion of sentiment and of humanity. Advantages and disadvantages in this idea.
Comparisons of these two ideas as completed respectively by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Auguste Comte.
III. The Idea of Personal Survival.
The doctrine of immortality the main moment in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Unfamiliar to old and simple faiths. Its energy and speculative relations. It is decreasing as a religious moment owing to, (1) a better understanding of ethics, (2) more accurate cosmical conceptions, (3) the clearer defining of life, (4) the increasing immateriality of religions.
The future and final moments of religious thought.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MOMENTA OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.
The records of the past can be studied variously. Events can be arranged in the order of their occurrence: this is chronology or annals; in addition to this, their connections and mutual relations as cause and effect may be shown: this is historical science; or, thirdly, from a general view of trains of related events some abstract aim as their final cause may be theoretically deduced and confirmed by experience: this is the philosophy of history. The doctrine of final causes, in its old form as the argumentum de appetitu, has been superseded. Function is not purpose; desire comes from the experience of pleasure, and realizes its dreams, if at all, by the slow development of capacity. The wish carries no warrant of gratification with it. No “argument from design” can be adduced from the region where the laws of physical necessity prevail. Those laws are not designed for an end.