But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion and Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous champion of a very prevalent and plausible simplification. “There exists no Theory of Knowledge for such things as we hold to be real in the strength of faith. In such religious affirmations, the believer demolishes every bridge between his conviction and that which Science can recognize as real.” Indeed Hermann’s attitude is here throughout identical with that of his master, Albrecht Ritschl: Metaphysics of any and every kind appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially unnecessary, unreal, misleading, as so much inflation and delusion of soul.—Yet this again is quite demonstrably excessive, and can indeed be explained only as an all but inevitable recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of the Hegelian school.
(1) Since the culmination of that reaction, “it has,” as Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and so free from all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, “become quite impossible any further to deny the metaphysical factors which had a share in constituting such types of New Testament doctrine as the Pauline and Joannine. Indeed, not even if we were to reduce the New Testament to the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the other hand, would the elements which spring from speculative sources be entirely eliminated. And since, again, the Old Testament religion, in its last stage, assimilated similarly metaphysical materials from the East and from the West; since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian branches, did the same with regard to the older civilized religions of Middle and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so that they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously: we are forced to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a concomitant of religion is satisfactorily explicable as a mere symptom of falsification or decay.” And whilst answering that the primary organ for religion is Feeling and Conscience, he points out how large an amount of Speculation was, nevertheless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after his unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon Sin, and of their cure by Grace alone.[321]
(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,—the historic and other facts,—of Religion, without certain subjective organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces: neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and developments of his own true personality in and through contact with the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the rest of what he is and knows.
(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof. Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact, get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion. Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]
(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow, and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental, Immanental Ethics.
(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immediately impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely made up of men and of movements not usually reckoned as exclusively or directly religious, whose very greatness,—one which humanity will not let die,—is closely interwoven with Mystical and Metaphysical affirmations. There are, among philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz, a Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the later stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a Lessing and a Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm, a Droysen and a Ranke; among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, a Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and among men of action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein. Shear any of these men of their Mystical and Metaphysical elements, and you will have shorn Samson of his locks.
And if we can frame a contrary list of men of force and distinction, who have represented an un- or even an anti-Mystical and anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal, Napoleon and Bismarck, Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must ever remember the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,—the strict necessity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollection; the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as found in the average practice of life, which cannot but produce a reaction and contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of what this second type has got of positiveness and of corrective criticism. Yet here too the greatness will consist directly in what these men are and have, not in what they are not; and wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of the apparent brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a higher world and of a deeper reality, there something fuller and more true has been attained than is reached by such strong but incomplete humanity alone.
4. Religion and Morality, their kinship and difference.
And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note how that the men, who deny all essential connection between Religion and Mysticism and Religion and Philosophy, ever, when they do retain Religion at all, tend to identify it with Morality, if not as to the motives, yet as to the contents of the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to show that, if the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than that between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is that between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism: Religion and Morality are nevertheless not identical.
(1) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact that, though the development of Religion tells upon that of Morality, and vice versa: yet that the rate of development of these two forces is practically never the same, even in one and the same soul, still less in any one country or race. In each case we get various inequalities between the two developments, which would be impossible, were the two forces different only in name.