While thus Lange's conception of religion is superior to that of Spencer in admitting a richer development of religious life, a more various satisfaction of the religious need, in another direction Spencer is superior. He comes considerably nearer to a correct and full conception of God than Lange. His idea of the final cause of all things does not lie entirely in the conception that it is the absolute indiscernible; but Spencer is fully in earnest with the idea that this indiscernible is the real cause of the world and of all single existences in it. He accordingly forbids giving certain attributes to the absolute—not because it would be doubtful whether it has attributes or not, but because it stands above all these
imaginable attributes as their real cause. Therefore he forbids, for instance, attributing personality, intelligence, will, to the highest being—not because it could also be impersonal, and in want of intelligence and will, but because it stands above all these attributes as their highest real cause, and because we can think of all these attributes only in human analogy, and therefore, when attributed to the highest being, can think of them only in rejectable anthropomorphism. He says, on page 109: "Those who espouse this position [personality of God], make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality and something higher. Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will, as these transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse.... The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived."
Thus we find in Lange a fuller and richer conception of the subject of religion; but this conception is in want of one thing—without which it is in want of everything—namely, of nothing less than of the objective reality. Spencer's religiousness has a much more meagre and less varied character: the acknowledgment and veneration of the indiscernible; but he nevertheless gives us with this content and object a real object, even an object of veneration, in which the abundance of all reality is hidden, with the only conception that the indiscernible
does not let us look into its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively perceptible.
It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion, the one to a real, the other to a full content.
Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in our organization. Now from our organization originate not only all modes of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions, impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual, and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite of
the superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground of historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further development.
In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things is higher than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as an impersonal is certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest cause
of all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified that it is able to bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he
not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Psalm XCIV, 9.)