Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two. But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration, in which our experiences, although always more or less successive, interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man. Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to be of importance for man's full awakening—even ethical and spiritual. Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests, indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true'—these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy, Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or Science, of a special but true kind.
Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature. The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work, Christoph Sigwart's Logik. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the real right', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,' as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is truly thinkable.'[39]
And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a doctrinaire position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in assuming that consciousness contains nothing but limits and conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]
II
Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.
1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary in clearness, importance, and richness of content.
The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah (say 1300 b.c. to about 860 b.c.) is indeed but little known to us; yet it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to 1916 b.c.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of the laws of the Book of the Covenant (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and, again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in Canaan (say in 1250 b.c.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long, deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses, as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my banner'—the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15); and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness—of the right and the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands—as when Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side' (Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5). Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any other god—certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here—the vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]
The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860 b.c.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 b.c.), and on to the public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 b.c.), is surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters.