14 SOCIAL CULTURE 



by it out of chaos into individuality and from individuality back 

 again into chaos. 



A creative goodness which lifts into being an infinity of other 

 selves of animals and men, only to swallow them up again by a 

 jealous reaction, drawing them down into the homogeneous ocean 

 of chaotic matter, deserves rather to be called, as Plato in the Timaeus 

 and Aristotle in his Metaphysics called it, envy and jealousy (i/^dvos) , 

 a quality of mind which they thought not possible to find in the idea 

 of God as Creator. 



The only effective counter-movement against the Aufkldrung is 

 the return to a study of the First Cause. 



This does not mean the neglect of secondary causes, but their 

 proper adjustment. It is an application of the great results of 

 religious thought - - a social institutional kind of thinking that 

 should be gone over by every individual for his enlightenment. The 

 church should elaborate its application of the thought of the First 

 Cause to all secondary causes, showing in each case how the divine 

 goodness connects and explains the entire movement from the 

 mechanical to the chemical, and from these to the crystal, the plant, 

 the animal, and to man. 



IX 



I review, in concluding my paper, the line of argument based on 

 the second or causal aspect of experience: 



(1) The first religious step is taken when all secondary causes are 

 aggregated into one group and included in the world-order, in what we 

 have called the first pole of experience. Ancestor-worship with its 

 infinite series of finite spirits belongs only to a world-order. A true 

 originating causality, a first cause, belongs to a second and higher 

 order, to a self-determining or originating order of being which 

 transcends the world of things and events; all things and events 

 depending upon a being derived from beyond, and not in themselves 

 possessing self-existence; and the true second order possessing 

 independence, self-existence, and the power to produce duality by 

 consciousness, will, or some other form of self-determination. 



(2) The first thinking of this transcendent being becomes absorbed 

 in the contemplation of its transcendence, or its sovereignty over the 

 first order. While the first order is dependent and must derive 

 its support, all that it has, from a higher order of being; the second 

 order is . independent and can exist by itself. The religious con- 

 templation is absorbed in this fact of independence or transcendence; 

 it searches the origin of the dependent order in the sovereignty of the 

 independent order; but it does not find at first, in the independent, 

 the motive for the dependent. It halts in the thought of transcend- 



