THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE UNKNOWABLE. 779 



buoy which they caiTy on their backs is ripped open and collapses, and 

 soon they both lie as if dead beside their broken weapons. The Eski- 

 mos leave them to get their drinking-cups, and the Kailertetang awake 

 to new life. Each one tills his seal-skin with water, passes a cup to 

 them, and inquires about the future, about the fortunes of the hunt, 

 and the events of life. The Kailertetang answer in murmurs, which 

 the questioner must interpret for himself. 



Thus ends this day, in which laughing and singing, joy and glad- 

 ness prevail. On the morrow the Eskimo goes back to his daily life, 

 but the autumn festival is the subject of talk in the hut and on the 

 hunt for weeks afterward. 



■^-~*- 



THE EELIGIOUS YALUE OF THE UNKNOWABLE.* 



Br THB Count GOBLET D'ALVIELLA, 



PROFESSOB OF THE HISTOBY OF BELIGI0N3 IN TUE UNIVEKSITT OF BRUSSELS. 



WE have not to take part here for or against the philosophy of 

 Evolution. The only points we wish to examine in the con- 

 troversy are, first, if the historical development of the religious senti- 

 ment can be summed up into a gradual reduction of the divine attri- 

 butes, into a simplification, or, to borrow Mr. Spencer's barbarous term, 

 a deanthropomorphization of the divinity ; next, if the theory of the 

 Unknowable has all the elements necessary to beget a religion ; and, 

 lastly, if the religious sentiment is tending to divest itself of every 

 moral element, or whether it is destined, as the Comtists maintain, to 

 confound itself with altruism or devotion to humanity. 



Mr. Harrison sharply criticises the theory that ascribes the origin 

 of religion to doubles appearing in dreams. We are not fanatics in 

 regard to this hypothesis, but would prefer to admit, with M. A. Re- 

 ville, that religion began with the worship of natural objects or cosmic 

 phenomena personified, animated, anthropomorphized by the imagina- 

 tion of the primitive man. But these reserves involve no impeachment 

 of Mr. Spencer's general reasoning, so far as concerns either the spiritual 

 nature of the first notion that man formed of the divine, or the work 

 of simplification and purification which that notion has constantly 

 undergone in the course of ages. The thesis of Mr. Harrison, on the 

 contrary — that man began with the adoration of natural objects frank- 

 ly regarded as such — appears to us absolutely contrary to reason and 

 observation. He cites, for example, the ancient religion of China, 

 which was based entirely on veneration of the earth, the sky, and an- 

 cestors, considered objectively and not as the residence of immaterial 



* From " The Nature and Reality of Religion," being the last part of the author's 

 review of the controversy between Mr. Spencer and Mr. Harrison, in which he presents 

 his own conclusions. 



