78o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



beings. This is to play at hazard, for, without insisting on what an- 

 cestors " considered objectively " may be, it has been found precisely 

 that the religion of the ancient Chinese Empire is the most perfect 

 type of organized animism, and that it regarded even the material 

 objects out of which it made its gods as the inseparable manifestation, 

 the envelope, or even the body of invisible spirits.* 



How shall we explain it that after the works of Tylor, Spencer, 

 Max Mtiller, Reville, and Tiele, a thinker as intelligent and well-in- 

 formed as Mr. Harrison can still pause at a thesis long ago passed by 

 by science ? It is, we believe, a remarkable instance of the influence 

 which Auguste Comte still exerts over his orthodox disciples, and 

 which can only be compared with that of Aristotle over the scholastics 

 of the middle ages. We know that Comte borrowed from President 

 De Brosses the hypothesis of primitive fetichism, and that he intro- 

 duced it in the series of three states (fetichism, polytheism, and mono- 

 theism), through which religion in his view had invariably to pass. 



We think, then, that Mr. Spencer is right in representing the evo- 

 lution of the idea of God as tending to render the object of worship 

 less and less sensible to man, more and more incapable of falling imder 

 our senses. But this process of abstraction must stop somewhere, else 

 even the existence of God will at length become its victim, and that 

 would evidently go beyond the Spencerian doctrine. The whole prob- 

 lem consists, then, in knowing where this stopping-place is to be 

 found ; and, according as we start from spiritual theism, from pan- 

 theism or from agnosticism, we shall be able to reach a different solu- 

 tion without really departing from the line of religious development. 



Mr. Spencer, on his side, estimates that the end will be reached 

 when the idea of God has been divested of all limitation and of every 

 condition. There will then remain for us the one absolute certainty, 

 that man " is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 

 from which all things proceed." 



Is there nothing here but a pure negation, as Mr. Harrison asserts? 

 The terms of the formula themselves prove that the question is of 

 what may be supposed to be the most positive thing in the world — 

 the stuff of which the Universe is made. Mr. Spencer speaks repeat- 

 edly of the Unknowable as the power that manifests itself at the same 

 time in the Universe and in the Consciousness, as the Supreme Reality 

 which is concealed behind the changing course of phenomena. He 

 attributes to it, as Mr. Harrison recognizes, unity, homogeneity, im- 

 manence, unlimited persistence in time and space. He assigns it, for 

 modes of action, the laws of the Universe ; he sets it face to face with 

 phenomena, both internal and external, in the relation of substance to 

 manifestation, if not of cause to effect. Still more, the Comtist critic 



* See, notably, Tiele, " Manuel de I'Histoire dcs Religions," translated by M. Maurice 

 Vernes, Book II ; and in the " Revue de I'Histoire des Religions," the " Religion d° I'An- 

 cien Empire Chiaois," by M. Julius Happel (Vol IV, No. 6). 



