184 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



sought and found its supreme object of veneration in the 

 God of the historical religion, which it philosophically 

 conceived as the Absolute. The second sought and 

 found its object of veneration in Humanity, in mankind 

 at large and as a whole. The former was, as all popular 

 and metaphysical religions have been, transcendental, 

 opposing to the limited and lower world which surrounds 

 us on this earth, the unlimited and higher region of 

 heaven ; this idea being expressed in the most varying 

 forms, from the narrowest sectarian to the largest and 

 deepest intellectual, religious, and poetical view of the 

 Divine, and vice versa, from the vaguest and most 

 abstract definition of the Absolute, to the most concrete 

 and living Christian belief in a Heavenly Father. The 

 other view naturally opposes all transcendentalism, de- 

 stroys both the religious and the metaphysical aspects: 

 it seeks and finds the object of its thought, and the 

 region of its practice, on this Earth, within the condi- 

 tions which surround us here in time and space. 

 This view had at the time received a great reinforce- 

 piogiess. ment and new resources through the idea of historical 

 progress recently introduced into philosophical literature 

 by some of the prominent thinkers in France. There 

 then happened, what has happened before and after in 

 dealing with smaller or larger problems : what had 

 seemed insoluble, if one regards only the Here and the 

 Now, acquired the appearance at least of being intelli- 

 gible if traced into a remote past or projected into a 

 distant future : in one word, if one adopts the dynamical, 

 as opposed to the statical view. This attitude is in 

 reality the same as that which Christian theology assumed 



33 

 Idea of 



