448 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



"absolute religion" and all the others. An important contribution, 

 however, was made by Schleiermacher, who recognized that religion 

 is essentially a feeling of dependence. But intellectual prepossessions 

 prevented a fruitful use immediately of this recognition. Only as 

 a wider acquaintance with religious phenomena was gained, a keener 

 historic sense was developed, and a more objective attitude became 

 possible, was the time ripe for more adequate definitions of religion. 



Max Muller L defined religion as " a mental faculty which inde- 

 pendent of, nay, in spite of sense and reason, enables man to appre- 

 hend the infinite under different names and under varying disguises." 

 The influence of certain phases of the thought of India with which he 

 was so thoroughly familiar is quite marked in this definition. Herein 

 lies much of its value; the generalization is based on a wider range 

 of facts. But the intellectual aspect is again too exclusively pre- 

 sented. The conflict between sense and reason on the one hand and the 

 religious faculty on the other is too strongly emphasized to be uni- 

 versally true. And the very conception of religion as an apprehension 

 of the infinite is, in spite of its popularity, open to the most serious 

 objections. There is no evidence whatever, and not the slightest 

 probability, that man in the earlier stages of his development was 

 able to conceive of infinity, either as boundlessness in space, or as 

 endlessness in time, or as exhaustlessness of energy, or as the nega- 

 tion of all limitations. Nor can it be plausibly affirmed that he had 

 even a vague feeling of infinitude. All the analogies drawn from 

 observation of the individual in infancy and early childhood, the 

 mental processes of savages, and the oldest recorded utterances 

 of civilized men suggest that primitive man had a sense of the 

 bigness of the world in which he lived and the variety of things in it, 

 but was quite incapable of either feeling or apprehending such an 

 abstraction as infinity. When Max Muller 2 later modified his defini- 

 tion by limiting the apprehension of the infinite to " such manifesta- 

 tions as are able to influence the moral conduct of man," he failed to 

 do justice to the unmistakable fact that religion and morals pursued 

 somewhat independent courses through the earlier history of the 

 human race. 



Albert Re"ville 3 gave the following definition: "Religion is the 

 determination of human life by the consciousness of a bond uniting 

 the spirit of man to that mysterious spirit whose government of the 

 world and of himself he recognizes, and with whom he loves to feel 

 himself united." When the objective reality with which the human 

 spirit enters into relations is described as a "mysterious spirit," it 

 may be questioned whether the predicate "mysterious" does not 



1 Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as illustrated by the Religions of 

 India, 1880, p. 23. 



2 Physical Religion, 1891, p. 294. 



s Prolfgom nes de I'histoire des religions, 1886, p. 34. 



