ECCLESIASTICAL AND GENERAL HISTORY 631 



true home. Philosophy cannot and may not know anything of all this, 

 except in so far as it calls religion to its aid when it attempts to study 

 the philosophy of religion. For without religion philosophy remains 

 bound down to the five senses and the whole apparatus of psychology 

 and logic, which everywhere carry it back to at least two fundamental 

 factors and one uniform process. In religion, on the other hand, it is 

 one fundamental factor and two processes which we are led to accept. 

 The obscurities to which this state of things sometimes give rise; 

 the "belief" of philosophy in the unity of the fundamental factor and 

 the -half-belief of the theologians in the God of religion, have produced 

 endless confusion in the course of history, and brought about the 

 erroneous notion that the results of pure knowledge and of religion 

 are essentially akin to each other or even identical. No! they are 

 different; they are two parallel lines which religious philosophy 

 apart, which is not pure philosophy are connected only, as it were, 

 by the bridge of certain analogies, or by the flights of fancy which 

 merge their different fields into one in order to give them life. 



However be the distance between them what it may in the 

 actual history of things they are very closely bound up with each 

 other. They have done each other great service, and together they 

 represent the higher life of humanity. How much does religion, 

 even the Christian religion, owe to the progressive achievements of 

 philosophy and the various forms of knowledge! How much they 

 have done to purify it, to clear it of false ideas, and to free it from 

 impossible pretensions! Religion, no doubt, is very tenacious in 

 clinging to old prejudices, and the history of the relation between 

 philosophy and religion is also the history of a struggle. Andrew 

 White has described it for us. Religion seems always to have had to 

 surrender; but it only seems. All that it did was to abandon out- 

 works that were no longer of any use to it. It shed the leaves in 

 which there was no more life. On the other hand, in none of the 

 intellectual systems that have prevailed from time to time has the 

 human mind ever spoken its last word, and nearly all of them have 

 borrowed something from religion. The human mind has had to take 

 these systems back again and again, and put others in their place. 

 The more closely and attentively the ecclesiastical historian examines 

 this struggle of the mind in itself and in its relation to religion, the 

 deeper he will go, and the more indispensable he will make the study 

 of his subject to the science of history as a whole. 



IV 



We said just now that the human mind has never spoken its last 

 word in any of the intellectual systems that have prevailed from time 

 to time. Is that true? Have we not, perhaps, its last word in the 



