476 ■ COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. iii, 



attitude toward the body of mythical conceptions of which 

 the current Christian theologies have been largely made up. 

 The consequence of this has been the rise of a purely nega- 

 tive iconoclastic style of criticism, both in religion and in 

 politics, which, in spite of its deadly hostility to the pre- 

 vailing orthodoxy, has nevertheless been equally characterized 

 by theories and aims which are the products of the old 

 statical habits of thought. While orthodoxy and its com- 

 panion legitimism have regarded the existing religious and 

 social order, not as a product of evolution, but as a divinely- 

 appointed and therefore eternally sacred order of things ; 

 on the other hand iconoclasm, whether manifested in religion 

 or in politics, has regarded the existing order of things, not 

 as a product of evolution, but as the work of artful priests 

 and legislators of antiquity, which may accordingly be 

 destroyed as summarily as it was created. Even while 

 justly inveighing, therefore, against patent absurdities or 

 flagrant wrongs in the established order of things, the icono- 

 clast proceeds from a point of view as untenable as that 

 occupied by his orthodox antagonist. Eejecting the mythical 

 conception of the established order as in any especial sense 

 divinely-appointed, he nevertheless borrows from the old 

 mythology its notion of cataclysms, and vainly imagines 

 that beliefs and institutions which suit the intellectual and 

 moral needs of half the world can be incontinently eradicated 

 or overthrown by direct assaults from without. Eeasoning, 

 then, upon this inadequate basis, and being as incapable of 

 appreciating sympathetically the beliefs of a bygone age as 

 his orthodox opponent is incapable of emancipating hiraseK 

 from such beliefs, the controversy between the two becomes 

 naturally barren of profit though fruitful in recrimination ; 

 and each regards the other with a dislike or a distrust which, 

 though justifiable enough when considered from the points of 

 view respectively occupied by the antagonists, nevertheless 



