Science Christianity and Modern Civilisation 337 



any replacement of one of the great historical religions by another. 

 If the range of Islam and of Buddhism is limited by climatic and 

 racial conditions, Christianity also must not be expected to make 

 itself at home except in the atmosphere created by the tradition of 

 Graeco-Roman culture. In fact a universal religion is an im- 

 possibility. The apparent unity of modern civilisation is after all 

 in the main restricted to the material setting of human life. Even 

 in the region of exact science men think less alike than we are 

 sometimes inclined to suppose. And the further we go from this 

 region of abstractions the greater the variety that we encounter. 

 In politics, morality, art, religion, it is vain to pretend that all men 

 are even on the road to unanimity. Nor is it in reality desirable 

 that they should be. Individuality, whether in a single human 

 being, a nation, or a school of thought, is what we value most of all ; 

 and reverence for individuality encourages the cultivation of what 

 is most distinctive and characteristic in each individual. What 

 unites us is, as a celebrated jest of Goethe's reminds us, not what is 

 distinguished but what is common. It is in the dissimilarity of the 

 dramatis personae that the interest of the action lies, whether in 

 private life or on the larger stage of universal history. 



The conclusion to which Thoeltsch thus came was strikingly 

 similar to that reached a few years previously by an English philo- 

 sopher whose thought, like his, had been concentrated on the 

 problem of Individuality, and whose death, as it chanced, almost 

 coincided with his own. " A number of great systems," writes 

 the late Mr, Bernard Bosanquet, " very profoundly differing in 

 life, mind, and institutions, existing side by side in peace and co- 

 operation, and each contributing to the world an individual best, 

 irreducible to terms of the others, this might be (I do not say, must 

 be) a finer, higher thing than a single body with a homogeneous 

 civilisation and a single communal will." But the two thinkers 

 differed in their estimate of the place to be assigned to history in 

 the philosophical interpretation of experience ; and Bosanquet, 

 for whom in the last resort full individuality belongs to no finite 

 system, but to the one eternal Absolute alone, would not, I think, 

 have been ready to follow Troeltsch in holding not only culture, 

 but |ruth itself to be, as he expressed it, " polymorphous." It 

 must be allowed that this theory unquestionably suggests itself 

 when once we have admitted that a variety of points of view in 

 philosophy does not involve the erroneousness of all but one, but 



