Preface

The story of this volume is soon told. In July, 1895, Professor Max Müller contributed to the Deutsche Rundschau an essay on the lost treatise against Christianity by the philosopher Celsus, known to us through the reply of Origen of Alexandria. This essay, entitled “The ‘True History’1 of Celsus,” contained an exposition of the doctrine of the Logos and its place in Christian teaching, with reference also to its applications in our modern thought. Among the comments upon it which in due time found their way to Oxford, was a vigorous, if familiar, letter (dated February, 1896) from a German emigrant to the United States, residing in Pennsylvania, who signed himself by the unusual name of the Pferdebürla, or “Horseherd.”2 His criticisms served as a fair sample of others; and his letter was published with a reply from Professor [pg vi] Max Müller in the Rundschau of November, 1896. More letters poured in upon the unwearied scholar who had thus set aside precious time out of his last years to answer his unknown correspondent. One of these, from “Ignotus Agnosticus,” supplied a text for further comment, and the whole grew into a little popular apologia, which was published at Berlin in 1899, and entitled Das Pferdebürla, or “Questions of the Day answered by Friedrich Max Müller.”

The veteran teacher thus enforced once more his ideas of the relation of language and thought, in which he had long since recognised the clue to man's knowledge of the relation of his spirit to God. This inner union he found realised in Christ, according to the testimony of the Fourth Gospel;3 and the lucid treatment of this great conception, freed from the technicalities of theology, will possibly prove to some readers the most helpful portion of this book. Ranging over many topics, once the themes of vehement controversy, the discussion has often an intimate, familiar, personal air. The disputants on opposite sides had drawn nearer; they could better understand each other's points of view.4 These pages, therefore, reveal the inmost beliefs of one who had [pg vii] devoted more than fifty years to the study of the history of religious thought on the widest scale, and had himself passed through severe struggles and deep griefs with unshaken calm. No reader of Max Müller's writings, or of the Life and Letters, can fail to recognise in these trusts the secret unity of all his labours. The record of human experience contained in the great sacred literatures of the world, and verified afresh in manifold forms from age to age, provided a basis for faith which no philosophy or science could disturb.

This is the key to the reasonings and appeals of this little book. It was translated as a labour of love by Mr. Fechter, Mayor of North Yakima, in the United States. The translation has been revised on this side of the Atlantic, and is now offered to the public in the belief that this final testimony of a “voice that is still” to the reality of “things unseen” will be welcome to many inquiring and perhaps troubled minds.

J. ESTLIN CARPENTER.
Oxford, April 2, 1903.

Chapter I.

The True History Of Celsus

The following essays, which were intended primarily for the Horseherd, but which were published in the Deutsche Rundschau, demand a short explanatory introduction. This, I believe, can best be given by me, by means of a reprint of another essay which appeared in the same periodical, and was the direct cause for the letter, which the writer, under the name of “Horseherd,” addressed to me. I receive many such anonymous communications, but regret that it is only rarely possible for me to answer them or to give them attention, much as I should like to do so. In this particular case, the somewhat abrupt, but pure, human tone of the letter appealed to me more than usual, and at my leisure I attempted an answer. My article, which called forth the letter of the Horseherd, was entitled “The ‘True History’ of Celsus,”5 in the July number of the Deutsche Rundschau, 1895, and, with a few corrections, is as follows:—

In an article which appeared in the March number of the Deutsche Rundschau, 1895, entitled “The Parliament of Religions in Chicago,” I expressed my [pg 002] surprise that this event which I had characterised as in my opinion the most important of the year 1893, had been so little known and discussed in Germany—so little, that the editors of the Wiener Fremdenblatt thought it needful to explain the nature of the Chicago Congress. Likewise, when in answer to the question as to what I should consider the most desirable discovery of the coming year in my department, I answered the discovery of the Sermo Verus of Celsus; this, too, appeared to be a work so little known, that the editors considered it necessary to add that Celsus was a renowned philosopher of the second century, who first subjected the ever spreading system of Christianity to a thorough criticism in a work entitled Sermo Verus. The wish, yes, even the hope, that this lost book, of which we gain a fair idea from the reply of Origen, should again make its appearance, was prompted by the recent discoveries of ancient Greek papyrus manuscripts in Egypt. Where so many unexpected discoveries have been made, we may hope for yet more. For who would have believed that ancient Greek texts would be found in a mummy-case, the Greek papyrus leaves being carelessly rolled together to serve as cushions for the head and limbs of a skeleton? It was plain that these papyrus leaves had been sold as waste paper, and that they were probably obtained from the houses of Greek officials and military officers, who had established themselves in Egypt during the Macedonian occupation, and whose furniture [pg 003] and belongings had been publicly sold and scattered on occasion of their rapid withdrawal. There were found not only fragments of classical texts, as of Homer, Plato, and the previously unknown treatise on “The Government of the Athenians,” not, perhaps, composed, but utilised, by Aristotle, but also many fragments of Christian literature, which made it probable that the libraries of Christian families also had been thrown on the market, and that papyrus leaves, when they appeared useless for any other purpose, were used as waste paper, or as a kind of papier-maché.

But why should the “True History” of Celsus, the λόγος ἀληθής, or Sermo Verus, excite our curiosity? The reason is quite plain. We know practically nothing of the history of the teaching of Christ in the first, second, and even third centuries, except what has been transmitted to us by Christian writers. It is an old rule, however, that it is well to learn from the enemy also,—“Fas est et ab hoste doccri.” Celsus was a resolute foe of the new Christian teaching, and we should, at all events, learn from his treatise how the Christian religion appeared in the eyes of a cultivated man of the second century, who, it seems, concurred in many important points with the philosophical conception cherished in the Christian church, or at least was familiar with it, namely, the Logos idea; but who could not comprehend how men, who had once understood and assimilated a view of the world founded on the Logos, could combine with [pg 004] it the belief in Christ as the incarnate Logos. To Celsus the Christian religion is something objective; in all other works of the first three centuries it is, and remains, almost entirely subjective.

This could hardly be otherwise, for a religion in its first inception scarcely exists for the outer world. What at that time were Jerusalem and Palestine in the eyes of the so-called world? A province yielding little profit, and often in rebellion. The Jews and their religion had certainly attracted the attention of Rome and Athens by their peculiarities; but the Jewish sects interested the classical world much less than the sects of the Platonic and Stoic schools. Christians were regarded as Jews, just as, not many years ago, Jains were treated by us as Buddhists, Sikhs as Brahmans, and Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and Brahmans were promiscuously placed in one pile as Indian idolaters. How should the differences which distinguished the Christian from the Jew, and the Jewish Christian from the heathen Christian, have been understood at that time in Rome? To us, naturally, the step which Paul and his associates took appears an enormous one—one of world-wide import; but of what interest could these things be outside of Palestine? That the Jews who looked upon themselves as a peculiar people, who would admit no strangers, and tolerate no marriages between Jew and Gentile, who, in spite of all their disappointments and defeats, energetically clung to their faith in a deliverer, in an earthly Messiah, [pg 005] and in the coming glory of their nation; that they should suddenly declare clean what they had always considered unclean; that they should transform their national spirit into a universal sympathy; yes, that they should recognise their Messiah in a crucified malefactor, indicate a complete revolution in their history; but the race itself was and continued to be, in the eyes of the world, if not beneath notice, at least an object of contempt. It should not, therefore, surprise us that no classical writer has given us a really historical account of the Christian religion, or has even with one word referred to the wonderful events which, had they actually taken place as described in the Gospels, would have stirred the uttermost corners of the earth. Celsus is the only writer of the second century who, being neither Christian nor Jew, was not only acquainted with representatives of Christianity and Judaism, but had also, it would seem, carefully read portions of the Old and New Testaments. He even boasts of having a better knowledge of these religions than many of their adherents (II, 12). That such a man considered this new Christian sect of sufficient importance to subject it to a searching investigation, is proof of his deep insight, and at the same time of the increasing power of Christianity as a religion independent of Judaism. Who this Celsus really was, it is not easy to discover. Even his adversary, Origen, seems to know but little of him; at any rate he tells us nothing of him,—indeed, we are even still in doubt about his date. It has [pg 006] been thought that he is the Celsus to whom Lucian (120-200 A.D.) dedicated his work on the false Alexander. This is possible; but Celsus is a very common name, and Origen speaks of two men of this name who were both Epicureans and are supposed to have lived in the times of Nero (54-68 A.D.) and Hadrian (118-138 A.D.). It has been argued that the latter could not have been the author of the Sermo Verus, because it apparently mentions the sect of the Marcellians, and this was not founded till the year 155 under Bishop Anicetus. But Origen's remark, that Celsus may have outlived the reign of Hadrian, has been overlooked. At any rate Origen speaks of the Sermo Verus as a work long known, and as he did not die until the year 253 A.D., in his time the work of Celsus would have been recognised as of considerable age, even if written after the year 155. Much learning has been expended on the identification of Celsus, which seems to me to have been wasted. It is remarkable that Origen made no effort to become personally acquainted with his adversary. He leaves the question open whether he is the same Celsus who composed two other books against the Christians (Contra Celsum, IV, 36). At the end of his book he speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary, and asserts that a second book by him against the Christians, which has either not yet been completed or has not yet reached him, shall be as completely refuted as the Sermo Verus. Such language is only used of a contemporary. [pg 007] Could it be proved that Celsus was a friend of Lucian, then we should know that in the judgment of the latter he was a noble, truth-loving, and cultivated man. It was not Origen's interest to emphasise these aspects of his opponent's character; but it must be said to his credit, that though he was much incensed at some of the charges of Celsus, he never attacked his personal character. Perhaps it was not fair in Origen to accuse Celsus of being ashamed of his Epicureanism, and of concealing his own philosophical and atheistic convictions, in order to obtain an easier hearing among Jews and Christians.6 This does not appear quite fair, for it was a very pardonable device for Celsus first to attack a part of Christian teaching under the mask of a Jew, who represents his faith as the older and more respectable, and seeks to convince the Christians that they would have done better had they remained true to the religion of their fathers. On the contrary, as Celsus, whatever he may have been except a Jew, could not with a good conscience have undertaken an actual defence of Judaism, it was quite natural that he should choose a Jew as an advocate of the Jewish religion, and put into his mouth, like a second Philo, ideas which at all events sound more Platonic than Epicurean. Origen was entirely justified in showing that in this process Celsus frequently forgot his part; and this he did with much skill.

But whatever Celsus may have been,—an Epicurean, [pg 008] or, as has occasionally been maintained, a Neo-platonist,—he was at all events no mean adversary and certainly not unworthy of Origen's steel. If not, why should Origen have felt the need of such an earnest refutation? He says, certainly, that he did it only at the request of his old friend and protector, Ambrosius. But that is what many writers under similar circumstances have said and still say. We have, at all events, lost much through the loss (or destruction?) of all manuscripts of Celsus. Not only was he acquainted with the principal philosophical schools of antiquity, he appears also to have studied zealously the religions of the ancient world as they were known at that time to the learned, especially in Alexandria, of which we have but scant knowledge. Origen expressly states (I, 14) that Celsus described the various peoples who possessed religious and philosophical systems, because he supposed that all these views bore a certain relationship to one another. Without a doubt much has been here lost to us, not only for the history of Greek philosophy, but also for the history of Oriental religions and philosophies, whose representatives at that time sojourned in Alexandria, yet as to whose personal influence we are almost entirely in the dark. Celsus is presumed to have written of the doctrines of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Jews, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians, Eleusinians, even of the Samaneans, i.e. the Buddhists (I, 24), and to have represented these as better accredited than those of the Jews. [pg 009] We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to understand clearly how men of this age, versed in philosophy, such as Clement and Origen himself, could confess Christianity, or become converted to it, or could defend it against other philosophers without in the least becoming untrue to their philosophical convictions. That the lower classes among Jews and Greeks followed the new teaching, is much more intelligible, even without wishing to lay too much stress on the evidential value of the miracles at that time. The great majority were accustomed to miracles; what was almost entirely lacking was practical religion. The Greek thinkers had created systems of philosophy and morals, but the traditional worship had degenerated into a mere spectacle. Even among the Jews the old religion had become a rigid temple ritual, which offered but little comfort and hope to the weak heart of man. In the eyes of the majority of the philosophers of the age every religion was only pernicious superstition, good enough for the masses, but scarcely worth consideration by the cultured. That Celsus made the Christian religion the object of serious treatment and refutation, not only implies a subtle and unprejudiced [pg 010] view of his age, but shows us at the same time how the Christianity of that period, entirely independent of the Jewish religion, had gained in significance, and had even in the eyes of a heathen philosopher begun to be esteemed as something important, as something dangerous, as something that had to be combated with philosophical weapons.

Christianity is especially indebted for its rapid spread to its practical side, to the energy of its love, which was bestowed on all who were weary and heavy laden. Christ and the apostles had understood how to gather around them the poor, the sinners, the most despised members of human society. They were offered forgiveness of their sins, love, and sympathy, if they merely promised to amend and sin no more. Among these earliest followers of Christ there was scarcely a change of religion in our sense of the word. Christianity was at first much more a new life than a new religion. The first disciples were and remained Jews in the eyes of the world, and that they came from the most despised classes even Origen does not dispute. Celsus had reproached the Christians because the apostles, around whose heads even in his time a halo had begun to shine, had been men of bad character, criminals, fishermen, and tax-gatherers. Origen admits that Matthew was a tax-gatherer, James and John fishermen, probably Peter and Andrew as well; but declares that it was not known how the other apostles gained a livelihood. Even that they had been [pg 011] malefactors and criminals, Origen does not absolutely deny. He refers to the letter of Barnabas, in which it is stated “that Jesus chose men as his apostles who were guilty of sin more than all other evil doers.”7 He relies upon the words of Peter, when he says, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”8

Paul, in like manner, says in his epistle to Timothy,9 “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”

But it is just in this that Origen recognises the divine power of the personality and the teaching of Christ, that by means of it men who had been deeply sunken in sins could be raised to a new life; and he declares it to be unjust that those who repented of their early sins, and had entered into a pure life, well pleasing to God, should be reproached with their previous sinfulness. In this respect he makes, indeed, no distinction between the apostles and such men as Phædon and Polemo, who were rescued from the mire of their sins through philosophy; and he recognises in the teaching of Christ a still greater force, because it had proved its saving and sanctifying power without any of the arts of learning and eloquence. What the apostles were, and what they became through the influence of the Gospel, Origen himself explains in the words of Paul, “For we also were aforetime foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts [pg 012] and pleasures, living in malice and envy, and hating one another.”10

He attributes it as an honour to the apostles that, even if their self-accusations were extravagant, they had so openly acknowledged their sins, in order to place the saving influence of the Gospel in a clearer light. But the fact itself, that the apostles had been sinful and despised men, Origen honestly admits. We also know with what true humanity Christ himself treated the adulteress: how he challenged the Pharisees, if they themselves were free from sin, to cast the first stone at her. And who does not admire the aged Pharisees who silently withdrew, one after the other, from the oldest to the youngest, without casting a stone? Have we many such Pharisees in our time? Jesus, however, dismissed the adulteress with the compassionate words, “Sin no more.” That such a course toward sin-laden mankind by one who knew no sin, made a deep impression on the masses, is perfectly intelligible. We see a remarkable parallel in the first appearance of Buddha and his disciples in India. He, too, was reproached for inviting sinners and outcasts to him, and extending to them sympathy and aid. He, too, was called a physician, a healer of the sick; and we know what countless numbers of ailing mankind found health through him. All this can be quite understood from a human standpoint. A religion is, in its nature, not a philosophy; and no one could [pg 013] find fault with Christianity if it had devoted itself only to the healing of all human infirmities, and had set aside all metaphysical questions. We know how Buddha also personally declined all philosophical discussion. When one of his disciples put questions to him about metaphysical problems, the solution of which went beyond the limits of human reason, he contended that he wished to be nothing more than a physician, to heal the infirmities of mankind. Accordingly, he says to Mâlunkyaputta: “What have I said to you before? Did I say, ‘Come to me and be my disciple, that I may teach you whether the world is eternal or not; whether the world is finite or infinite; whether the life-principle is identical with the body or not, whether the perfect man lives after death or not?’ ”

Mâlunkyaputta answered, “Master, you did not say that.”

Then Buddha continued, “Did you then say, ‘I will be your disciple,’ but first answer these questions?”

“No,” said the disciple.

Thereupon Buddha said: “A man was once wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his friends called in an experienced physician. What if the wounded man had said, I shall not permit my wound to be examined until I know who wounded me, whether he be a nobleman, a Brahman, a Vaisya, or a Sûdra; what his name is; to what family he belongs; if he be large or small, or of medium size, and how the [pg 014] weapon with which he wounded me looked. How would it fare with such a man? Would he not certainly succumb to his wound?”

The disciple then perceives that he came to Buddha as a sick man, desiring to be healed by him as a physician, not to be instructed about matters that lie far beyond the human horizon.

Buddha has often been censured because he claimed for his religion such an exclusively practical character, and instead of philosophy preached only morality. These censures began in early times; we find them in the famous dialogues between Nagasena and Milinda, the king Menander, about 100 B.C. And yet we know how, in spite of all warnings given by the founder of Buddhism, this religion was soon entirely overgrown with metaphysics; and how, finally, metaphysics as Abbidharma found an acknowledged place in the Sacred Canon of the Buddhists.

Christianity presents a parallel case. In the beginning it sought only to call sinners to repentance. The strong, as Jesus himself said, do not require a physician, but the sick. He therefore looked upon himself as a physician, just as Buddha had done in an earlier day. He declared that he was not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. The truth of his teaching should be known by its fruits, and there is scarcely a trace in the Gospels of philosophical discussions, or even of attacks on the schools of Greek philosophy. But even here it was soon apparent that, for a practical reformation of conduct, a higher consecration [pg 015] is essential. It was admitted, as an Indian philosopher is reputed long since to have said to Socrates, that no one could understand the human element who had not first understood the divine. Men of Greek culture who felt themselves attracted by the moral principles of the little Christian congregations soon, however, wanted more. They had to defend the step which they had taken, and the Christianity which they wished to profess, or had professed, against their former friends and co-believers, and this soon produced the so-called apologies for Christianity, and expositions of the philosophical and theological views which constituted the foundation of the new teaching. A religion which was recruited only from poor sinners and tax-gatherers could scarcely have found entry into the higher circles of society, or maintained itself in lecture-rooms and palaces against the cultivated members of refined circles, if its defenders, like Buddha, had simply ignored all philosophical, especially all metaphysical, questions.

How came it, then, that cultured men in high stations, entirely independent, professed Christianity? How did they make their friends and former co-believers understand that such a step was bona fide? In answering this question, we get help from Celsus, as well as his opponent, Origen.

The bridge which led across from Greek philosophy to Christianity was the Logos. It is remarkable how much this fundamental doctrine of Christianity [pg 016] fell, later on, into the background; how little it is understood, even by the educated of our own time, and how often, without giving it any consideration, they have cast it aside. In early Christian days this was probably a consequence of the practical and political development of the new religion. But the living nerve of the Christian religion, which was its closest bond to the highest spiritual acquisitions of the ancient Greek world, was thus severed. First, the Logos, the Word, the Son of God, was misunderstood, and mythology was employed to make the dogma, thus misconceived, intelligible. In modern times, through continued neglect of the Logos doctrine, the strongest support of Christianity has been cut from under its feet, and at the same time its historical justification, its living connection with Greek antiquity, has almost entirely passed out of view. In Germany it almost appears as though Goethe, by his Faust, is answerable for the widespread treatment of the Logos idea as something obscure, incomprehensible, mystical. Many, when reading the opening of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” say to themselves, “No one understands that,” and read on. He who does not earnestly and honestly make an effort to understand this beginning of the Gospel, shows that he is but little concerned with the innermost essence of Christianity, as clearly presented to us in the Fourth Gospel. He forgets that not only faith, but thought, pertains to a religion. It is no excuse to say, “Did not the learned [pg 017] Dr. Faust torment himself to discover what ‘the word’ here meant, and did not find it out?” He says in Goethe:—

But this is just what he ought not do. It was not necessary to translate it at all; he only needed to accept the Logos as a technical expression of Greek philosophy. He would then have seen that it is impossible to prize the Word too highly, if we first learn what the Word meant in the idiom of contemporary philosophy. Not even to a Faust should Goethe have imputed such ignorance as when he continues to speculate without any historical knowledge:—

Had Goethe wished to scourge the unhistorical exegesis of modern theologians, he could not have [pg 018] done so better than by this attempt of an interpreter of the Bible, fancying himself illumined by the spirit, but utterly destitute of all knowledge of history. Knowledge of the history of the Greek philosophy of the first and second centuries after Christ is indispensable to the understanding of such a word as Logos—a word that grew up on Greek soil, and whose first roots reach far into the distant past of the Greek mind; and for that very reason not admitting of translation, either into Hebrew or into German. Like many other termini technici, it must be understood historically; just as logic, metaphysic, analytic, organon, etc., can only be apprehended and understood historically. Now it is, perhaps, not to be denied, that even now a majority of educated readers either perfunctorily repeat the first sentence of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” or believe that something lies buried therein that is beyond the depth of ordinary men. This, of course, is partially true, and it cannot be otherwise in religions which are intended not only for the young, but for the wise and learned, and which should be strong meat for adults, and not merely milk for babes. The fault lies chiefly in the translation, in that it should have been thought necessary to translate a word instead of permitting it to remain, what it was, a foreign word.

This becomes still worse when, as for instance, in certain Oriental languages, the newly converted Christian has to read, “In the beginning was the Noun or the Verb.” The correct translation would, of course, [pg 019] be, “In the beginning was the Logos.” For Logos is not here the usual word Logos, but a terminus technicus, that can no more be translated out of the lexicon than one would think of etymologically translating Messiah or Christ as the “Anointed,” or Angelos as “messenger” or “nuncio.” If we read at the beginning of the Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos,” at least every one would know that he has to deal with a foreign, a Greek word, and that he must gain an understanding of it out of Greek philosophy, just as with such words as atom, idea, cosmos, etc. It is remarkable what human reason will consent to. Millions of Christians hear and read, “In the beginning was the Word,” and either give it no thought, or imagine the most inconceivable things, and then read on, after they have simply thrown away the key to the Fourth Gospel. That thought and reflection also are a divine service is only too readily forgotten. Repeated reading and reflection are necessary to make the first verse of the Fourth Gospel accessible and intelligible in a general way; but one cannot be a true Christian without thinking and reflecting.

An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy is much simpler than is commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term, namely, Logos, expressed both, though they distinguished the inner from the outer Logos. It is one of the most remarkable aberrations of the [pg 020] human mind, to imagine that there could be a word without thought or a thought without word. The two are inseparable: one cannot exist or be even conceived without the other. I believe that I have clearly shown in my Science of Thought that thought without word and word without thought are impossible and inconceivable, and why it is so. Here is the first key to a historical solution of the riddle at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel. We know that Greek philosophy after making every possible effort to explain the world mechanically, had already in the school of Anaxagoras reached the view that the hylozoic as well as the atomic theory leaves the human mind unsatisfied; and that it is necessary to posit as the origin of all things a thought or thinking mind that manifests itself in the universe. This was the nous, the mind, of Anaxagoras. He could just as well have called it Logos, for the word was in use even before the time of Anaxagoras, to express that reason, the recognition of whose all-pervading presence in the universe was the great step in advance made by the system of Anaxagoras. Even Heraclitus had divined the existence of reason in the universe, and had applied to it the name Logos. While the masses recognised in Moira or Heimarmenê only destiny, or fate, Heraclitus declared, that the essence of this Heimarmenê is the Logos, the Reason that pervades the world. This is the oldest expression of Hegel's thought, “What is, is rational.” [pg 021] We must not suppose, however, that Heraclitus considered this Logos as identical with his fire. He merely says that the fire is subordinate to the Logos, that it operates κατὰ τὸν λόγον, according to the Logos, or (as we should say) rationally.

Our knowledge of the entire system of Heraclitus is of course so fragmentary that we can only speak of this, as of many other points, with great caution. The same is true, although in a lesser degree, of the system of Anaxagoras. His nous, if we translate it by mind, is more comprehensive than Logos. We must not, however, suppose, that this nous bore a personal character, for Anaxagoras expressly states that it is a χρῆμα, a thing, even though he would have said that this nous regulated all things. Whether an impersonal mind is conceivable, was still at that time a remote problem. Even in Plato we cannot clearly determine whether he represented his nous as God in our sense, or as Sophia, wisdom, a word which with him often replaces nous. It is remarkable that in his genuine works Plato does not generally use the word Logos, and in Aristotle as well nous remains the first term, what we should call the divine mind, while Logos is the reason, the causal nexus, the οῦ ἔνεκα, therefore decidedly something impersonal, if not unsubjective.

Plato is the first who distinguishes between essence and being in the primeval cause, or, as we might say, between rest and activity. He speaks of an eternal plan of the world, a thought of the world, the world [pg 022] as a product of thought, inseparable from the creator, but still distinguishable from him. This is the Platonic world of “Ideas,” which lies at the foundation of the world perceivable by the senses, the phenomenal world. What is more natural or more reasonable than this thought? If the world has an author, what can we imagine as reasonable men, but that the thought, the plan of the world, belongs to the author, that it was thought, and thereby realised for the first time? Now this plan, this idea, was the inner Logos, and as every thought finds its immediate expression in a word, so did this one, which was then called the outer Logos. The outer was not possible without the inner, even as a word is impossible without mind and reason. But the inner Logos also first realises itself in the outer, just as the reasonable thought can only be made real in the word. This character of the Logos as thought and word, at once capable of distinction and yet undifferentiated and inseparable, is of the highest importance for Christian speculation; without an exact comprehension of it, we shall see that the relation of the Son to the Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church, remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a concept. We cannot think of “tree” without the word or a hieroglyphic of some kind. We can even say that, as far as we are concerned, there is [pg 023] no tree, except in language, for in the nature of things there are only oaks or beeches, but not and never a tree. And what is true of tree is true of all words, or to speak with Plato, of all ideas, or to speak with the Stoics, of all Logoi. There are no doubt conjurers who pretend to be able to think without words, and even take no little pride in being able to perform this trick. They forget only too often that their inexpressible thoughts are nothing but obscure feelings, in fact, they do not even distinguish between presentation and idea, and forget that when we speak of words, we do not understand by them mere mimicry of sound or interjections, but only and exclusively intelligible words, that is, such as are based on concepts and are derived from roots. The old Greek philosophers, probably favoured by their language, appear never to have forgotten the true relation between Logos and Logos, and their thought finally resulted in a view of the world founded upon it. Although it is now the custom to speak slightingly of the later Platonists, we should always recognise that we owe to them the preservation of this, the most precious jewel out of the rich storehouse of Greek philosophy, that the world is the expression and realisation of divine thought, that it is the divine word expressed.

We cannot here enter into the various phases in which Plato and his followers presented these ideas. At times they are represented as independent of the Creator, as models, as golden statues, to which the [pg 024] creative mind looks up. Soon, however, they are conceived as thoughts of this mind, as something secondary, created, sometimes also as something independent, as much so as is the Son in relation to his Father. The whole Logos, with all ideas, became in this manner the first-born Son of the Creator, yet so that the Father could not be Father without the Son, or the Son without the Father, Son. All these distinctions, insignificant as they may appear from a purely philosophical point of view, demand attention because of the influence that they afterward exerted on Christian dogma, especially on that of the Trinity—a dogma which, however specifically Christian it may appear to be, must still in all its essential features be traced back to Greek elements.

It is certainly remarkable that Jewish philosophy also developed on very similar lines, of course not with the purity and exactness of the Greek mind, but still with the same object in view,—to bring the reason and wisdom recognised in nature into renewed connexion with their supernatural Jehovah. Through the Proverbs of Solomon and similar works the Jews were well acquainted with Wisdom, who says of herself (viii. 22 ff.): “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.… Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth.… When he prepared the heavens, I was [pg 025] there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.… Then I was by him, as a master workman: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.” These and similar thoughts were familiar to Jewish thinkers (see Proverbs viii. and ix., Job xxviii. 12, Ecclesiasticus i. 4), and it was natural that, in coming in contact with Greek philosophy, especially in Alexandria, they should seek to recognise again this traditional conception of divine Wisdom in the Logos of Greek philosophers. We see this most clearly in Philo, a contemporary of Christ, of whom it is often difficult to say whether he reasons more as a Greek or as a Jew. While the Greeks had almost lost sight of the bridge between the world and God by abstraction, the Jews, through mistaken reverence, had so far removed the Creator above his creation that on both sides the need of mediation or a mediator was deeply felt. The Jewish God was little better than the Epicurean. If the Epicureans taught that there probably is a God, but that the world is of no concern to Him, so among the Jews of the first century gnostic ideas prevailed, according to which not the highest but a subordinate God created and ruled the world. The task of creation seemed unworthy of the supreme God. Philo therefore seized the Stoic idea of the Logos or Logoi in order to bring his transcendental God again into relation with the visible world. The most important attributes and powers of God were hypostatised as beings who participated in the creation and government [pg 026] of the world. Philo's God first of all creates or possesses within himself a world that is conceived, an invisible world,12 which is also called the world of ideas13 or the idea of ideas.14 These ideas are the types15 of all things, and the power by which God created them is often called Sophia or Epistêmê, wisdom or knowledge.16 This world of ideas in its entirety corresponds, as is readily seen, to the Greek Logos, the separate types to the Platonic ideas or the Stoic Logoi.

The entire Logos, or the sum of Ideas, is called by Philo, entirely independent of Christianity, the true Son of God, while the realised world of Christian teaching passes as the second Son. If the first Logos is occasionally called the image or shadow of God, the world of sense is the image of the image, the shadow of the shadow. More logically expressed, God would be the causa efficiens, matter the causa materialis, the Logos the causa instrumentalis, while the goodness of God is sometimes added as the causa finalis. At the same time we also see here the difference between the working of the Jewish and Greek minds. In the Old Testament and in Philo, the Sophia or wisdom of God becomes a half mythological being, a goddess who is called the mother, and even the nurse,17 of all beings. She bore with much labour out of the seed of God,18 as Philo says, the only and [pg 027] beloved visible Son, that is to say, this Cosmos. This Cosmos is called by him the Son of God,19 the only begotten,20 while the first Logos is the first-born,21 and as such often coincides with the Sophia and its activity.22 He is also called the elder son,23 and as such is distinguished from a younger son,24 from the real, visible world. But this divine Sophia may not, according to Philo, any more than God Himself, come into direct contact with impure matter. According to him this contact occurs through the instrumentality of certain powers,25 which in part correspond to the Greek Logoi, and which in his poetic language are also represented as angels.26 Philo says in plain terms that the eternal Logoi, that is the Platonic ideas, are commonly called angels.

We see by this in how misty an atmosphere Philo lived and wrote, and we may be certain that he was not the only one who in this manner blended the Jewish religion with Greek philosophy. In the Samaritan theology also, in Onkelos and Jonathan, traces of the Logos idea are to be found.27 If we now observe in the Fourth Gospel, somewhere in the first half of the second century, this same amalgamation of Christian doctrine with Platonic philosophy, only in a much clearer manner, we can scarcely doubt from [pg 028] what source the ideas of the Logos as the only begotten Son of God, and of the divine wisdom, originally flowed. Christian theologians are more inclined to find the first germs of these Christian dogmas in the Old Testament, and it is not to be denied that in the minds of the authors of some of the books of the Old Testament analogous ideas struggle for expression. But they are always tinctured with mythology, and among the prophets and philosophers of the Old Testament there is absolutely no trace of a truly philosophical conception of the Logos, such as confronts us as a result of centuries of thought among the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the Stoics and Neo-Stoics. We look in vain in Palestine for a word like Logos, for a conception of the Cosmos as the expression of a rationally thinking mind, especially for the Logoi as the species of the Logos, as the primeval thoughts and types of the universe. It is difficult to understand why theologians should have so strenuously endeavoured to seek the germs of the Logos doctrine among the Jews rather than the Greeks, as if it was of any moment on which soil the truth had grown, and as if for purely speculative truths, the Greek soil had not been ploughed far deeper and cultivated more thoroughly than the Jewish. That Philo found employment for Platonic ideas, and especially for the Stoic Logos, nay, even for the Logoi, in his own house, and that other philosophers went so far as to declare the fundamental truths of Greek philosophy to have been borrowed [pg 029] from the Old Testament, is well known; but modern researches have rendered such ideas impossible. The correspondences to the Greek Logos that are found in the Old Testament are of great interest, in so far as they make the later amalgamation of Semitic and Aryan ideas historically more intelligible, and also in so far as—like the correspondences to be found among the East Indians and even the red Indians28—they confirm the truth or at least the innate human character of a Logos doctrine. But wherever we encounter the word Logos outside of Greece, it is, and remains, a foreign word, a Hellenic thought.

Jewish philosophers, while they adopted the word, only filled their old skins with new wine, with the natural consequence that the wine burst the old skins; but without spilling. For it was this which, in the hands of such men as the writer of the Fourth Gospel, as Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and the best of the church fathers, gave them the strength and enthusiasm to triumph over the world, and especially over the strongholds of heathen religion, and even over Greek philosophy. Had the Fourth Evangelist wished to say that Christ was the divine Sophia or the Shekinah, or, as in Job, Wisdom as the fear of God, would he have said, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos became flesh, and lived among us, and we saw his glory, a glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth?” Why not take the facts just as they [pg 030] are, and why wish to improve that which requires no human improvement? The Christian doctrine is and remains what it is; it rests on an indestructible arch, supported on one side by the Old Testament and on the other by Greek philosophy, each as indispensable as the other. We forget only too readily how much Christianity, in its victory over Greek philosophy, owes to this very philosophy. Christianity could no doubt have achieved the moral and social regeneration of the people without these weapons of the Greek mind; but a religion, especially in the age of the downfall of Greek and Roman philosophy, must have been armed for battle with the best, the most cultured, and the most learned classes of society, and such a battle demanded a knowledge of the weapons which had been forged in the schools of Greek philosophy. We cannot therefore put too high a value on the Fourth Gospel for a knowledge of the intellectual movement of that day. It is true that a religion need not be a philosophy, but it must not owe philosophy any answer. Small as may be the emphasis that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was the centre, the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed point of departure, and then proceed to prove that the Word is the Son of God, and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and philosophical [pg 031] are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain on the one hand the divinity of the Son of God, on the other hand they retain the rationality of the created universe. That “the ALL is Logos, is Word or Reason,” was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, i.e. the Logoi, the divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest. And what is the fittest, if not the rational, the Platonic “Good,” that is, the Logos? Why, then, turn back to the stone age of human thinking, why again turn nature into wood, when for thousands of years Greek philosophers and Christian thinkers have recognised her as something spiritual, as a world of eternal ideas? How would such men as Herder, Schelling, and Hegel have smiled at such a view of the world! Yes, Darwin himself would be ashamed of his followers, for he saw, though not always clearly, that everything in this sphere presupposes something beyond, and in the loftiest utterance of his book he demanded an origin, yes, an originator. In the writings of the philosophical church fathers we constantly hear more of the Logos which was in the beginning, and through which all things were made, than of God, who in the beginning created heaven and earth.

And in this lies the great interest of the lost [pg 032] treatise of Celsus. Had he been an Epicurean, as Origen supposed, he would have had no personal interest in the Logos. But this Logos had become at that time to such an extent the common property of Greek philosophy, that the Jew, under whose mask Celsus at the outset attacked the Christians, could quite naturally express his willingness to acknowledge the Logos as the Son of God. Origen, it is true, says that the Jew has here forgotten his part, for he had himself known many Jewish scholars, no one of whom would have acknowledged such an idea. This shows that Origen did not know the works of Philo, who would certainly have offered no objection to such a doctrine, for he himself calls the Logos the first-born Son (υἱὸς πρωτόονος)29 When therefore Celsus, the heathen philosopher, admits through the mouth of the Jew that the Logos is the Son of God, he is merely on his guard against the identification of any individual with the Son of God and indirectly with the Logos, that is to say, he does not wish to be a Christian. At all events we see how general was the view at that time, that the whole creation was the realisation of the Logos, nay, of the Son of God; that God uttered Himself, revealed Himself, in the world; that each natural species is a Word, a Thought of God, and that finally the idea of the entire world is born of God, and is thereby the Son of God.

This idea of a Son of God, although in its philosophical [pg 033] sense decidedly Greek, had, it is true, certain preparatory parallels among the Jews, on which Christian theologians have laid only too great stress. In the fifth book of Moses we read, “You are children of the Lord your God.” In the book of Enoch, chap. cv., the Messiah is also called the Son of God, and when the tempter says to Christ, Matthew iv. 1, “If thou be the Son of God,” it means the same as “If thou be the Messiah.”

The question is: Is this Jewish conception of the Son of God as Messiah the Christian as well? Such it has been, at least in one book of the Christian church, in the Fourth Gospel, and it found its expression first in the representation that Joseph was descended from David; secondly, in the belief that Jesus had no earthly father. We see here at once the first clear contradiction between Christian philosophy and Christian mythology. If Joseph were not the father of Jesus, how could Joseph's descent from David prove the royal ancestry of Jesus? And how does it follow from his being the Son of God that he had no earthly father? Although he was the Son of God, he was called the son of the carpenter, and his brothers and sisters were well known. The divine birth demands the human; without it, it is entirely unintelligible. We know from the recently discovered ancient Syrian translation of the Gospels that the two streams of thought—that Christ was the Son of God, and that at the same time he had an earthly father,—could flow side by side, quite [pg 034] undisturbed, without the one rendering the other turbid.

It was the misunderstanding of the spiritual birth of Christ from his divine Father, and even from his divine mother (the Ruach, feminine, the holy spirit), that appeared to make it necessary to deny him an earthly father, and to assert that even his human mother did not conceive and give birth to him in the ordinary way. In the earliest period of the Christian church this was otherwise. It was considered at that time that in Christ the divine sonship went hand in hand with the human, and further that the one without the other would lose its true meaning. In a Syrian palimpsest, which was recently discovered in the convent at Mount Sinai by Mrs. Smith Lewis, and which, being written in the fifth century, presupposes a still older Syrian translator, we now see an original Greek text, probably of the second century, in which the Davidic genealogy of Joseph (Matthew i. 16) is really the genealogy of Jesus, for it is there said, “Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph to whom the virgin Mary was espoused begat Jesus, who is called Christ.” In the twenty-first verse it reads also, “And she shall bear him a son,” and in the twenty-fifth verse, “And took unto him his wife, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Jesus.” This purely human birth of Jesus does not in any manner disturb the belief in his true divine origin, as the Son of God, as the first-born, the image of God, whose name was called the Word of God, i.e. [pg 035] Logos. On the contrary, it removes all difficulties with which so many Christians have contended, openly or in silence, when they asked themselves how it is possible to conceive a human birth, a human mother, without a human father. Even a deification of the mother, or even of the grandmother, such as is proclaimed by the Roman church, does not help any honest soul out of this mire which has been made by well-meaning but ignorant theologians. The old Christian philosophers, the old church fathers, saints, and martyrs, alone give us light and leading. As long as we conceive the divine sonship of Christ from the Jewish or Greek mythological standpoint, the true divine nature of Christ remains a mere phrase. When, however, we call to our aid the most orthodox and enlightened men of the second century, we find that such men as Justin, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Apollonius30 and Clement, to say nothing of Origen, believed in Jesus as the only begotten son of God31 in the sense which these words had at that time for every one who spoke and thought in Greek. This Son is often represented as distinguishable from the Father, but not as separable. Of a Son of God in the Jewish sense of the word, of a descendant of David, the evangelist would never have said that all things were made by him. That could be affirmed only of the true Son of God, of the Logos, as the [pg 036] thought of God, which is uttered in the visible world.

In what sense this Logos was recognised in Jesus, is certainly a difficult question, and here the work of Celsus would have been of great use to us, for he expressly states that he has no objection to the Logos idea; but how philosophers could accept an incarnation32 of this Logos in Jesus, was beyond his understanding. It must be borne in mind that matter and flesh were held by Celsus to be something so unclean, that according to him the Deity could only operate on matter by means of an endless number of intermediaries (a true fœtus œonum). This obscurity in the conception of Jesus as Logos by the Christian church is the reason why Celsus does not regard Joseph as the natural father of Jesus, but Panthera. Origen, of course, denounces this very indignantly; and the legend is nothing more than one of the many calumnies, which are nearly always to be traced among the opponents of a new religion and its founders. For the true nature and the divine birth of Christ, as Origen himself seems to feel, such a story would naturally have no significance whatever. It remains true, however, that no writer of authority of the second and third centuries has clearly explained in what sense the Christian church conceived Jesus as the Logos.

Three conceptions are possible. The first appears to have been that of the Fourth Gospel, that the [pg 037] Logos, in all its fulness, as the Son, who in the beginning was with God and was God, by whom all things were made, became flesh in Jesus, and that this Jesus gave to those who believed in him as Logos the power themselves to become sons of God, born like him not of blood nor of the will of flesh, but of God. This may also explain why the legendary details of the birth of Christ are never mentioned in the Fourth Gospel. But however clear the view of the evangelist is, it nevertheless remains obscure how he conceived the process of this incarnation of an eternal being, transcending time and space and comprehending the whole world, which lived among them, which, as is said in the Epistle of John, was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we have beheld and our hands handled, the Word of life,33 etc. If we think ourselves for a moment into this view, into the unity of the Divine that lives and moves in the Father, in the Logos, and in all souls that have recognised the Logos, we shall comprehend the meaning of the statement, that whoever believes in Jesus is born of God, that whoever has the Son, has the life. To have the truth, to have eternal life, to have the Son, to have the Father, all this then signifies one and the same thing for the evangelist, and for the greatest among the ante-Nicene fathers.

But second, the conception that the Logos was born in Jesus might simply signify the same as [pg 038] Philo means, when he speaks of the Logos in Abraham and in the prophets. This would be intelligible from Philo's point of view in relation to Abraham, but clearly does not go far enough to explain the deification of Christ as we find it in all the Evangelists.

There remains possible therefore only a third conception. Philo knows very well that God has an infinite number of powers or ideas, all of which might be called Logoi, and together constitute the Logos. If now, among these Logoi, that of humanity were conceived as highest, and Jesus were regarded as the incarnate Logos, as the expressed and perfectly realised idea of man, all would be intelligible. Jesus would then be the ideal man, the one among mortals who had fully realised the idea of man as it existed in God, who on the one side was the son of God, on the other side the son of man, the brother of all men, if they would only acknowledge Christ as the Son of God, and emulate His example. This would be a correct and to us a perfectly intelligible and acceptable conception. But many as are the difficulties which this would remove, the objection remains that we can produce no historical proof of such a conception of Jesus as Logos of humanity. We are too poor in historical monuments of the first three Christian centuries to be able to speak with assurance of the inner processes of thought of even the most prominent personalities of that time. In everything, even in relation to many of the leading questions [pg 039] of the Christian religion, we are obliged to rely on combination and construction. Not only in the Evangelists, but in many of the church fathers, feeling overcomes reason, and their expressions admit but too often of the most varied interpretations, as the later history of the church has only too clearly proved. Nevertheless we must endeavour to enter not only into their emotions, but also into their thoughts, and not believe that they used words without thoughts. I do not say that this is impossible. Unthinkable as it is, that words arise and exist without ideas, yet we know only too well that words become mere words, that they grow pale and die, and that they may finally become vox et prœterea nihil. It is, however, the duty of the historian and especially of the philologist to call back to life such words as have given up the ghost. May what I have here written about the meaning of the Logos fulfil this aim, and at the same time make it clear that my desire for the discovery of the original text of the Sermo Verus was not an idle one. I have since learned that the same wish was expressed at an earlier date by no less a person than Barthold Niebuhr.

Chapter II.

The Pferdebürla (Horseherd)

A contributor to a periodical, which, like the Deutsche Rundschau, has a world-wide circulation, receives many letters from every corner of the earth. Many of them are nothing more than the twitter of birds in the trees; he listens and goes his way. Others contain now and then something of use, for which he is thankful, usually of course in silence, for a day and night together contain only twenty-four hours, and but little time remains for correspondence. It is interesting to note how radically one is often misunderstood. While one person anonymously accuses the writer of free thinking and heresy, another, and he generally gives his name, complains of his orthodox narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and blindness, which for the most part are attributed to poor Oxford, which, in foreign countries at least, still has the reputation of high church orthodoxy.

Yet, in spite of all this, such letters are useful, for they give us a knowledge of the public which we desire to influence, but which for the most part goes its own way, as it may find most convenient. Often [pg 041] such opinions come to us from the highest circles, at times also from the lowest, and it is difficult to tell which of the two are the more instructive. The problems of humanity in all their simplicity are after all the same for us all, only they are viewed from different standpoints, and are treated with scientific or practical design. Members of the same profession readily understand each other; they employ their own technical language; but the unprofessional person often goes straighter to the heart of a question, and refuses to be satisfied with authorities or traditional formulas. These gentlemen it is often difficult to silence. We can easily contend with combatants who wield their weapons according to the rules laid down by the schools; we know what to expect, and how to parry a quart or a tierce. But an opponent who strikes regardless of all rule is often hard to manage, and we get a scar where it is least expected or deserved. In this wise I was served by an unknown opponent, who wrote to me from a place in the neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, not far from Ohio. He had read in his country solitude my article on Celsus in the Deutsche Rundschau. I know nothing of him, except what he himself writes, but the man interested me. After all, he says in his rude way very much the same things as others veil in learned phrases, and his doubts and difficulties are manifestly products of his heart as well as of his brain. The problems of humanity have troubled him with genuine pain, and after honestly thinking [pg 042] them out as well as he knew how, his convictions stand firm as a rock, and all who disagree with him seem to him not only fools, but unfortunately hypocrites as well. It is the misfortune of these lonely thinkers that they cannot comprehend how any one can hold opinions differing from their own without being dishonest. They cannot doubt that they have been honest toward themselves, and as a consequence they cannot conceive how others, who are of a different mind, can be equally honest, and have come by their convictions by a straightforward path. Often it has been very difficult for them to break with their old faith, cherished from childhood, and they can only look upon it as cowardice and weakness if others, as they think, have not made or wished to make this sacrifice. But we shall let the horseherd who emigrated to America speak for himself.

I here print his letter exactly as I received it, without any alterations.34 To me it seems that the man speaks not only for himself, but for many who think as he does, but who have not the ability nor the opportunity to express themselves clearly. I resolved, accordingly, to reply to him, and once begun, my pen ran on, and my letter unexpectedly covered more ground than I had intended. Whether he received the letter or not, I do not know; at least it must have been delivered to his address, for it was not returned to me. As I have not, however, heard from him again since February, and as he speaks in [pg 043] his letter of chest catarrh, which he hopes will in no long time bring him to a joyful end, I must wait no longer for an answer, and publish the correspondence in the hope that there are other “Pferdebürle” in the world to whom it may be of value.

“

Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S., February 26, 1896.

Dear Colleague Max Müller:

“Your article in the Deutsche Rundschau on Celsus pleased me very much. What does it matter that you do not know me? I love you, and that gives me a right to address you. Why those vain regrets over the loss of the original? I would not stretch out my little finger for that Celsus; gone is gone like the lost parts of the Annals of Tacitus. More than likely both of these losses are to be ascribed to Christian fanaticism. Tacitus hated the Jews and the Christian sect derived from them. But, father Max, have we not much greater modern Celsuses and Tacituses, for instance David Hume and Schopenhauer? One would think that after the writings of these heroes positive Christianity would be an impossibility, and yet the persistence of error is so great that it may take several centuries more before the end of the Christian era is reached. Has there ever been anything in the history of the world more humiliating to the human understanding than this false and lying tale of the Christian religion? And is there anything in face of our knowledge, and of the realm of nature and of man's [pg 044] position in it, so unbearable, yes so odious, as the inoculation of such error in the tender consciousness of our school children? I shudder when I think that in thousands of our churches and schools this systematic ruin of the greatest of all gifts, the consciousness, the human brain, is daily, even hourly, going on. Max, can you, too, still cling to the God-fable? The English atmosphere may serve as an apology. I could not strike a dog, but I am filled with bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea of God, the soul-phantom, and the hallucination of immortality.—The facts are so simple and clear; we are the highest existing forms of being in the animal world of this planet, and share one and the same nature with them. After death we are just as entirely reduced to nothing as before our birth. Nature tells us so plainly that the eternal conditions before and after our birth are identical.

“You ask me what this juggling means;

Take this short answer for your pains;

A game of chance from the eternal sea

By the same sea again will swallowed be.

—Omar Khayyam (Bodenstedt).

“But there is nothing in this world so false as the statement that good can ever come out of lies. Nothing in the world is so wholesome as truth, and truth is under all circumstances lovable, beautiful, and holy. Let us kneel before the truth of nature; nature cannot go astray. The distinction between good and evil, the evil heritage of Judaism, must [pg 045] fall in the end. Max, on quiet fields, in a mountain village of Silesia, I turned somersaults with joy at the discovery that this distinction is false, and that good and evil are identical. Max, you will not be angry with me? I am no learned fellow. I never attended a high school, and now I rejoice at it, for what a German calls education can only serve to miseducate after all. Modern life is, for every open-minded person, the real high school. Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that the mind is a ‘prius.’ By no means, Max! Mind is a development, an evolving phenomenon. One would suppose it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken. Then, Max, why not be content with the limits of our knowledge, conditioned by experience, and give up this infamous romancing and tyrannical lying? The only affection which after fifty years I still cherish in my bosom is the sweet, unquenchable longing for that truth which fate has denied us.

“Max, you are by no means a free man, as I observe that the religious congress in Chicago impressed you very much.35 I was present when the gayly dressed idolators from Cardinal Gibbons down to the stupid Shinto priest and the ill-favoured Baptist woman [pg 046] preacher sat together on the platform. It was very pretty and refreshing to look upon. They all talked nonsense and thought themselves very wise. There was but one exception which interested me: a yellow Buddhist monk inquired, what they thought of English missionaries, who in time of famine distributed bread to the poor, but only on one condition, that they adopted the Christian superstition (indifferent whether honestly or not). The so-called ‘Ethical Culture Societies’ were not admitted by the committee to their congress of many religions. Max, it was pitiful to listen to the tittle-tattle that was read. None had learned beforehand what he wanted to say. Dicere de scripto is a shame for learned men. Only Cardinal Gibbons made a short, but colourless and dull extemporaneous address, which closed with the hypocrisy, what a great thing it is to keep oneself unspotted by this world. Accursed hypocrites, you yourselves are this world,—pitifully incarnate, it is true,—but you yourselves are this ‘spotted world.’ Why then still hold to the stupid distinction between good and evil, when we must admit that evil is essential to the very existence of things, and it would be impossible for the world to be, except as it is. We must be as we are, or we should not be at all. O beautiful longing for the primeval cause! Our ignorance is like evil, welcome. Let us, O Max, embrace the evil and ignorance, for if we were nothing but wretched cripples of virtue, and knew everything, we could not bear to live. As [pg 047] it is, we enjoy the spirited battle, and carry a sweet yearning in our breasts.

“Max, how are you personally? Have you a family? How is your health? How old are you? What relation do you bear to the learned set in England? Do you know the one German philosopher, with the courage of his convictions, Emil Dühring, in Berlin. I consider my knowledge of the writings of Dr. Dühring as the greatest gift of fate which has been vouchsafed to me. The Jews and state professors hide his fame under a bushel. Oh! could not such independent men as you, honoured Max Müller, do something to bring this hero nearer to our young students? Dühring is the only writer of the present day who is to be enjoyed almost without drawback. What is to be said of our German set which is cowardly enough to repress so long the greatest mind which our century has produced? Were I in your position, how would I shout my ‘Quos Ego’ across to Germany! Please, my countryman, favour me with a few lines in answer to this effusion, in order that I may learn who and what you are. I am a Silesian horseherd (to be distinguished from the cowherds [kühbürla's], who till their field with pious moo-moos). Instead of attending a high school, I herded cows, ploughed, harvested, and helped to thrash in the winter. While herding I played the flute in the valleys of the Sudetic Mountains; and because the hands of the old village schoolmaster trembled very much, I begged of him to let me try to play the organ [pg 048] for him. ‘Ah, you rascal, you can play better than I,’ and he boxed my ears. Then my eldest brother took possession of the farm of seventy-five acres, gave us no compensation, and the rest of us lads had to pack off. We scraped together the passage money to America, and about thirty years ago I arrived here, where—I almost said God be praised—it has always gone pretty hard with me. Whether I fare well or ill is the same to me. I make no distinction, for in view of the rapid passing of life, it does not pay to give much thought to unnecessary distinctions. I never could think of marrying, chiefly because the majority of the women in this country are shrews, cannot cook, and spend much too much money on the housekeeping. Besides, I have but a short time to live, for I possess a chest catarrh most loyally devoted to me, verging upon a perfect asthma, which I hope erelong will bring me to a joyful end. No doubt you will think what a disconsolate fellow this is who has written to me. O pshaw! I have always enjoyed the sunshine, and have sat alone hundreds of snug hours before my winter's companion, a small iron stove. During the last three nights I have repeatedly read through your article on Celsus, published in the Deutsche Rundschau, by a tallow-candle. In relation to your enthusiasm over the religious clap-trap in Chicago, I should like to observe that you would have been entirely in the right if you had represented the Exhibition as the greatest event of the past ten years. I came through [pg 049] Chicago in September, 1892, visited the prospective site of the Exposition, and found there a mere wilderness, scarcely a single building half finished, and it was a wonder of wonders what American enterprise and genius for organisation accomplished within the single intervening winter. One could scarcely recover from one's astonishment at what ten thousand labourers, urged on by the Yankee lash, could make ready in six months. ‘There was money in the business,’ and for money Jonathan works real miracles. Its like the world has never produced. The American is cut on a large pattern, and in spite of his political delusions I entertain the greatest hopes for the future of a country which is in such hands.”

With many friendly greetings,

A Silesian Horseherd.

Emigrated to America.

”

I answered my unknown friend and correspondent as follows:—

“

“My Good Friend: You are an honest fellow, and I believe that I am one too, but our views are widely divergent. I am an old professor, am now seventy-two years old, or as has been often said to me, seventy-two years young. Like yourself I commenced life with nothing, and have laboured till I have become not rich, but independent. Here in wealthy England and in wealthy Oxford I am considered [pg 050] a poor man, but I am quite content, and call that riches. I have been married thirty-seven years, have one son, secretary to the Embassy at Constantinople, and a happily married daughter, with four grandchildren. Now you know all that you wished to know. Of my sorrow, the loss of two daughters, I must remain silent.

“All my life I have been engaged in investigating the past; I am a philologist and have therefore been also a student of history, have especially studied the historical development of the various religions of mankind, and to this end have had to make a study of ancient languages, particularly Oriental languages. When one consecrates one's life to such a cause, one acquires an interest in and a love for the ancients, and a wish to know what has consoled them in this vale of grief. As you probably acquired a love for your colts, mares, and stallions, I acquired an interest in ancient and modern religions. And as you probably do not immediately kill or reject your horses because they possess a blemish, shy, kick, prance about, etc., so I do not immediately destroy all beliefs, and least of all my own mount, because they are not faultless, occasionally leave me in the lurch, behave foolishly, even dance on their hind legs with head in air; but I endeavour to understand them. When we understand even a little, we can forgive much. That many religions, including our own, contain errors and weak points, just as your horses do, I know perhaps even better than you. But have you ever asked yourself, what would have become [pg 051] of mankind without any religion, without the conviction that beyond our horizon, that is beyond our limit, there still must be something? You will answer, ‘How do we know that?’ Well, can there be any boundary without something beyond it? Is not that as true as any theorem in geometry? If it were not so, how could we explain the fact that mankind has never been without a belief in a world beyond, nor without religion, either in the lowest or in the highest levels.

“This horizon, this boundary, does not relate only to space, as all will agree, even when carried beyond the Milky Way; it relates as well to time. You assert, ‘The world is much older than we suppose;’ you are right, but if it were a million years, still there must have been a time before it was even a day old. That also is indisputable. But when we reach the limit of our senses and our understanding, then the horse shies, then we imagine that nothing can go beyond our understanding. Now let us begin with our five senses. They seem to be our wings, but seen in the light they are our fetters, our prison walls. All our senses have their horizon and their limits; and the limits in the external world are our making. Our sight scarcely reaches a mile, then it ceases; we can observe the movement of the second hand, but that of the minute hand escapes us. Why? We might know that a cannon-ball passes through our field of vision, but we cannot locate it. Why not? Our sense of touch is also very weak and only extends over a very limited space. And as it [pg 052] is on the large scale, so is it with the small. We see the eye of a needle, but infusoria and bacteria, which we know to be there and which affect us so much, we cannot see. With telescopes and microscopes we can slightly extend the field of our perception, but the limitations and weakness of our sense-impressions remain none the less an undeniable fact. We live in a prison, in a cave as Plato said, and yet we accept our impressions as they are, and form out of them general notions and words, and with these words we erect this stately building, or this tower of Babel, which we then call human science.

“Yes, say certain philosophers, our senses may be finite and untrustworthy, but our understanding, and still further our reason, they are unlimited, and recognise nothing which is beyond them. Well, what does this most wise understanding do for us? Has not Hobbes long since taught us that it adds and subtracts, and voilà tout? It receives the impressions of the senses, combines them, feels them, comprehends and designates or names them after any characteristic, and when man has found words, then the adding and subtracting begin, but unfortunately also the jumbling and chattering, till we finally establish that philosophy and religion, which have aroused in so great degree your anger, and even your blood thirstiness. In spite of all it remains true that we can no more get beyond the horizon of our senses than we can jump out of our skins. You know that old [pg 053] saying of Locke's, although it is much older than Locke, that there is nothing in our intellect which was not first in our senses. And therefore, however much we may extend our knowledge by adding and subtracting, everywhere we feel in the end our horizon, our limitations, our ignorance, for with the limitations of our senses it cannot be otherwise. Invariably we receive the old answer, ‘You are like the mind which you conceive, not me.’

“But you say that we have no right whatever to speak of a mind. That is possible, but everything depends upon what we understand by the term ‘mind.’ Is not mind, that is to say, a recipient, essential to our seeing and hearing? The eye can no more see than a camera obscura. True seeing, hearing, and feeling are not perceptible through the organs of sense, but through the recipient, for without it the organs of sense could make no resistance, could not receive, could not perceive. This unknown element which lies beyond the senses, this recipient must be there. It is true he cannot be named. Perhaps it would have been better to have called him ‘x’ or the Unknown; but when we know what is meant, why not call it mind or spirit, that is, breath? You call it a soul-phantom. Well, good, but without such a soul-phantom we cannot get on; you would have to consider yourself a mere photographic apparatus, and I do not believe that you do.

“Of course you can still say that the mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. Rightly [pg 054] understood that is quite true, but how misleading that word ‘evolution’ has been in these latter days. Darwin certainly brought much that is beautiful and true to the light of day. He demonstrated that many of the so-called species are not independent creations, but have been developed from other species. That means that he has corrected the earlier erroneous nomenclature of Natural History and has introduced a more correct classification. He has greatly simplified the work of the Creator of the world. Of that merit no one will deprive him, and it is a great merit. And those who believed that every species required its own act of creation, and had to be finished by the Creator separately (as was the established opinion in England, and still is in some places), cannot be grateful enough to Darwin for having given them a simpler and worthier idea of the origin of the earth and of its animal and vegetable kingdoms.

“But now comes Mr. Herbert Spencer and tells us, ‘We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.’ That sounds splendid, but every one who does not quite ignore the past, knows that evolution or development is neither anything very new or very useful. Formerly we used simply to say the tree grows, the child develops, and this was metaphorically transferred to society, the state, science, and religion. The study of this development was [pg 055] called history, and occasionally genetic or pragmatic history; but instead of talking as we do now of evolution with imperceptible transitions, it was these transitions which industrious and honest investigators formerly sought to observe. They aimed at learning to know the men, and the events, which marked a decided step in advance in the history of society, or in the history of morals. This required painstaking effort, but the result obtained was quite different from the modern view, in which everything is evolved, and, what is the worst, by imperceptible degrees. In Natural History this is otherwise; in it the term ‘evolution,’ or ‘growth,’ may be correctly applied, because no one really has ever seen or heard the grass grow, and no one has ever observed the once generally accepted transition from a reptile to a bird. In this we must doubtless admit imperceptible transitions. Yet even in this we must not go beyond the facts; and if a man like Virchow assures us that the intermediate stages between man and any sort of animal have never been found to this day, then in spite of all storms we shall probably have to rest there. But I go still farther. Even supposing, say I, that there is an imperceptible transition from the Pithecanthropos to man, affecting his thigh, his skull, his brain, his entire body, have we then found a transition from the animal to man? Certainly not; for man is man, not because he has no tail, but because he speaks, and speech implies not only communication,—an animal can do that perhaps [pg 056] better than a man,—but it implies thinking, and thinking not only as an animal thinks, but thinking conceptually. And this small thing, the concept, is the transition which no animal has ever accomplished. The moment an ape achieved it, he would be ipso facto a man, in spite of his miserable brain, and in spite of his long tail.

“Concepts do not present themselves spontaneously (or we should find them also among animals), but they are a special product, in part the work of our ancestors, and inherited by us with our language, and in part even now the work of more gifted men from time to time. This making necessarily implies the existence of a maker, and if we now provisionally call this maker, this transcendent, invisible, but very powerful ‘x,’ mind, are we thereby chargeable, as you say, with having conjured up a soul-phantom? Call it a phantom if you will, but even as a phantom it has a right to exist. Call it mind, breath, breathing, willing, or (with Schopenhauer) will, there is always a He or It to be reckoned with. Of this He or It, this pronominal soul-phantom, you will never rid yourself.

“And if we now perceive with our senses a world as it is given us whether we will or no, and in this objective world, without us, which so many regard as within us, we everywhere recognise the presence of purpose, must we then not also have a name for that which manifests itself in nature as purposive or rational? Shall we only call it ‘x,’ or [pg 057] may we transfer the word designating what works purposively in us to this Unknown, and speak of a universal Mind without which nature could not be what it is? Nature is not crazy nor incoherent. When the child is born, has the mother milk, and to what purpose? Why, certainly, to nourish the child. And the child has the lips and muscles to suck. When the fruit has ripened on the tree, it falls to the earth full of seed. The husk breaks, the seed falls in the soil, it rains and the rain fertilises the seed, the sun shines and makes it grow, and when the tree has grown and again bears blossoms and fruit, this fruit is useful to man, is food and not poison to him. Is all this without purpose, without reason? Is it a symphony without a composer? Man, too, needs rain and sunshine, and warmth and darkness; and all this is given to him so that he may live and work and think. What would man be without darkness, without the rest afforded by night? Probably crazy. What would he be without sunshine? Perhaps an Esquimau or a mole. But how remarkable it is that as the tree always reproduces itself, so also does man. The son differs from the father, and yet how like they are. Where is the form which retains the continuous resemblance to itself, and yet leaves to each separate person freedom and individuality? Whence comes this purpose in all nature? That is an old question which has received many answers, both wise and foolish. Unfortunately men so frequently forget what has already been attained, and then begin again [pg 058] at the beginning. Darwin was an industrious and delicate observer, and showed admirable power of combination. But he was no philosopher, and never sought to be one. He was of opinion that everything in nature which appeared to show purpose proceeded from the survival of the fittest. But that is no answer. We ask, Why does the fittest survive? And what is the answer? Because only the fittest survives. And when we come to Natural Selection, who is the selector that selects? These are nothing but phrases, which have long been known and long since been abandoned, and still are always warmed up again. If we recognise in nature purpose or reason, then we have a right to conclude that the source of it lies in the eternal reason, in the eternally rational. Behind all objects lies the thought or the idea. If there are rational ideas in nature, then there must be a rational thinker. Behind all trees—oaks, birches, pines—lies the thought, the idea, the form, the word, the logos of tree. Who made or thought it before ever the first tree existed? We can never see a tree; we see only an oak, a birch, a pine, never a tree. But the thought or idea of tree meets us, realised and diversified in all trees. This is true of all things. No one has ever seen an animal, a man, a dog, but he sees a St. Bernard, a greyhound, a dachshund, and strictly not even that. What, then, is it that is permanent, always recurring in the dog, by means of which they resemble each other, the invisible form in which they are all cast? That is [pg 059] the thought, the idea, the logos of dog. Can there be a thought without a thinker? Did the ideas in nature, the millions of objects which make up our knowledge, fall from the clouds? Did they make themselves or did nature make them? Who, then, is nature? Is it a masculine, feminine, or neuter? If nature can choose, then it can also think and produce. But can it? No, nature is a word, very useful for certain purposes; but empty, intangible, and incomprehensible. Nature is an abstraction, as much as dog or tree, but far more inclusive. When we recognise thought, reason, purpose in nature, still it is all in vain, we must assume a thinker in, above, behind nature, and we must as a matter of course have a name for him. The infinite thinker of all things, of all ideas, of all words, who can never be seen and never comprehended, because he is infinite, but in whose thoughts all creatures, the entire creation, have their source, and who when rightly understood approaches us palpably or symbolically in all things, in the sole path of sense by which he can approach us sentient beings, why should we not call him Mind, or God, or as the Jews called him, Jehovah, or the Mohammedans, Allah, or the Brahmins, Brahman? Either reason operates in nature, or nature is without reason, is chaos and confusion. Neither survival of the fittest nor natural selection could bring order into this confusion; we might as well believe that if the type in a printing office be thoroughly shaken and mixed, it could produce [pg 060] Goethe's Faust by chance. If we insist upon adhering to the theories of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, be it so; we only transfer the choice to a Something which can choose, and leave the fitness or adaptability to the judgment of an originator, who can really judge and think.

“I hope that I have made this plain to you; but what would be plain to us would not be plain to children, and still less to mankind in its infancy five thousand or fifty thousand years ago. I have especially endeavoured to discover what led these men of old, in many respects so uncultivated, to believe in something beyond, invisible, superhuman, supernatural. We can see from their language and from the oldest monuments of their religion that they early observed that something happened in the world. The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke, and asked himself and the sunshine. ‘Whence?’ he said; ‘stop, what is there? who is there?’ Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay great honour to the sun; to be grateful to it, to appeal to it for light, heat, and increase. And therefore the sun became a God, e.g. a Deva (deus), which originally meant nothing more than light. But even then an old Inca in Peru observed that the sun was not free; could not, therefore, [pg 061] be a being, to whom man could be grateful, to whom he could pray. It is, said he, like a beast of burden, which must daily tread its appointed round. And although the worship of the sun was the religion of his country, and he himself was worshipped as a child of the sun, he renounced the ancient faith of his country, and became what is now frequently called an atheist; that is, he longed after a truer God. What say you to this Inca? This same thing occurred also in other lands, and instead of continuing to worship the sun and moon, the dawn, the storm-wind, or the sky, they worshipped that which must be behind it all, which was called Heaven-Father, Jupiter, and every conceivable name. These names were no longer to indicate the visible object, but Him who had thought and created the object, the thinker and ruler of the world. This is the fundamental idea from which all religions have arisen: not animism, fetishism, totemism, or whatever the little tributaries may be called, which have poured for thousands of years into the main stream. Every people has produced its own religion, its own language, in the course of thousands of years; later, religions have been framed for all mankind, and we are still engaged in that task, even in what you call that clap-trap of Chicago. Even though we have all been born and educated in some religion, we nevertheless have the right, even the duty, like the old Inca, to examine every article of our hereditary religion, to retain it or to cast it aside, according to our own judgment and conception of the [pg 062] truth. Only the fundamental principle must remain; there is a thinker and a ruler of the universe. Of Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, of Joseph and Mary, of the resurrection and ascension, let each one believe what he will, but the highest commandment applies to all, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.’

“You see, therefore, that I, too, am a God-romancer. And what objection can you raise against it? You are of opinion that to love God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are evidently very proud of your discovery that there is no distinction between good and evil. Well, if loving God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, then it follows that not loving God and not loving your neighbour is equivalent to not being good, or to being evil. There is, then, a very plain distinction between good and bad. And yet you say that you turned a somersault when you discovered that there was no such distinction. It is true that the nature of this distinction is often dependent on the degree of latitude and longitude where men are congregated, and still more on the intention of the agent. This is very ancient knowledge. The old Hindu philosophers went still farther, and said of an assassin and his victim, ‘The one does not commit murder, and the other is not murdered.’ That goes still farther than your somersault. At all events, we entirely agree with each other, that everything which is done out of love to God and our neighbour is good, and [pg 063] everything which is done through selfishness is bad. The old philosopher in India must have turned more somersaults than you; but what he had in his mind in doing it does not concern us here. But it was not so bad as it sounds, and I believe that what you say, that there is no real distinction between good and evil, is not so bad as it sounds.

“We have now reached that stage that we must admit that there is a mind within us, in our inner world, and a mind without us, in the outer world. What we call this mind, the Ego, the soul within us, and the Non-ego, the world-soul, the God without us, is a matter of indifference. The Brahmans appear to me to have found the best expression. They call the fundamental cause of the soul, of the Ego, the Self, and the fundamental cause of the Non-ego, of the World-soul, of God, the highest Self. They go still farther, and hold these two selves to be in their deepest nature one and the same—but of this another time. To-day I am content, if you will admit, that our mind is not mere steam, nor the world merely a steam-engine, but that in order that the machine shall run, that the eye shall see, the ear hear, the mind think, add, and subtract, we need a seer, a hearer, a thinker. More than this I will not inflict on you to-day; but you see that without deviating a finger's breadth from the straight path of reason, that is from correct and honest addition and subtraction, we finally come to the soul-phantom and to the idea of God, which you look upon with such blood-thirstiness. [pg 064] I have indicated to you, with only a few strokes, the historical course of human knowledge. There still remains much to fill in, which must be gained from history and the diligent study of the sacred books of mankind, and the works of the leading philosophers of the East and the West. We shall then learn that the history of mankind is the best philosophy, and that not only in Christianity and Judaism, but that in all religions of the world, God has at divers times spoken through the prophets in divers manners, and still speaks.

“And now only a few words more over another somersault. You say that the mind is not a prius, but a development out of matter. You are right again, if you view the matter only from an embryological or psychological standpoint. A child begins with deep sleep, then comes dream-sleep, and finally awakening, collecting, naming, adding, subtracting. What is that which awakens in the child? Is it a bone, or is it the soft mass which we call brain? Can the gray matter within our skulls give names, or add? Why, then, has no craniologist told us that the monkey's brain lacks precisely those tracts which are concerned with speech or with aphasia?36 I ask again, Can the eye see, the ear hear? Try it on the body under dissection, or try it yourself in your sleep. Without a subject there is no object in the world, without understanding there is nothing to understand, [pg 065] without mind no matter. You think that matter comes first, and then what we call mind. Where is this matter? Where have you ever seen matter? You see oak, fir, slate, and granite, and all sorts of other materies, as the old architects called them, never matter. Matter is the creation of the mind, not the reverse. Our entire world is thought, not wood and stone. We learn to think or reflect upon the thoughts, which the Thinker of the world, invisible, yet everywhere visible, has first thought. What we see, hear, taste, and feel, is all within us, not without. Sugar is not sweet, we are sweet. The sky is not painted blue, we are blue. Nothing is large or small, heavy or light, except as to ourselves. Man is the measure of all things, as an ancient Greek philosopher asserted; and man has inferred, discovered, and named matter. And how did he do it? He called everything, out of which he made anything, matter; materia first meant nothing more than wood used for building, out of which man built his dwelling. Here you have the whole secret of matter. It is building-material, oak, pine, birch, whichever you prefer. Abstract every individual characteristic, generalise as you will, the wood, the hyle, always remains. And you will have it that thought, or even the thinker, originated from this wood. Do you really believe that there is an outer world such as we see, hear, or feel? Where have we a tree, except in our imagination? Have you ever seen a whole tree, from all four quarters at once? Even here we have [pg 066] something to add first. And of what are our ideas composed, if not our sense-perceptions? And these perceptions, imperfect as they are, exist only in us, for us, and through us. The thing perceived is and always remains, as far as we are concerned in the outer world, transcendent, a thing in itself; all else is our doing; and if you wish to call it matter or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the prius of mind, but the posterius, that which is demanded by the mind, but is always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed. From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside the atoms, or the matter, so that we can never say that there is nothing in the universe but matter. And now if we ascribe motion to the atoms, or like other philosophers, perception, then that is nothing more nor less than to ascribe mind to them, which, however, if you are right, must first evolve itself out of this matter. If we wind something into these atoms, then we can also wind something out of them; in doing this, however, we give up at the outset the experiment of letting mind evolve itself out of matter. Give an atom the germ-power of an acorn, and it will develop into an oak. Give an atom the capacity of sense-perception, and it will become an animal, possibly a man. But what was promised us was the development of feeling and perception out of the dead atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc. [pg 067] Even if we could explain life out of the activities of these atoms, which may be possible,—although denied by Haeckel and Tyndall,—still feeling, perception, understanding, all the functions of mind, would remain unexplained. J. S. Mill is certainly no idealist, and no doubt is one of your heroes. Well Mr. Mill declares that nothing but mind could produce mind. Even Tyndall, in his address as President of the British Association in Belfast, declared in plain words that the continuity of molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness constitute the rock on which all Materialism must inevitably be shattered.

“Think over all of this by your iron stove, or better still at some beautiful sunrise in spring, and you will see before you a more glorious revelation than all the revelations of the Old World.”

Yours faithfully,

F. Max Müller

Oxford, November, 1896.

”

Chapter III.

Concerning The Horseherd

The appearance of my article in the Deutsche Rundschau seems to have caused much headshaking among my friends in Germany, England, and America. Many letters came to me privately, others were sent directly to the publishers. They came chiefly from two sides. Some were of the opinion that I dealt too lightly with the Horseherd; others protested against what I said about the current theory of evolution. The first objection I have sought to make up for in what follows. The other required no answer, for I had I think, in my previous writings, quite clearly and fully explained my attitude in opposition to so-called Darwinism. Some of my correspondents wished peremptorily to deny me the right of passing judgment upon Darwin's doctrine, because I am not a naturalist by profession. Here we see an example of the confusion of ideas that results from confusion of language. Darwinism is a high-sounding, but hollow and unreal word, like most of the names that end in ism. What do such words as Puseyism, Jesuitism, Buddhism, and now even Pre-Darwinism and Pre-Lamarckism signify? Everything and nothing, and no one is more on his [pg 069] guard against these generalising termini technici than the heroes eponymi himself. What has not been called Darwinism? That the present has come out of the past, has been called the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century. Darwin himself is not responsible for such things. He wished to show how the present has come out of the past, and he did it in such a manner that even the laity could follow him and sincerely admire him. Now, of course, it cannot be denied that if we understand Darwinism to mean Darwin's close observations concerning the origin of the higher organisms out of lower as well as the variations of individuals from their specific types, caused by external conditions, it would as ill become me to pass either a favourable or unfavourable judgment as it would Darwin to estimate my edition of the Rig-Veda, or a follower of Darwin to criticise my root theory in philology, without knowing the ABC of the science of language. If, however, we speak of Darwinism in the domain of universal philosophical problems, such as, for instance, the creation or development of the world, then we poor philosophers also have no doubt a right to join in the conversation. And if, without appearing too presuming, we now and then dare to differ from Kant, or from Plato or Aristotle, is it mere insolence, or perhaps treason, to differ from Darwin on certain points?

This was not the tone assumed by Darwin, giant as he was, even when he spoke to so insignificant a person as myself. I have on a previous occasion [pg 070] published a short letter addressed to me by Darwin (Auld Lang Syne, p. 178). Here follows another, which I may no doubt also publish without being indiscreet.

“

Down, Beckenham, Kent, July 3, 1873.

“Dear Sir: I am much obliged for your kind note and present of your lectures. I am extremely glad to have received them from you, and I had intended ordering them.

“I feel quite sure from what I have read in your work, that you would never say anything to an honest adversary to which he would have any just right to object; and as for myself, you have often spoken highly of me, perhaps more highly than I deserve.

“As far as language is concerned, I am not worthy to be your adversary, as I know extremely little about it, and that little learnt from very few books. I should have been glad to have avoided the whole subject, but was compelled to take it up as well as I could. He who is fully convinced, as I am, that man is descended from some lower animal, is almost forced to believe, a priori, that articulate language has been developed from inarticulate cries, and he is therefore hardly a fair judge of the arguments opposed to this belief.”

With cordial respect I remain, dear sir,

Yours very faithfully,

Charles Darwin.

” [pg 071]

This will at all events show that a man who could look upon a chimpanzee as his equal, did not entirely ignore, as an uninformed layman, a poor philologist. Darwin did not in the least disdain the uninformed layman. He thought and wrote for him, and there is scarcely one of Darwin's books that cannot be read by the uninformed layman with profit. And in the interchange of acquired facts or ideas, mental science has at least as much right as natural science. We live, it is true, in different worlds. What some look upon as the real, others regard as phenomenal. What these in their turn look upon as the real, seems to the first to be non-existent. It will always be thus until philology has defined the true meaning of reality.

It is, however, a worn-out device to place all those who differ from Darwin in the pillory of science as mystics, metaphysicians, and (what seems worst of all) as orthodox. It requires more than courage, too, to class all who do not agree with us as uninformed laymen, “to accuse them of ignorance and superstition, and to praise our friends and disciples as the only experts or competent judges, as impartial and consistent thinkers.” Through such a defence the greatest truths would lose their worth and dignity. The true scholar simply leaves such attacks alone. It is to be regretted that this resounding trumpet blast of a few naturalists renders any peaceful interchange of ideas impossible from the beginning. I have expressed my admiration for Darwin more freely and earlier than many of his present eulogists. [pg 072] But I maintain, that when anthropogeny is discussed, it is desirable first of all to explain what is understood by anthropos. Man is not only an object, but a subject also. All that man is as an object, or appears to be for a time on earth, is his organic body with its organs of sense and will, and with its slowly developed so-called ego. This body is, however, only phenomenal; it comes and goes, it is not real in the true sense of the word. To man belongs, together with the visible objective body, the invisible subjective Something which we may call mind or soul or x, but which, at all events, first makes the body into a man. To observe and make out this Something is in my view the true anthropogeny; how the body originated concerns me as little as does the question whether my gloves are made of kid or peau de suède. That will, of course, be called mysticism, second sight, orthodoxy, hypocrisy, but fortunately it is not contradicted by such nicknames. If an animal could ever speak and think in concepts, it would be my brother in spite of tail or snout; if any human being had a tail or a forty-four toothed snout, but could use the language of concepts, then he would be and remain a man, as far as I am concerned, in spite of all that. We, too, have a right to express our convictions. They are as dear to us as to those who believe or believed in the Protogenes Haeckelii. It is true we do not preach to the whole world that our age is the great age of the study of language and mind, and that it has cast more light on the origin [pg 073] of the mind (logogeny) and on the classification of the human race (anthropology) than all other sciences together. A little progress, however, we have made. Who is there that still classifies the human race by their skulls, hair, anatomy, etc., and not by their speech? If, like zoölogy, we may borrow countless millions of years, where is there any pure blood left, amid the endless wars and migrations, the polygamy and slavery of the ancient world? Language alone is and remains identical, whoever may speak it; but the blood, “this very peculiar fluid,” how can we get at that scientifically? It is, however, and remains a fixed idea with these “consistent thinkers” that the sciences of language and mind lead to superstition and hypocrisy, while on the other hand the science of language gratefully acknowledges the results of zoölogy, and only protests against encroachments. Both sciences might advance peacefully side by side, rendering aid and seeking it; and as for prejudices, there are plenty of them surviving among zoölogists as well as philologists, which must be removed viribus unitis. What is common to us is the love of truth and clearness, and the honest effort to learn to understand the processes of growth in mind and language, as well as in nature, in the individual (ontogenetically) as well as in the race (phylogenetically). Whether we now call this evolution or growth, philology at all events has been in advance of natural science in setting a good example, and securing recognition of the genetic method. Such [pg 074] men as William Humboldt, Grimm, and Bopp did not exactly belong to the dark ages, and I do not believe that they ever doubted that man is a mammal and stands at the head of the mammalia. This is no discovery of the nineteenth century. Linnæus lived in the eighteenth century and Aristotle somewhat earlier. I see that the Standard Dictionary already makes a distinction between Darwinism and Darwinianism, between the views of Darwin and those of the Darwinians, and we clearly see that in some of the most essential points these two tendencies are diametrically opposed to each other. There is one thing that naturalists could certainly learn from philologists, viz., to define their termini technici, and not to believe that wonders can be performed with words, if only they are spoken loud enough.

The following letter comes from a naturalist, but is written in a sincere and courteous tone, and deserves to be made public. I believe that the writer and I could easily come to terms, as I have briefly indicated in my parentheses.

“

An Open Letter To Professor F. Max Müller.

“Respected Sir: Your correspondence in this periodical with the ‘Horseherd’ has no doubt aroused an interest on many sides. There are many more Horseherds than might be supposed; that is to say, men in all possible positions and callings, who after earnest reflection have reached a conclusion [pg 075] that does not essentially differ from the mode of thought of your backwoods friend.

“The present writer considers himself one of these; he is, indeed, not self-taught like the Horseherd, but a scientific man, and like you, a professor; but as he had no philosophical training, and he has only reached his views through observation and reflection; in contrast to you, the profound philologist, he stands not much higher than the Silesian countryman. And to complete the contrast, he adds, that he has long been a severe sufferer. So that instead of guiding the plough on the field of science with a strong hand, he must remain idly at home, and modestly whittle pine shavings for the enlightenment of his home circle.

“I do not know whether the Horseherd will consider that his argument has been refuted when he reads your letter by his warm stove. In this, according to my view, you have practically failed. (My counter arguments shall follow later.)

“Yes, I find in your reasoning very remarkable contradictions. You acknowledge for instance the infinity of space and time, and in spite of this you say that there was a time before the world was a year old. I do not understand that. We must assume for matter, for that is no doubt what you mean by the term ‘world,’ the same eternity as for space and time, whose infinity can be proved but not comprehended. (Well, when we say that the world is 1898 years old, we can also say that it once [pg 076] was a year, or half a year old; of course not otherwise.)

“A ‘creation’ in the sense of the various religions is equally incomprehensible to us. (Certainly.)

“But I do not wish to enlarge on this point any farther. Here begins the limit of our thinking faculties, and it is the defect of all religions that they require us to occupy ourselves with matters that lie beyond this limit, that never can be revealed to us, since we are denied the understanding of them; a revelation is at all events a chimera. For either that which is to be revealed lies beyond our senses and ideas,—and then it cannot be revealed to us,—or it lies on this side, and then it need not be revealed to us. (This is not directed against me.)

“I believe, moreover, dear sir, that through your comparative studies of religion you must reach the same conclusion as myself, that all religious ideas have arisen solely in the brain of man himself, as efforts at explanation in the broadest sense; that dogmas were made out of hypotheses, and that no religion as a matter of fact reveals anything to us. (Not only religious ideas, but all ideas have arisen in the brain.)

“You express a profound truth when you say that atheism is properly a search for a truer God. I was reminded by it of a passage in one of Daudet's novels, in which the blasphemy of one who despairs of a good God, is yet called a kind of prayer. You will therefore bear with me if I explain to you how [pg 077] a scientific man who thinks consistently can reach a conclusion not far removed from that which prompted the Horseherd to turn a somersault.

“Good and evil are purely human notions; an almighty God stands beyond good and evil. He is as incomprehensible to us in moral relations as in every other. (From the highest point of view, yes; but in the lives of men there is such a distinction.)

“Only look at the world! The existence of the majority of living creatures is possible only through the destruction of others. What refined cruelty is expressed by the various weapons with which animals are provided. Some zoölogist ought to write an illustrated work entitled, The Torture Chamber of Nature. I merely wish to touch upon this field; to exhaust it would require pages and volumes. Your adopted countryman, Wallace, seeks, it is true, to set aside these facts by a superficial observation. That most of the animals that are doomed to be devoured, enjoy their lives until immediately before the catastrophe, takes none of its horror from the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as it reaches the stomach.

“Now I, who am but a poor child of man, full of evil inclinations according to Biblical lore, liberated [pg 078] the poor frog on my ground. But ‘merciful nature’ daily brings millions and millions of innocent creatures to a like cruel and miserable end.

“I intentionally leave out of consideration here the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Believers in the Bible find it so convenient to argue about original sin. Where is the original sin of the tormented animal kingdom?

“Of course man in his unutterable pride looks with deep disdain on all living creatures that are not human. As if he were not bone of their bone, as if suffering did not form a common bond with all living creatures! (I have never done that, but I think that it is difficult to establish a thermometer of suffering.)

“Do you not bethink you, honoured student of Sanskrit, of the religion of the Brahmins? In sparing all animals, the Hindus have shown only the broadest consistency.

“There will come a time when there will be only one religion, without dogma: the religion of compassion. (Buddhism is founded on Kârunya, compassion.) Christianity, lofty as is its ethical content, is not the goal, but only a stage in our religious development.

“It is a misfortune that Nietzsche, the great keen thinker, should have been misled into an opposite conclusion by the mental weakness, the paralytic imbecility, which gradually enveloped his brain like a growth of mould. And the foolish youths, who esteem the expressions of this incipient insanity as the revelations of a vigorous genius, swear by his later [pg 079] hallucinations about the Over-man and the blond beast.

“A specialist in mental disease can point out the traces of his malady years before it openly broke out. And as if he had not written enough when the world still considered him of sound mind, must men still try to glean from the time when his brain was already visibly clouded?

“How few there are who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by his paradoxical nonsense. (May be.)

“But—I am straying from the path. Now to the subject. I perfectly understand that the majority of religions had to assume a good and evil principle to guard themselves against the blasphemy of attributing all the suffering of the world to an all-merciful Creator. (Some religions have done this, on the theory that an almighty God stands beyond good and evil.) The devil is a necessary antithesis to God; to deny him is the first step made by the consistent man of science toward that atheism which originates really from the search for a better God. The Horseherd is wrong when he denies the existence of things beyond our power of conception. There are, as can be proved, tones that we do not hear, and rays that we cannot see. There are many things that we shall learn to comprehend in the hundreds of thousands of years that are in store for mankind. We are merely [pg 080] in the beginning of our development. Something, however, will always remain over. The ‘Ignorabimus’ of one of our foremost thinkers and investigators will always retain its value for us. (Most certainly.)

“The other world is of but little concern to him who has constantly endeavoured to lead a good life, even if he has never given much thought to correct belief. If personal existence is continued, our earthly being must be divested of so many of its outer husks that we should scarcely recognise each other, for only a part of the soul is the soul. (What we call soul is a modification of the Self.) If, however, an eternal sleep is decreed for us, then this can be no great misfortune. Let the wise saying in Stobœi Florilegium, Vol. VI, No. 19, in ‘praise of death’ serve to comfort us: ‘Ἀναξαγόρας δύο ἔλεγε διδασκαλίας εῖναι θανάτου, τὸν τε πρὸ τοῦ γενέσθαι χρόνον καὶ τὸν ὕπνον,’—‘Anaxagoras said that two things admonished us about death: the time before birth and sleep.’

“The raindrop, because it is a drop, may fear for its individuality when it falls back into the sea whence it came. We men are perhaps only passing drops formed out of the everlasting changes of the world-sea. (Of what does the world-sea consist but drops?)

“Those who think as I do constitute a silent but large congregation: silent, because the time is not yet ripe for a view that will rob thousands of their illusions. We do not preach a new salvation, but a silent, for many, a painful, renunciation. But the profound [pg 081] peace that lies in this view is as precious to those who have acquired it as is the hope of heaven to the believer. In honest doubt, too, lies a saving power as well as in faith; and your Horseherd is on the path of this salvation. (I believe that too.)”

With great respect,

Yours very faithfully,

Ignotus Agnosticus.

”

Whilst I received this and many other letters from many lands, no sign of life reached me from my Horseherd. He must have received my letter, or it would have been returned to me through the post. I regretted this, for I had formed a liking for the man as he appeared in his letter, and he no doubt would have had much to say in reply to my letter, which would have placed his views in a clearer light. He was an honest fellow, and I respect every conviction that is honest and sincere, even if it is diametrically opposite to my own. Now, my unknown friend could have had no thought of self in the matter. He knew that his name would not be mentioned by me, and it would probably have been of little concern to him if his name had become known. The worst feature of all discussions is the intrusion of the personal element. If for instance in a criticism of a new book we emphasise that which we think erroneous, for which every author should be grateful, we feel at the same time, that while desiring to render a service to the cause of [pg 082] truth, we may not only have hurt the book or the writer, but may have done a positive injury. The writer then feels himself impelled to defend his view not only with all the legitimate arts of advocacy, but also with the illegitimate. This poor truth is the greatest sufferer. As long as two paths are open, there is room for quiet discussion with one's travelling companion as to which may be the right and best path by which to reach the desired point. Both parties have the same object in view, the truth. As soon however as one goes, or has gone his own way, the controversy becomes personal and violent. There is no thought of turning back. It is no longer said: “This is the wrong path,” but “You are on the wrong path,” and even if it were possible to turn back, the controversy generally ends with, “I told you so.” Poor Truth stands by sorrowfully and rubs its eyes.

Now what was the Horseherd to me, and what is he now, even if he has been brought to what he called a joyful end by his catarrh “verging upon a perfect asthma.” There was nothing personal between us. He knew me only by that which I have thought and said; I knew of him only what he had gathered in his hours of leisure, and had laid aside for life. I have never seen him face to face, do not know the colour of his eyes, hardly even whether he was old or young. He was a man, but he may be even that no longer. Everything that in our common view constitutes a man, his body, his speech, his experience, is gone. We did not bring these things with us into [pg 083] the world and probably shall not take them away with us. What the body is, we see with our eyes, especially if we attend a cremation, or if in ancient graves we look into the urns which contain the grayish black ashes, whilst near by there sleeps in cold marble, as in the Museo Nazionale in Rome, the lovely head of the young Roman maiden, to whom two thousand years ago belonged these ashes, as well as the beautiful mansion that has been excavated from the earth and rebuilt round about her. And the language, the language in which all our experience here on earth lies stored, will this be everlasting? Shall we in another life speak English or Sanscrit? The philologist knows too well of what material speech is made, how much of the temporal and accidental it has adopted in its eternal forms, to cherish such a hope, and to think that the Logos can be eternally bound to the regular or irregular declensions or conjugations of the Greek, the German, or even the Hottentot languages. What then remains? Not the person, or the so-called ego—that had a beginning, a continuation, and an end. Everything that had a beginning, once was not, and what once was not, has in itself, from its very beginning, the germ of its end. What remains is only the eternal One, the eternal Self, that lives in us all without beginning and without end, in which each one has his true existence, in which we live, move, and have our being. Each temporal ego is only one of the million phenomena of this eternal Self, and such a phenomenon [pg 084] was the Horseherd to me. It is only what we recognise in all men as the eternal, or as the divine, that we can love and retain. Everything else comes and goes, as the day comes in the morning and goes at night, but the light of the sun remains forever. Now it may be said: This Self, that is and abides, is after all next to nothing. It is, however, and that “is” is more than everything else. Light is not much either, probably only vibration, but what would the world be without it? Did we not begin this life simply with this Self, continue it with this Self, and bring it to an end with this Self? There is nothing that justifies us in saying that this Self had a beginning, and will therefore have an end. The ego had a beginning, the persona, the temporal mask that unfolds itself in this life, but not the Self that wears the mask. When therefore my Horseherd says, “After death we are just as much a nullity as before our birth,” I say, quoderat demonstrandum is still to be proved. What does he mean by we? If we were nothing before birth, that is, if we never had been at all, what would that be that is born? Being born does not mean becoming something out of nothing. What is born or produced was there, before it was born or produced, before it came into the light of the world. All creation out of nothing is a pure chimera for us. Have we ever the feeling or experience that we had a beginning here on earth, or have we entirely forgotten the most remarkable thing in our life, viz., its beginning? Have we ever [pg 085] seen a beginning? Can we even think of an absolute beginning? In order to have had our beginning on earth, there must have been something that begins, be it a cell or be it the Self. All that we call ego, personality, character, etc., has unfolded itself on earth, is earthly, but not the Self. If we now on earth were content with the pure Self, if in all those that we love, we loved the eternal Self and not only the appearance, what then is more natural than that it should be so in the next world, that the continuity of existence cannot be severed, that the Self should find itself again, even though in new and unexpected forms? When therefore my friend makes the bold assertion: “After our death we are again as much a nullity as before our birth,” I say, “Yes, if we take nullity in the Hegelian sense.” Otherwise I say the direct contrary to this: “After our death we are again as little a nullity as before our birth. What we shall be we cannot know; but that we shall be, follows from this, that the Self or the divine within us can neither have a beginning nor an end.” That is what the ancients meant in saying that death was to be best understood from the time before birth. But we must not think that each single ego lays claim only to a part of the Self, for then the Self would be divided, limited, and finite. No, the entire Self bears us, just as the entire light illumines all, every grain of sand and every star, but for that reason does not belong exclusively to any one grain of sand or star. [pg 086] It is that which is eternal, or in the true sense of the word that which is divine in us, that endures in all changes, that makes all change possible, for without something that endures in change, there could be no change; without something continuous, that persists through transformation, nothing could be transformed. The Self is the bond that unites all souls, the red thread which runs through all being, and the knowledge of which alone gives us knowledge of our true nature. “Know thyself” no longer means for us “Know thy ego,” but “Know what lies beyond thy ego, know the Self,” the Self that runs through the whole world, through all hearts, the same for all men, the same for the highest and the lowest, the same for creator and creature, the Âtman of the Veda, the oldest and truest word for God.

For this reason the Horseherd was to me what all men have always been to me—an appearance of the Self, the same as I myself, not only a fellow-creature, but a fellow-man, a fellow-self. Had I met him in life, who knows whether his ego or his appearance would have attracted me as much as his letter. We all have our prejudices, and much as I honour a Silesian peasant who has spent his life faithfully and honestly in a strange land, I do not know whether I should have sat down by his iron stove and chatted with him about τὰ μέγιστα.

I also felt as I read his letter, that it was not a solitary voice in the desert, but that he spoke in the name of many who felt as he felt, without being [pg 087] willing or able to express it. This also has proved to be entirely true.

Judging by the numerous letters and manuscripts that reach me, the Horseherd was not alone in his opinions. There are countless others in the world of the same mind, and even if his voice is silenced, his ideas survive in all places and directions, and he will not lack followers and defenders. The striking thing in the letters that reached me was that the greater number and the most characteristic among his sympathisers did not wish their names to be known. What does this signify? Do we still live on a planet on which we dare not express what we hold to be the truth—planet Terra so huge and yet so contemptibly small? Has mankind still only freedom of thought, but not freedom of utterance? The powers may blockade Greece; can they blockade thoughts on wings of words? It has been attempted, but force is no proof, and when we have visited the prisons in which Galilei or even Giordano Bruno was immured, we learn how nothing lends greater strength to the wings of truth than the heavy chains with which men try to fetter it. It is still the general opinion that even in free England thought and speech are not free, that in the realm of thought there is even less freedom on this side of the Channel than on the other.37 Oxford especially, my own university, is still considered the stronghold of [pg 088] obscurantists, and my Horseherd even considers the fact that I have lived so long in Oxford a circonstance atténuante of my so-called orthodoxy. Plainly what is thought, said, and published in England, and especially in Oxford, is not read. In England we can say anything we please, we must only bear in mind that the same consideration is due to others that we claim from others. It is true that from time to time in England, and even in Oxford, feeble efforts have been made, if not to curtail freedom of thought, at least to punish those who laid claim to it. Where possible the salaries of professors were curtailed; in certain elections very weak candidates were preferred because they were outwardly orthodox. I do not wish to mention any names, but I myself have received in England, even if not in Oxford, a gentle aftertaste of this antiquated physic. When at the request of my friend Stanley, the Dean of Westminster Abbey, I delivered a discourse in his venerable church, which was crowded to the doors, petitions were sent to Parliament to condemn me to six months' imprisonment. I was accosted in the streets and an ordinary tradesman said to me, “Sir, if you are sent to prison, you shall have at least two warm dinners each week from me.” I am, to be sure, the first layman that ever spoke publicly in an English church, but I had the advice of the highest authorities that the Dean was perfectly within his rights and that we were guilty of no violation of law. I therefore waited in silence; I knew that public opinion [pg 089] was on my side, and that in the end the petition to Parliament would simply be laid aside. Later on it was attempted again. At the time that I delivered my lectures on the Science of Religion at the university of Glasgow, by invitation of the Senate, I was accused first before the presbytery at Glasgow, and when this attempt failed, the charge was carried before the great Synod at Edinburgh. In this case, too, I went on my way, in silence, and in the end, even in Scotland, the old saying, “Much cry and little wool,” was verified. This proverb is frequently heard in England. I have often inquired into its origin. Finally I found that there is a second line, “As the deil said when he shore the sow.” Of course such an operation was accompanied with much noise on the part of the sow, but little wool, nothing but bristles. I have never, however, had to turn my bristles against the gentlemen who wished to shear me.

I am of opinion, therefore, that those who wished to espouse the cause of my Horseherd should have done so publicly and with open visor. As soon as any one feels that he has found the truth, he knows also that what is real and true can never be killed or silenced; and secondly, that truth in the world has its purpose, and this purpose must in the end be a good one. We do not complain about thunder and lightning, but accustom ourselves to them, and seek to understand them, so as to live on good terms with them; and we finally invent lightning conductors, to protect ourselves, as far as we can, against the inevitable. [pg 090] So it is with every new truth, if it is only maintained with courage. At first we cry and clamour that it is false, that it is dangerous. In the end we shake our wise heads and say these are old matters known long since, of which only old women were afraid. In the end, after the thunder and lightning, the air is made clearer, fresher, and more wholesome. When I first read the long letter of my Horseherd, I said to myself, “He is a man who has done the best he could in his position.” He has let himself be taught, but also irresistibly influenced, by certain popular books, and has come to think that the abandonment of views that have been instilled into him from his youth is so brave and meritorious, that all who disagree with him must be cowards. This inculcation of truth into childish minds is always a dangerous matter, and even if I do not use the strong expressions that are used by my friend,—for I always think, the stronger the expression the weaker the argument,—I must admit that he is right up to a certain point. It does not seem fair that in the decision of the most important questions of life the young mind should have no voice. A Jewish child becomes a Jew, a Christian child a Christian, and a Buddhist child a Buddhist. What does this prove? Unquestionably, that in the highest concern in life the child is not allowed a voice. My friend asks indignantly: “Is there anything in face of our knowledge, and of the realm of nature and of man's position in it, so unbearable, [pg 091] yes so odious, as the inoculation of such error in the tender consciousness of our school children? I shudder when I think that in thousands of our churches and schools this systematic ruin of the greatest of all gifts, the consciousness, the human brain, is daily, even hourly, going on. Max, can you, too, still cling to the God-fable?” etc.

Now I have explained clearly and concisely in what sense I cling to the God-fable, and I should like to know if I have convinced my Horseherd. I belong, above all, to those who do not consider the world an irrational chaos, and also to those who cannot concede that there can be reason without a reasoner. Reason is an activity, or, as others have it, an attribute, and there can neither be an activity without an agent, nor an attribute without a subject; at least, not in the world in which we live. When ordinary persons and even professional philosophers speak of reason as if it were a jewel that can be placed in a drawer or in a human skull, they are simply myth-makers. It is precisely in this ever recurring elevation of an adjective or a verb to a noun, of a predicate to a subject, that this disease of language, as I have called mythology, has its deepest roots. Here lies the genesis of the majority of gods, not by any means, as it is generally believed I have taught, merely in later quibbles and misunderstandings, which are interesting and popular, but have little reference to the deepest nature of the myth. We must not take these matters too lightly.

[pg 092]

I recognise therefore a reasoner, and consequent reason in the world, or in other words, I believe in a thinker and ruler of the world, but gladly concede that this Being so infinitely transcends our faculties of comprehension, that even to wish only to give him a name borders on madness. If, in spite of all of this, we use such names as Jehovah, Allah, Deva, God, Father, Creator, this is only a result of human weakness. I cling therefore to the God-fable in the sense which is more fully set forth in my letter, and it pleased me very much to see that at least a few of those, who as they said were formerly on the side of the Horseherd, now fully agree with me, that the world is not irrational. Here is the dividing line between two systems of philosophy. Whoever thinks that an irrational world becomes rational by the survival of the fittest, etc., stands on one side; I stand on the other, and hold with the Greek thinkers, who accept the world as the expression of the Logos, or of a reasonable thought or thinker.

But here the matter became serious. To my Horseherd I thought that I could make myself intelligible in a humorous strain, for his letter was permeated with a quiet humour. But my known and unknown opponents take the matter much more seriously and thoroughly, and I am consequently obliged at least to try to answer them seriously and thoroughly. What my readers will say to this I do not know. I believe that even in short words we can be serious and profound. When Schiller says that he belongs [pg 093] to no religion, and why? because of religion, the statement is short and concise, and yet easily understood. I shall, however, at least attempt to follow my opponents step by step, even at the risk of becoming tedious.

And first of all a confession. It has been pointed out to me that in one place I did my Horseherd an injustice. I wrote: “You are of opinion that to love God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are evidently very proud of your discovery that there is no distinction between good and evil. Well,” I then continue, “if loving God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, then it follows that not loving God and not loving your neighbour is equivalent to not being good, or to being evil. There is, then, a very plain distinction between good and evil. And yet you say that you turned a somersault when you discovered that there was no such distinction.”

Well, that looked as though I had driven my friend into a corner from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. But I did him an injustice and shall therefore do everything in my power to right it. My memory, as it so frequently does, played me a prank. At the same time that I answered him, I was in active correspondence with one of the delegates to the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at which the love of God and one's neighbour had been adopted, as a sort of article of agreement which the followers of any or every faith could accept. Thus it befell [pg 094] that I supposed the Horseherd in America to stand at the same point of view, and consequently to be guilty of a contradiction. Such is, however, not the case; he made no such concession of love of God and one's neighbour in his letter. If he therefore insists that there is no distinction between good and evil, I cannot at least refute him out of his own mouth. The only place where he is inconsistent is where he concedes that he could not strike a dog, but is filled with bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea of God. Here he clearly holds it good that he cannot be cruel to an animal, and that he looks upon bloodthirstiness as a contrast. He also concedes that a lie can never accomplish any good, and believes that the truth is beautiful and holy. If a lie can accomplish no good, only evil, then there must be a distinction between good and evil. And what is the meaning of beautiful and holy, if there is no contrast between good and evil. But I shall argue this point no farther, but simply say peccavi, and I believe that he, and those like-minded with him, will be satisfied with that. How different it would have been, however, had I been guilty of such a mistake in a personal dispute! The injured party would never have believed that my oversight was accidental, and not malicious, in spite of the fact that it would have been the most stupid malevolence to say that which every one who can read would instantly recognise as untrue. But enough of this, and enough to show that my Horseherd at least remained consistent. Even when he [pg 095] so far forgets himself as to say, “God be praised,” he excuses himself. Only he has unfortunately not told us what he really means when he says that good and evil are identical. Good and evil are relative ideas, just like right and left, black and white, and although he has told us that he turned somersaults with joy over the discovery that this distinction is false, he has left us in total darkness as to how we shall conceive this identity.

But let us turn back to more important things. My opponents further call me sharply to account, and ask how I can imagine that the material world can be rational, or permeated with reason. I believed that it must be clear to every person with a philosophical training, that there are things that are beyond our understanding, that man can neither sensibly apprehend nor logically conceive an actual beginning, and that to inquire for the beginning of the subjective self, or of the objective world, is like inquiring for the beginning of the beginning. All that we can do is to investigate our perceptions, to see what they presuppose. A perception plainly presupposes a self that perceives, or that resists, and on the other side, something that forces itself upon us, or, as Kant says, something that is given. This “given” element might be mere confusion, but it is not; it displays order, cause and effect, and reveals itself as rational. This revelation of a rational world may, however, be explained in two ways. That there is reason in nature, even the majority of Darwinians admit, but they think that [pg 096] it arises of itself, since in the struggle for life that which is most adapted to its conditions, fittest, best, necessarily survives. In this view of the world, however, if I see it aright, much is admitted surreptitiously. Whence comes all at once this idea of the best, of the good, the fit, the adapted, in the world? Do roasted pigeons fall from the sky? Is the pigeon itself an accidental combination, an evolution, that might as well have been as it is, or otherwise? It is all very fine to recognise in the ascending series of protozoa, cœlenterata, echinoderms, worms, mollusks, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, the stages of progress toward birds and finally to mammals and man. But whence comes the idea of bird or pigeon? Is it no more than an abstraction from our perceptions of thousands of birds or pigeons, or must the idea of bird, of pigeon, even of the wood pigeon, be there already, that we may detect it behind the multiplicity of our perceptions?

Is the pigeon, in whose wing each feather is counted, a mere accident, a mere survival which might have been what it is or something different, or is it something willed and thought, an organic whole? It is the old question whether the idea preceded or followed the reality, on which the whole Middle Ages broke their teeth, the question which separated and still separates philosophers into two camps,—the Realists and the Nominalists. I think that the latest investigations show us that the Greek philosophers, and especially Plato, saw more correctly when they recognised [pg 097] behind the multiplicity of individuals the unity of the idea, or the species, and then sought the true sequence of evolution not in this world, in a struggle for existence, but beyond the perception of the senses, in a development of the Logos or the idea. The circumstances, it appears to me, in this view remain just the same; the sequence, and the purposiveness in this sequence, remain untouched, only that the Greeks saw in the rational and purposive in nature the realisation of rational progressive thoughts, not the bloody survivals of a monstrous gladiatorial combat in nature. The Darwinians appear to me to resemble the Roman emperors, who waited till the combat was ended, and then applauded the survival of the fittest. The idealist philosophy, be it Plato's or Hegel's, recognises in what actually is, the rational, the realisation of eternal, rational ideas. This realisation, or the process of what we call creation, can never be conceived by us otherwise than figuratively. But we can make this figurative presentation clearer and clearer. That the world was made by a wood cutter, as was originally implied in the Hebrew word bara, and in the German schoepfer, schaffer, in the English shaper, or in the Vedic tvashtâ, and the Greek τέκτων, was quite comprehensible at a time in which man's highest product was that of the carpenter and the stone mason; and in which the name of timber (materies) could become the universal name for matter (ὕλη, wood). After this idea of the founder of the universe as a carpenter or builder was [pg 098] abandoned as inadequate, the world was divided into two parties. The one adopted the theory of material primitive elements, whether they be called atoms, or monads, or cells, which by collision or struggle with each other, and by mutual affinity, became that which we now see around us. The other saw the impossibility of the rise of something rational out of the irrational, and conceived a rational being, in which was developed the original type of everything produced, the so-called Logos of the universe. How this Logos became objectively and materially real, is as far beyond human comprehension as is the origin of the cosmos out of countless atoms, or even out of living cells. So far, then, one hypothesis would be as complete and as incomplete as the other. But the Logos hypothesis has the far-reaching advantage, that instead of a long succession of wonders,—call them if you like the wonder of the monads, or the worm, or the mollusk, or the fish, or the amphibian, or the reptile, or the bird, or, lastly, man,—it has but one wonder before it, the Logos, the idea of thought, or of the eternal thinker, who thought everything that exists in natural sequence, and in this sense made all. In this view we need not even abandon the survival of the fittest, only it proceeds in the Logos, in the mind, not in the outward phenomenal world. It would then also become conceivable that the embryological development of animated nature runs parallel with the biological or historical, or as it were recapitulates it, only the continuity of the idea is far closer and more [pg 099] intimate than that of the reality. Thus, for instance, in the development of the human embryo, the transition from the invertebrate to the vertebrate may be represented in the reality by the isolated amphioxus, which remains stationary where vertebrate man begins, and can make no step forward, while the human embryo advances farther and farther till it reaches its highest limit.

In order now to infer from these and similar facts that man at one time really existed in this scarcely vertebrate condition of the amphioxus,—a conclusion which, strictly understood, yields no meaning,—we can make the case much more easily conceivable if we represent the thinking, or invention of the world, as an ascending scale, in which even the least chromatic tone must have a place without a break, while the principal tones do not become clear and full until the requisite number of vibrations is attained. These gradations of tone are the really interesting thing in nature. As the full, clear tones imply certain numerical relations among the vibrations, so the successive stages or the true species in nature imply a will or thought in which the true Origin of Species has its foundation. That natural selection, as it is called, could suffice to explain the origin of species, was doubted even by Huxley,38 who yet described himself as Darwin's bull-dog.

If we have followed the supporters of my Horseherd so far, I should like here to enter a caveat, that [pg 100] is indeed of no great significance, but may turn one or another from a by-way, which the Horseherd himself has not avoided. He speaks of the place of man in nature; he thinks (like so many others) that man is not only an animal belonging to the mammalia, which no one has ever denied, but that he is of the same nature as the animal world. He need not therefore have accepted the whole simian theory, at least he does not say so; but that each man, and the entire human race, has descended from an unknown pair of animals, he appears to receive as indubitable. This would not, so far as I can see, make the slightest difference in the so-called dignity of mankind. If man had a prehensile tail, it would not detract from his worth. I myself have little doubt that there were men with tails in prehistoric or even in historic times. I go still farther and declare that if ever there should be an ape who can form ideas and words, he would ipso facto be a man. I have therefore no prejudices such as the advocates of the simian theory like to attribute to us. What I and those who agree with me demand of our opponents, is merely somewhat keener thought, and a certain consideration for the results of our knowledge, such as we on our side have bestowed on their researches. They have taught us that the body in which we live was at first a simple cell. The significance of this “at first” is left somewhat vague. This cell was really what the word means, the cella (room) of a dumb inhabitant, the Self. The essential thing is [pg 101] and remains what was in the cell. Through gemmation, differentiation, segmentation, evolution, or whatever other technical expressions we may use for division, multiplication, budding, increase, etc., each cell became a hundred, a thousand, a million. Within this cell is a bright spot into which not even the microscope can penetrate, although whole worlds may be contained therein. If it is now remembered that no one has ever succeeded in distinguishing the human cell from the cell of a horse, an elephant, or an ape, we shall see how much unnecessary indignation has been expended in recent years over the simian origin of the human race, and how much intelligent thought has been wasted about the animal origin of man, that is of the individual. My body, your body, his body, is derived (ontogenetically) from the cell, is in fact the cell which has remained persistently the same from beginning to end, without ever, in spite of all changes, losing its identity. This cell in its transformations has shown remarkable analogies with the transformations of other animal cells. While, however, the other animal cells in their transformations remain stationary here and there, either at the boundary line of worms, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, or mammals, the one cell which was destined to become man moves on to the stage of the tailed catarrhine apes, then of the tailless apes, and without staying here it irresistibly strides towards its original goal, and only stops where it is destined to stop. Speaking, however, not [pg 102] phylogenetically, but ontogenetically, at what point does our own cell come in contact with the cell that was intended to become an ape, and that became and remained an ape? If we accept the cell theory in its latest form, what meaning can there be in the statement of the late Henry Drummond, that “In a very distant period the progenitors of birds and the progenitors of men were one and the same”?39 Would not a very small quantity of strictly logical thought have cut off a priori the bold hypothesis that directly or indirectly we descend from a menagerie? Every man, and consequently all mankind, has accomplished his uninterrupted embryological development on his own account; no man and no human cell springs from the womb of an ape or any other animal, but only from the womb of a human mother, fertilised by a human father. Or do men owe their being to a miscarriage?

As many streams may flow alongside of each other and through the same strata, and one ends in a lake while the others flow on and grow larger and larger, till finally one river attains its highest goal, the sea, so the cells develop for a time alongside of each other, then some remain stationary at their points of destination, while others move on farther; but the cell that has moved forward is as little derived from the stationary cell as the Indus from the Sarasvati. It is at the points of destination that the true species digress, and when these points [pg 103] are reached, the specific development ceases, and there remains only the possibility of the variety, the origin of which is conditioned by the multiplicity of individuals; but which must never be confounded with a true species. Every species represents an act of the will, a thought, and this thought cannot be shaken from its course, however close temptation may often come.

With this I believe I have cleared up and refuted one of the objections that my correspondents made, at any rate to the best of my ability. Whoever is convinced that each individual, be it fish or bird, springs from its own cell, knows ipso facto that a human cell, however undistinguishable it may be to the human eye from the cell of a catarrhine ape, could never have been the cell of an ape. And what is true ontogenetically, is of course true phylogenetically. For myself this inquiry into the simian origin of man never had any great interest; I even doubt whether the Horseherd would have laid great stress upon it. His champions, however, plainly consider it one of the principal and fundamental questions on which our whole view of the world must be erected. In my opinion so little depends on our covering of flesh, that as I have often said, I should instantly acknowledge an ape that could speak, that is, think in concepts, as a man and brother, in spite of his hide, in spite of his tail, in spite of his stunted brain. We are not that which is buried or burned. We are not even the cell, but the inhabitant of the [pg 104] cell. But this leads me to new questions and objections, which have been made by the representatives and successors of the Horseherd, and to which I hope to reply on some other occasion, assuming that my own somewhat dilapidated cell holds out so long against wind and rain.

F. Max Müller.
Frascati, April, 1897.

Chapter IV.

Language And Mind

The number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of the Deutsche Rundschau is a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can [pg 106] be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.

Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.

I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin [pg 107] has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond, i.e. an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (On the Perception of the Infinite) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans [pg 108] felt, thought, and named their god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.

His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore constituted, not the prius, but the posterius of those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me. “The mind,” so wrote the Horseherd, “is not a prius, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon.” Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work, The Ascent of Man, that “Order of events is history, and evolution is history” (p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season [pg 109] and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say, “The human mind is also a development,” certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says: “Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is a prius. But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken.”

In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that “spirit,” in such expressions as “He has yielded up his spirit,” means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of “spirit” in such a phrase as “his spirit has departed.” But easy as it is to distinguish between [pg 110] spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not a prius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerous embarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.

It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce [pg 111] a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic term Âtman, which I translate into “the Self” (neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase “the Self” (masculine). “Soul” has a too tender quality to be the equivalent of Âtman.

This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While the Esse of all objects is a percipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, the Esse of the self is a percipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers called Avidyâ (not knowing, ignorance), or also Mâyâ (appearance, or illusion), vanishes.

[pg 112]

The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simply ultra vires by every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider the Avidyâ (ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such an Avidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in the Vidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance, Avidyâ, or Mâyâ (illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.

How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So [pg 113] far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations, i.e. the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.

In one place40 he says, “I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.” In another place41 [pg 114] he speaks still more plainly and says, “In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.” Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word “evolution” or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond, “Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”42 Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before, “How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.” In the Contemporary Review, November, 1871,43 Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology, “I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.” Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of [pg 115] ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers call sak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed, i.e. that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.

If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (for kid is not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained [pg 116] behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?

These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness, [pg 117] or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.

Above all things we must settle what we are really [pg 118] to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says, “Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”44 Undoubtedly by “generically” is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a difference in kind, that is in genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.

What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its [pg 119] being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. It is so—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?

Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the [pg 120] genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:—

After three weeks fear is manifested;

After seven weeks social affections;

After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;

After five months sympathy;

After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;

After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.45

[pg 121]

We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.

The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes, [pg 122] remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoölogical garden.

As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period, post hominem natum, although it has been [pg 123] thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book on Mental Evolution in Animals, has collected a large number of illustrations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly, The Spectator, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.

What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although [pg 124] we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.

Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian language ipso facto ceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages, [pg 125] and yet katvāras sounds quite differently from τέσσαρες and quatuor and our four. The words for eight, octo in Latin, ὀκτώ in Greek, and ashtau in Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν), Sanskrit satám, centum. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined in asht-au, oct-o, ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible that asht-i was a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number, [pg 126] we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.

Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life [pg 127] to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the [pg 128] makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.

But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such as Pânini have systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists [pg 129] accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.46 With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?

These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as [pg 130] is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.47 They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that “Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”48 That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the [pg 131] philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer, “It is warm” or “I am tired,” and the man who can actually say, “It is warm,” “I am tired.” Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.

Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say, “It is warm.” We shall say nothing of “it”; it may be a simple demonstrative stem, which needed little for its formation. But [pg 132] before this “i-t” or “id” could become an impersonal “it,” long-continued abstraction, or, if you prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the word is. Whence comes such a verbal form, Sanskrit as-ti, Greek ἔστι, Latin est? Was the abstract “to be” onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is possible. The root as in asti, that we now translate as is, means as we see from as-u, breath, originally to breathe. Whoever likes may see in as, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.

This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger's breadth, but in time changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old track. Nay, more, this “concept” has caused much shaking of the head among philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four, four and four, eight, [pg 133] eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen an ape so well trained that as the word “seven” was spoken, he picked up seven straws. But what is such child's play in comparison with the first formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities, requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only, whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.

This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians, even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any danger there could be no fear. The facts are [pg 134] there and show us the right path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds. That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such pantomimes as L'enfant prodigue. We have long known that imitations of sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by myself.49 But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure, and that even Noiré's clamor concomitans does not explain every case. Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language leaves a certain number of roots [pg 135] which are not mere sound-imitations, such as “bow wow,” or “moo moo.” There are people who have taken much pains to discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we may say much but can prove little, we have at least a που στῶ for our researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon roots as clamor concomitans, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained [pg 136] ad for eat, tan for stretch, mar for rub, as for breathe, sta for stand, ga for go, no human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.

If we now return, to our is,—Sanskrit as-ti, Greek ἔστι, Latin est,—we see that it originally meant “to breathe out.” This blowing or breathing was then used for “life,” as in as-u, breath of life, and from life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing, and meant nothing more than the abstract “to be.” There are languages that possess no such pale word as “be” and could not form such a sentence as “It is warm.” The auxiliary verb “to have” is also lacking in many languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there was no such word as “be,” “stand” was employed; where there was no word for “have,” then “hold,” tenere, would render the same, or at least similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different thought.

But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which a language must pass, before it could reduce “breathe” to “be” and form such a sentence as “It is warm.” Even an animal feels [pg 137] warmth, and can in various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us consider “warm.” Of course “warm” may represent a mere feeling, and then a simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary. Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in this case ghar (in gharmá, θερμός), and this meant at first to be bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects, and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general, is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given us.

Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as [pg 138] children, we have no suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and words. Our so-called thinking before speaking, however, refers simply to reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that is not speaking, [pg 139] only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the abstract word “dog,” not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel, poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found, in rerum natura, or in domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for “thing” is padârtha; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only what is necessary to form so simple a word as “white.” The idea of [pg 140] white must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was named nix nivis, from a root snigh or snu, denoting everything which melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example, this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception, before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like snow; that is, that which is formed [pg 141] into a ball, so that they had the sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality, distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things, just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind. How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so, and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is, as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was denoted by mar, eat by ad, go by ga, strike by tud, we may perhaps apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it. Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a [pg 142] reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact would it have any significance for science.

At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the development of the human mind. I say, “which we can reach,” for what lies beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history of homo alalus. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the mind. If we take such a word as the Vedic deva, there may have been many older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we know from deva and the Latin deus, that even before the Aryan separation a root dyu or div had been formed, as well as the conception “shine.” If this root was first used actively for the act of shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces in us, and to call it a “shiner,” dyu (nom. dyaus), and then with a new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings, deva, deus. Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and stars, from which “shining” had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the [pg 143] idea “shine,” and further formations such as Dyaus (shiner) and deva (shining). Now observe how Dyaus, as “shiner,” at the same time assumed the significance of an otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of language.

All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas, and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings, and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is enough, sapienti sat. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace back the French dieu, the Latin deus, the Sanskrit deva, divine, to the physical idea div, “shine,” so we can with thousands of other words, of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of other ideas and sounds for [pg 144] “shine,” etc., before the formation of div, Dyaus, and deva, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated and continued inseparable one from the other.

If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find, for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the root bhar with the simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly in bharâmi, in bibharmi, in bibharti (I bear, he bears), also in bháras or bhartár (a bearer), and bhârás (load) and bhárman and bhartí (bearing), etc.

But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we have φέρω, in Latin fero, in Gothic bairan, in English to bear. The principal meanings which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in, to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives such as the German Bahre, English bier (French bière, borrowed), and also φέρετρον and feretrum, as well as ferculum (a litter). On the other hand there is φόρετρον (a porter's wages), and φaρέτρa (quiver). And barrow in wheel-barrow has the same origin. Burden is that which is borne, [pg 145] then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther takes us to φερτός (bearable) and ἄφερτος (unbearable). We also find in Greek δύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskrit durbhara, with the meaning “heavy to bear.” In Latin, however, fertus signifies fruitful, like fertilis, ferax. We say, “The earth bears” (trägt), and Getreide (grain) meant originally that borne (getragen) by the earth (hence in Middle High German Geträgede). So we have also far, the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived from fero, and along with it fārina (flour), if it stands for farrina. Far may originally, however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxon bere, the English barley, are again related to it. Of course we have the same root in derivatives, such as lucifer, frugifer, in Greek καρποφόρος or φερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, as fruchtbar, dankbar, scheinbar, urbar. Like φόρος, φορά means also what is carried or brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such as birth, born, and Gothic berusjos (parents), parentes and barn (the child), like the Greek φέρμα.

If δίφρος (carriage) stands for διφόρος, it means originally a carriage for two persons, just as ἀμφορεύς, Latin amphora, was a vessel with two handles. We should scarcely believe that the same root is concealed in the German Zuber (tub) and Eimer (bucket). But Zuber was originally Zwiber, a vessel [pg 146] with two handles, and Eimer was Einber, a bucket with one bail. We may compare manubrium (handle) and derivatives like candelebrum, lugubris, as well as luctifer. If bhartri meant bearer and then husband, as bhâry[~a] meant wife, i.e. the one to be maintained, we are probably justified in seeing in bhrâtar (brother) the original meaning of helper, protector. Although the wife is to be maintained and sustained, she, too, brings something to the household, and that is the φέρνω (dowry). The Middle Latin expression paraphernalia is properly dowry, though it has now assumed an entirely different meaning. “To be carried” easily takes the meaning of being torn away, s'emporter, and this we find in the Greek represented by φέρεσθαι, in the Sanskrit in the secondary form bhur (to hasten), yielding bhuranyú, bhúrni (hasty, violent), and other derivatives.

We have already seen how φόρος and φορά signified that which is contributed, then duty, tribute. This is the Gothic gabaur, that is, gebühr (due), and consequently all things that are proper or becoming.

Offerre (bring before) leads to Opfer (sacrifice) and to the simpler offrir, as sufferre to souffrir (suffer).

It has been usual to derive Fors, Fortuna, from ferre,50 the goddess who brings, although she takes away as well. The ancients had no doubts of this derivation, and τὸ φέρον (fate) and τὸ φερόμενον (chance) seem to substantiate it. But the old [pg 147] divine character of Fors, Fortuna (as related to Harit), points to other sources, which had already entirely vanished from the consciousness of the ancients. Yet the expression, es trägt sich zu (it happens), the old gaburjan, Anglo-Saxon gebyrian, and kipuri (zufällig, casual), must be taken into account, and forms such as forte, forsan, fortassis (forte an si vis), fortuitus, are very remote from their supposed mythological meaning. If ferre were the root, we should have further proof of the immeasurable fertility to which we owe such words as fortune and misfortune.

It would lead us too far if we tried to collect all the meanings which our roots had in the various ancient Aryan tongues in combination with prepositions. It must suffice to select a small number from a modern language such as French, which give us an idea of the endless modifications to which every root is more or less adapted. Thus from circumferre we have circonférence, also périphérie, from conferre, conférence and also confortable, from deferre déférence, from differre différence, from praeferre préférence, from proferre proférer, from referre référence, each word again with numerous offshoots. We are not at the end yet, and still less when we keep in view also the parallel formations tuli and latum, or portare. We then see what a root in this language has to signify, whether considered as a concrete word or as a mere abstraction. This is prolific of contention and has been much disputed; the main thing is to [pg 148] know the facts. From these we may infer how in all this multiplicity the unity of the root element can be best explained.

I do not say that all ideas can be so clearly traced to their origin as in this root. In some the intermediate forms have been lost, and the etymologies become uncertain, often impossible. But the result on the whole remains the same. Wherever we can see clearly, we see that what we call mind and thought consists in this, that man has the power not only to receive presentations like an animal, but to discover something general in them. This element he can eliminate and fix by means of vocal signs; and he can further classify single presentations under the same general concepts, and mark them by the same vocal signs. What we call derivative forms, such as deva besides div, are originally varieties in the formation of words, that in time proved useful, and through repeated employment obtained their special application. Often, too, there are real compounds, just as the German bar in fruchtbar, furchtbar, etc., was originally the same word that we have in Bahre (bier), but was very different from bar in Nachbar (neighbour), which in spite of the similarity in sound comes from an entirely different root, seen in bauen (build), bebauen (cultivate), bauer (peasant), and in the English neighbour.

If we have the ideas and the words, the process of thought, as Hobbes has taught us, is nothing but an addition and subtraction of ideas. We add when we say, A is B; when we say, for instance, man, or Caius, [pg 149] is mortal, adding Caius, or man, to all that we call mortal; we subtract when we say, A is not B; that is, when we abstract Enoch from all that we call mortal. Everything that man has ever thought, humiliating as it may sound, consists in these two operations; just as the most abstruse operations of mathematics go back in the end to addition and subtraction. To what else could they go back? Whether these mental operations are true or false, is another question, with which the method of the thinker has nothing to do; any more than formal logic inquires whether all men are mortal, but only infers on the basis of these premises that Caius, because he is a man, is also mortal.

We see, therefore, how language and thought go hand in hand; where there is as yet no word, there is not yet an idea. The thinking capacity of the mind has its source in language, lives in language, and develops continuously in language. The human mind is human language, and as animals possess no language, they do not ipso facto possess what philosophers understand by mind. We need not for this reason ascribe any special faculty to men. Speech and thought are only a wider development of the faculty of presentation such as an animal may have; but in an animal it never develops any farther, for an animal has no general ideas; it remains at the individual, and never attains unity in plurality. It knows, as Plato would say, a horse, but not “horsedom.” If we wish to say that the perceiving self is present in animals as in men, there is no objection, though in all [pg 150] such, questions relating to animals we are always groping in the dark. But the fact remains that the step, whether small or vast, that leads from the individual to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, from perceiving (that is, being acted upon) to conceiving, thinking, speaking, that is, to acting, is for the animal impossible. An animal might speak, but it cannot; a stone might grow, but it cannot; a tree might walk, but it cannot. Why not? Because there are natural boundaries that are apparently easy to pass, and yet impassable. The tree grows up a tree, the animal an animal, but no farther, just as man never surpasses the human, and therefore can never think except through language, which often is very imperfect.

In one sense, therefore, the Horseherd is quite right. The mind is a development, an eternal, ceaseless development; but when he calls it a function possessed by all living organisms, even a goose and a chicken, he goes far beyond the facts. No goose speaks, although it cackles, and although by cackling it apprised the Romans of the important fact that their Capitol was in danger. How much a dog could tell us if he could speak! As if this capacity or incapacity is not as much the result of intention as every other capacity and incapacity in nature! If we translate this ability by facultas, that is facilitas, we need not for that reason assume in man a faculty, or as the Horseherd calls it, a phantom, but the thing remains the same. We can speak, and an animal cannot; we can think, and an animal cannot.

[pg 151]

But it must not be supposed that because we deny thought and speech to animals, we wish to degrade them. Everything that has been told us of the ingenious tricks of animals, even the most incredible, we shall gladly believe, only not that bos locutus est, or that an actual utterance lies hidden in the bark of a dog. A man who sees no difference between language and communication will of course continue to say that a dog speaks, and explain in how many dialects he barks, when he is hungry, when he wants to go out with his master, when he hears burglars in the house, or when he has been whipped and whines. It would be more natural if scientists confined themselves to facts, without asking for reasons, and primarily to the great fact that no animal, with the exception of man, speaks, or ever has spoken. The next duty of the observer is to ask: Why is this? There is no physical impossibility. A parrot can imitate all words. There must therefore be a non-physical cause why there has never been a parrot or dog language. Is that true or false? And if we now call that non-physical cause mind, or still better the Logos, namely, the gatherer of the many into the one, comprehending, conceiving, is our argument so erroneous if we seek the distinction between man and animal in the Logos, in speech and thought, or in mind? This mind is no ghost, as the Horseherd asserts, nor is it a mere phantom of the brain as is imagined by so many scientists. It is something real, for we see its effects. It is born, like everything that belongs to our ego, of [pg 152] the self-conscious Self, which alone really and eternally exists and abides.

So far I hope to have answered the second objection of the Horseherd or Horseherds, that the mind is a function possessed also by a goose or a chicken. Mind is language, and language is mind, the one the sine qua non of the other, and so far no goose has yet spoken, but only cackled.

Chapter V.

The Reasonableness Of Religion

The most difficult and at all events the thorniest problem that was presented to me by the Horseherd still remains unanswered, and I have long doubted whether I should attempt to answer it in so popular a periodical as the Deutsche Rundschau.

There are so many things that have been so long settled among scholars that they are scarcely mentioned, while to a great majority of even well-informed people they are still enveloped in a misty gloom. To this class belong especially the so-called articles of faith. We must not forget that with many, even with most men, faith is not faith, but acquired habit. Why otherwise should the son of a Jew be a Jew, the son of a Parsi a Parsi? Moreover, no one likes to be disturbed in his old habits. There are questions, too, on which mankind as it is now constituted will never reach a common understanding, because they lie outside the realm of science or the knowable. Concerning such questions it is well to waste no more words. But it is on just such a question, namely, the true nature of revelation, that the Horseherd and his companions particularly wish to know my views. The [pg 154] current theory of revelation is their greatest stumbling block, and they continually direct their principal attack against this ancient stronghold. On the other hand there is nothing so convenient as this theory, and many who have no other support cling fast to this anchor. The Bible is divine revelation, say they, therefore it is infallible and unassailable, and that settles everything.

Now we must, above all things, come to an understanding as to what is meant by revelation before we attribute revelation to the Bible. There are not many now who really believe that an angel in bodily form descended from heaven and whispered into the ear of the apostles, in rather bad Greek, every verse, every word, even every letter of our Gospels. When Peter in his second Epistle (i. 18) assures us that he heard a voice from heaven, that is a fact that can only be confirmed, or invalidated, by witnesses. But when he immediately after says (i. 21) that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” he presents to us a view of inspiration that is easily intelligible, the possibility or truth of which must yet be first determined by psychologists. If it be conceded, however, that holy men may partake of such an inspiration, even then it is plain that it requires a much higher inspiration to declare others to be divinely inspired than to make such a claim for oneself alone. This theory, that the Gospels are inspired by God, and therefore are infallible and unassailable, has gained more and more currency since the time [pg 155] of the Reformation. The Bible was to be the only authority in future for the Christian faith. Pope and ecclesiastical tradition were cast aside, and a greater stress was consequently laid on the litera scripta of the New Testament. This naturally led to a very laborious and detailed criticism of these records, which year by year assumed a wider scope, and was finally absorbed in so many special investigations that its original purpose of establishing the authority of the Scriptures of the New Testament seems to have quite passed out of sight. These critical investigations concerning the manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrimus, and Vaticanus, down to Number 269, Bentley's Q, are probably of less interest to the Horseherd; they are known to those who make a special study of this subject, and are of no interest outside.

If, as might have happened, without any miracle, the original autograph of the Gospels, as they were written by the apostles or some one else with their own hands, had been carefully preserved in the archives of the first popes, our professors would have been spared much labour. But we nowhere read that these successors and heirs of Peter showed any special solicitude for this prime duty of their office, the preservation of this precious jewel of their treasure, the New Testament. What they neglected, had therefore to be recovered by our philologists. Just as those who wished to study the Peloponnesian war resorted to the manuscripts of Thucydides, the [pg 156] Christian scholars, to become acquainted with the origins of Christianity, betook themselves to the manuscripts of the New Testament. And as the manuscripts of Thucydides vary widely from one another and in certain passages leave us quite helpless, so do the manuscripts of the New Testament. Bentley speaks of thirty thousand variæ lectiones in the New Testament; but since his time their number must have increased fourfold. The manuscripts of the New Testament are more numerous than those of any classic. Two thousand are known and have been described, and more yet may lie buried in libraries. Now while this large number of manuscripts and various readings have given the philologists of the New Testament greater difficulties than the classical philologist encounters, still on the other hand the New Testament has the advantage over all classical texts, in that some of its manuscripts are much older than those of the majority of classical writers. We have, for instance, no complete manuscripts of Homer earlier than the thirteenth century, while the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament descend from the fourth and fifth centuries. It is frequently said that all these things are of no importance for the understanding of the New Testament, and that theologians need not trouble themselves about them. But this is saying too much. There are variæ lectiones, which are certainly not without importance for the facts and the doctrines of Christianity, and in which the last word belongs not to [pg 157] the theologian, but to the philologist. No one would say that it makes no difference if Mark xvi. 9-20 is omitted or not; no one would declare that the authenticity or spuriousness of the section on the adulteress (John vii. 53-viii. 11) was entirely indifferent. When we consider what contention there has been over the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first Epistle of John, and how the entire doctrine of the Trinity has been based on that (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”), it will hardly be maintained that the manuscripts are of no importance for Christian dogma. Whether in the first Epistle to Timothy iii. 16, we read ΟΣ for ΘΣ, that is, θεός, is also not quite immaterial. Still I admit that in comparison to the problems presented to me by the Horseherd and his comrades, these variæ lectiones will not rack our brains nearly so badly. I have been reproached for still owing my friends an answer to the attacks which they directed exclusively against Christian religion. It was, however, impossible to deal thoroughly with these matters, without first taking into consideration their objections against all religion.

I therefore first endeavoured to make clear to my unknown friends two things, which constitute the foundation of all religion: first, that the world is rational, that it is the result of thought, and that in this sense only is it the creation of a being which possesses reason, or is reason itself (the Logos); [pg 158] and secondly, that mind or thought cannot be the outcome of matter, but on the contrary is the prius of all things. To this end a statement of the results of the philosophy of language was absolutely necessary, partly to establish more clearly the relation of thought to speech, partly to comprehend the true meaning of the Logos or the Word in the New Testament, and understand in how easily intelligible and perfectly reasonable a sense the term “Word” (Logos) can be applied to the Son of God.

I am not one of those who pretend to find no difficulties in all these questions. On the contrary, I have wrestled with them for years, and remember well the joy I felt when first the true historical meaning of the opening of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the word,” became clear to me. It is true that I turned no somersaults like the Horseherd, but I was well satisfied. I do not therefore consider the objections raised by him as unfounded or without justification; on the contrary, it were better if others would speak with the same freedom as he has done, although a calmer tone in such matters would be more effective than the fortissimo of the Horseherd.

What aided me most in the solution of these religious or theological difficulties, was a comparative study of the religions of mankind. In spite of their differences, they are all afflicted with the same ailments, and when we find that we encounter the same difficulties in other religions as those with [pg 159] which we are ourselves contending, it is safe to consider them as deeply rooted in human nature, and in this same nature, be it weak or strong, to seek their solution. As comparative philology has proved that many of the irregular nouns and verbs are really the most regular and ancient, so it is with the irregular, that is, the miraculous occurrences in the history of religion. Indeed, we may now say that it would be a miracle if there were anywhere any religion without miracles, or if the Scriptures on which any religion is based were not presented by the priests and accepted by the believers as of superhuman, even divine origin, and therefore infallible. In all these matters we must seek for the reasons, and in this manner endeavour to understand their truth as well as error.

Whether or not I have succeeded in proving that the world is rational, and that mind is the prius of matter, I must leave to the decision of the Horseherd and his friends. Fortunately these questions are of that nature that we may entertain different opinions upon them without accusing each other of heresy. Many Darwinians, for instance, Romanes, and even Huxley, have always considered themselves good Christians, although they believed the doctrine of Darwin to be the only way of salvation. If, however, we take up such questions as were propounded to me by the Horseherd, and which have more to do with Christian theology than Christian religion, there is an immediate change of tone, and unfortunately the [pg 160] difference of view becomes at once a difference of aim. The moral element enters immediately, and those who believe otherwise are designated unbelievers, though we do not at once stamp those who think otherwise as incapable of thought. Here lies the great difficulty in considering and treating calmly religious, or rather, theological questions. There is little hope of reaching a mutual understanding when the first attack is characterised by such vigour as was shown by the Horseherd and many of his comrades. He speaks at once of tales of fraud and deceit, and of the fantasies of the Christian religion. He says that he is full of bloodthirstiness against the Jewish idea of God, and believes that since the writings of Hume and Schopenhauer, positive Christianity has become a sheer impossibility, and more of the same import. This is certainly “fortissimo,” but not therefore by any means “verissimo.”

Other correspondents, such as Agnosticus, declare all revelation a chimera; in short, there has been no lack of expressions subversive of Christianity, and, in fact, of all revealed religion.

At this point a glance at the development of the religion of the Hindus may be of great service to us. Nowhere is the idea of revelation worked out so carefully as in their literature. They have a voluminous literature, treating of religion and philosophy, and they draw a very sharp distinction between revealed and unrevealed works (Sruti and Smriti). Here much depends upon the name. Revealed meant [pg 161] originally nothing more than plain and clear, and when we speak of a revelation, in ordinary life, this is not much more than a communication. But erelong “reveal” was used in the special sense of a communication from a superhuman to a human being. The question of the possibility of such a communication raised little difficulty. But this possibility depends naturally on the prior conception of superhuman beings and of their relationship to human beings. So long as it was imagined that they occasionally assumed human form, and could mingle in very human affairs, a communication from a Not-man, I will not say a monster, presents no great difficulties. The Greeks went so far as to ascribe to men of earlier times a closer intercourse with the gods. But even with them the idea that man should not enter too closely into the presence of the gods breaks forth here and there, and Semele, who wished to be embraced by Zeus in all his glory, found her destruction in this ecstasy. As soon as the Deity was conceived in less human fashion, as in the Old Testament, intercourse between God and man became more and more difficult. In Genesis this intercourse is still represented very simply and familiarly, as when God walks about in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve are ashamed of their nakedness before Him. Soon, however, a higher conception of God enters, so that Moses, for example (Exodus xxxiii. 23), may not see the face of Jehovah, but still ventures at least to look upon His back. The writer of the Fourth Gospel goes [pg 162] still farther and declares (i. 18), “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared Him.” Here we clearly see that the possibility of intercourse between man and God, and a revelation of God to man, depends chiefly or exclusively on the conception which man has previously formed of God and man. In all theological researches we must carefully bear in mind that the idea of God is our idea, which we have formed in part through tradition, and in part by our own thinking; and we must not forget that existence formed an essential attribute of this idea, whatever opposition may have been raised against the ontological proof in later times. After what we have seen of the true relationship between thought and speech, it follows that the name, and with it the idea of a divine being, can only proceed from man. God is and remains our God. We can have a knowledge of Him only through our inner consciousness, not through our senses. God Himself has no more imparted His name to mankind than the fixed stars and planets to which we have given names, although we only see, but do not hear or touch them. This must be absolutely clear to us before we dare speak of the possibility or impossibility of a revelation.

Now it is very useful, before we treat of our own idea of a revelation emanating from God, to look round among other nations and see how they reached the idea of a revelation. We see in India that a [pg 163] number of hymns in an ancient dialect and in fixed metres were preserved by oral tradition—the method was wonderful, but is authenticated by history—before there could have been a thought of reducing them to writing. These hymns contain very little that would appear to be too high or too deep for an ordinary human poet. They are of great interest to us because they make known, as clearly as possible, the sound of the oldest Aryan language, and the nature of the oldest Aryan gods. As Professor Deussen, in his valuable History of Philosophy says, (I, 83), the Vedic religion, which he at the same time calls the oldest philosophy, is richer in disclosures than any other in the world. In this sense he very properly calls the study of the Rigveda the high school of the science of religion, so that as he says no one can discuss these matters without a knowledge of it. This unique distinction rests, as he truly remarks, on the fact, “That the process on which originally all gods depend, the personification of the phenomena of nature, while it is more or less obscured by all other religions, in the Rigveda still takes place, so to speak, before our eyes visibly and palpably.” I have long preached this in vain. All who have studied the Rigveda say this, and all who have not studied it say just the contrary, and lay especial stress upon the fact that these hymns contain ideas that once and for all they declare as modern. But no one has ever contended that this is not so. What is historically the oldest, may from a higher [pg 164] point of view be quite modern, and there are scholars who even look upon Adam as a reformer of mankind. Those who best know the Rigveda have often shown that it stands at a tolerably advanced stage, and here and there casts a distant glance into its own past. I myself have often said that I would give much if I could escape from my own proofs of the age of this collection of hymns, and could clearly show that at least some of these Vedic hymns had been added later.

These hymns, therefore, just because, judging from their language and metre, they are older than everything else in India, or even in the entire Aryan world, and because they are mainly concerned with the ancient gods of nature, appeared to the Hindus themselves as apaurusheya, that is, not wrought by man. They were called Sruti, (that which was heard), in distinction from other literature, which was designated as Smriti, or recollection.

All this is easily intelligible. There followed a period, however, during which the true understanding of the hymns became considerably obscured, and a new series of works, the so-called Brâhmanas, arose. These were very different from the hymns. They are composed in a younger language and in prose. They treat of the sacrifice, so full of significance in India, at which the hymns were employed, and which seems to me to have been originally designed for measuring time, and thus served to mark the progress of civilisation. They explain the meaning [pg 165] of the hymns, often quite erroneously; but they contain some interesting information upon the condition of India, long after the period when the hymns first appeared, and yet before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century before Christ. It has been supposed that, as the Brâhmanas were composed in prose, they were originally written, according to the hypothesis of Wolf, that prose everywhere presupposes the knowledge of writing. I cannot admit this in the case of India; at any rate, there is no trace of any acquaintance with writing in the whole of this extensive mass of literature. It was throughout a mnemonic literature, and just because the art of writing was unknown, the memory was cultivated in a manner of which we have no idea. At all events, the Brahmans themselves knew nothing of the Brâhmanas in written form, and included them with the hymns under the names Veda and Sruti; that is, they regarded them, in our phraseology, as revealed, and not the work of men.

The remarkable thing, however, is that they did not assume, like the Romans in the case of Numa and Egeria, a communication from the Vedic gods of nature to ordinary men, but contented themselves with declaring that the Veda had been seen by the Rishis, whose name Rishi they explained etymologically as “seer.”

It is clear, therefore, that what the Brahmans understood under Sruti was nothing more than literature composed in an ancient language (for the Brâhmanas are also composed in an ancient language, though [pg 166] not as ancient as that of the hymns), and treating of matters on which apparently man alone can establish no authority. For how could ordinary man take on himself to speak about the gods or to give directions for the sacrifice, to make promises for the reward of pious works, or even to decide what is morally right or wrong? More than human authority was necessary for this, and so the Brâhmanas, as well as the hymns, were declared to be apaurusheya, that is, not human, though by no means divine, in the sense of having been imparted by one of the Devas.

We see, therefore, that the idea of the Sruti, while approaching to our idea of revelation as apaurusheya, that is, not human, does not quite coincide with it. What was ancient and incomprehensible, was called superhuman, and soon became infallible and beyond assault. If we look at other religions, we find that Buddhism denied the Veda every authority, and in conformity with its own character especially excluded every idea of superhuman revelation. In China, too, we look in vain for revelation. In Palestine, however, we find the idea that the Lord Himself spoke with Moses, who delivered His commands to Israel, and the tables of the commandments were even written by God's own fingers on both sides. But this must not be confounded with written literature. The idea that the entire Old Testament was written or revealed by Jehovah is absolutely not of ancient Jewish origin, whatever respect may have been shown to the holy books as recognised in the Synagogue.

[pg 167]

As for Islam, the Koran is looked upon as communicated to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel, even as Zoroaster in the Avesta claims to have received certain communications in conversation with Ahuramazda.

In Christianity, in whose history the theory of revelation has played so great a part, there is in fact—and this is frequently overlooked—no declaration on the subject by Christ or the apostles themselves. That the Gospels, as they have come down to us, have been revealed, is nowhere stated in them, nor can it be gathered from the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles. No one has ever maintained that any New Testament Scripture was known to Christ or even to the apostles.51 On the contrary, if we take the titles of the Gospels in their natural meaning, they do not purport to have been written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John themselves: they are simply the sacred history as it was recorded by others according to each of these men. Attempts have indeed been made to reason away the meaning of κατά, “according to,” and interpret it as “by,” but it is more natural to take it in its ordinary sense. When Paul, in his second Epistle to Timothy (iii. 16), says, “Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching,” this is the usual mode of expression applied to the Scriptures of the Old, not of the New Testament (John v. 39), and would [pg 168] merely signify inspired, breathed in, not revealed in each word and letter.

In any case we learn this much from a comparative study of religions, that the majority of them have their holy books, which are usually the oldest remains of literature, oral or written, that they possess. They look upon the authors of these Scriptures as extraordinary, even superhuman beings; and the later theologians in order to remove from the minds of the people every doubt as to their truth, devised the most ingenious theories, to show how these books were not produced by men, but were merely seen by them, and how in the end even the words and letters of the original text were dictated to certain individuals. It is imagined, therefore, that the Deity condescended to speak Hebrew or Greek in the dialect of that period, and that therefore no letter or accent may be disturbed.

This would, of course, make the matter very easy, and this is no doubt the reason why the theory has found so many adherents. It is only strange that no founder of any religion ever appears to have felt the necessity of leaving anything in his own writing either to his contemporaries or to posterity. No one has ever attempted to prove that Moses wrote books, nor has it ever been said of Christ that he composed a book (John vii. 15). The same is true of Buddha, in spite of the legend of the alphabets; and of Mohammed we know from himself that he could neither read nor write. What we possess, therefore, in the [pg 169] way of holy Scriptures is always the product of a later generation, and subject to all the hazards involved in oral tradition. This was not to be avoided, and ought not to surprise us. If we attempt ourselves to write down without the aid of books or memoranda, occurrences or conversations of which we were witnesses fifty years ago, we shall see how difficult it is, and how untrustworthy is our memory. We may be entirely veracious, but it by no means follows that we are also true and trustworthy. Let any one try to describe the incidents of the Austro-Prussian War without referring to books, and he will see how, with the best intentions, names and dates will waver and reel. When did the German National Assembly elect the German Emperor? Who were the members of the regency? Who was Henry Simon, and were there one or more Simons, like the nine Simons in the New Testament? Who can answer these questions now without newspapers, and yet these are matters only fifty years old, and at the time were well known to all of us. Was it different with the Christians in the year 50 A.D.? It was therefore very natural that a certain inspiration or preëminent endowment should be demanded for the authors of the Gospels; if some do so still, it is on their own responsibility, just as if we demanded for the mother of Mary the same immaculate birth as for Mary herself, et sic ad infinitum. These are for the most part merely excuses for human unbelief. Nothing proves the veracity of the authors of the Gospels [pg 170] so clearly as the natural, often derogatory words which they use of themselves, or even more of the apostles. These did not understand, as they say, the simplest parables or teachings; they were jealous of one another; Peter even denied the Lord; in short, the authors of the Gospels cannot be credited with sinlessness and infallibility, supposing that they were really the apostles.

If they were not, then all these difficulties of our own making disappear. We then find in the Gospels just what we might expect: no ingeniously prepared statements without inconsistencies and without contradictions, but simple, natural accounts, such as were current from the first to the third generations in certain circles or localities, and even according to the attachment of certain families to the personal narrations of one or another of the apostles. We must not forget that in the first generation the necessity for a record was not even felt. Children were still brought up as Jews, for Christianity did not seek to destroy, only to fulfil; and as all the Scriptures, that is the Old Testament, were derived from God and were good for instruction, they continued in use for teaching without further question. But in the second and third generations the breach between Jews and Christians became wider and wider, and the number of those who had known Christ and the apostles, less and less; the need of books especially for the instruction of children consequently became more urgent, and the four Gospels thus arose by a [pg 171] natural process in answer to a natural and even irresistible want. The difficulties involved even in the smallest contradiction between the Gospels on a theory of inspiration thus disappear of themselves; nay, their discrepancies become welcome, because they entirely exclude every idea of intentional deviation, and simply exhibit what the historical conditions would lead us to expect. Of what harm is it, for instance, that Matthew (viii. 28), in relating the expulsion of the devils in the land of the Gergesenes, speaks of two possessed men, while Mark (v. 2) knows only of one among the Gadarenes? Mark also speaks only of unclean spirits, while Matthew speaks of devils. Mark and Luke know the name of the sufferer, Legion; Matthew does not mention the Roman name. These are matters of small import in human traditions and records; in divine revelations they would be difficult to explain.

But it becomes still more difficult when we come to expressions which are really significant and essential for Christianity, for even in these we find inconsistencies. What can be more important than the passage in which Christ asks his disciples, “But whom say ye that I am,” and Peter answers, “Thou art the Messiah” (Mark viii. 29). That was a purely Jewish-Christian answer, and Jesus accepts it as the perfect truth, which, however, should still remain secret. In (Matthew xvi. 16) Peter says not only, “Thou art the Messiah,” but adds, “Son of the living God.” This makes a great difference, and the remarkable thing [pg 172] is, that later on Jesus only commands his disciples to keep secret that he, Jesus, was the Messiah, and says nothing of himself as the Son of God. So much has been written about other discrepancies in this passage, particularly of the promise of the building of the church upon this rock (Peter), which is only found in (Matthew xvi. 18), that we have nothing further to say about it, unless it be that in Mark in this very passage Jesus rebukes Peter because he thinks more of the world than of God, like so many of his later successors.

Let us bear in mind further that neither revelation nor divine inspiration was really necessary for recording most of the things related in the Gospels. The less, the better; for either the witnesses knew that Pilate was at the time governor in Palestine, that Caiaphas was high priest, and that Jairus was ruler of a synagogue, or they did not know it, and in that case we cannot assume that these things were revealed to them by God without irreverence. If, however, it is impossible that God should have inspired or sanctioned the historical part of the Gospels, why then the other part, which contains the teachings of Christ? Is it not much better, much more honest and trustworthy for the writers to have communicated them to us, as they knew and understood them (and that they occasionally misunderstood them they themselves quite honestly admit), than to have been supernaturally inspired for the purpose, and even to have received a revelation in the form of a theophany? [pg 173] Through such weak human ideas we merely drag the Real, the truly Divine, into the dust, and from whom do these ideas of a divine inspiration or revelation come, if not from men as they were everywhere, whether in India or Judea? Everywhere the natural is divine, the supernatural or miraculous is human.

Even for the Apostles and the authors of the Gospels there was only one revelation: that was the revelation through Christ; and this has an entirely different meaning. To understand this, however, we must glance at what we know of the intellectual movements of that time. The Jewish nation cherished two great expectations. The one was ancient and purely Jewish, the expectation of the Messiah, the anointed (Christ), who should be the political and spiritual liberator of the chosen but enslaved people of Israel. The other was also Jewish, but transfused with Greek philosophy, the recognition of the word (Logos) as the Son of God, who should reconcile or unite humanity with God. The first declares itself most clearly, though not exclusively, in the three so-called Synoptic Gospels, the second in the so-called Gospel of John. But it is worthy of note how often these apparently remote ideas are found combined in the Gospels. The idea that a man can be the Son of God was blasphemy in a strict Jewish view, and it was for this reason that the last question of the high priest was, “I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God” (Matthew xxvi. 63). The Jewish Messiah could [pg 174] never be the Son of God, the Word, in the Christian sense of the term, but only in the sense in which many nations have called God the Father of men. In this sense, also, the Jews say (John viii. 4), “We have one father, even God,” while they start back affrighted at the idea of a divine sonship of man. The Messiah, according to Jewish doctrine, was to be the son of David (Matthew xxii. 42), as the people appear to have called Jesus (Mark x. 47, xv. 39), and in order to counteract this view Christ himself said, in a passage of great historical import: “How then doth David in spirit call the Messiah Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If then David called him Lord, how is he his son?” With these words the true Messiah publicly renounced his royal descent from David, whilst he immediately laid claim to a much higher one. Of what use is it, then, that the author of the Gospel takes such pains in the first chapter to trace Joseph's descent genealogically from David, in spite of the fact that he does not represent Joseph himself as the natural father of Jesus?

These contradictions are quite conceivable in an age strongly influenced by different intellectual currents, but they would be intolerable in a revealed or divinely inspired book. All becomes intelligible, clear, and free from contradiction, if we see in the Synoptic Gospels that which they profess to be—narratives of what had long been told and believed in certain circles [pg 175] about the teaching and person of Christ. I say, what they themselves profess to be; for can we believe, that if the authors had really witnessed a miraculous vision, if every word and every letter had been whispered to them, they would have made no mention of it? They relate so many wonders, why not this one, the greatest of all? But it is not enough that they do not claim any miraculous communication for themselves or their works. Luke states in plain words the character of his gospel, “For as much as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of the word (Logos); it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.”

What can be clearer? Theophilus had evidently received a not very systematic Christian training, such as was possible under the conditions of that time. As Luke says, there were even then several works on the matters of common belief among Christians. In order, however, that Theophilus may have a trustworthy knowledge of them, his friend (whether Luke or any one else) determines to communicate them to him in regular order, as they had been imparted to him, without asserting that he had himself been from the beginning an eye-witness of them, or [pg 176] a minister of the Word. It is apparent, therefore, that the writer rests upon a tradition derived from eye-witnesses, and that he had even investigated everything with care. Is it credible that he would not have made mention of a revelation or a theophany, had either fallen to his lot? He also lays stress upon his orderly arrangement, which probably implies that even at that time there were the same discrepancies in the sequence of events that we observe in the four Gospels, to say nothing about the numerous apocryphal Gospels. This is just what we as historians expected, in fact it could scarcely be otherwise. Christ's message had first to pass through the colloquial process, the leavening process of oral transmission; then followed the reduction to written form, and it is this that we have, apart from the corruptions of copyists. It is difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise, and still we are not content with these facts, and imagine that we could have done it much better ourselves.

When we take the Synoptic Gospels one by one, we find in Luke the most complete and probably the latest sequence of all the important events; in Mark, the shortest and probably most original narrative, which only contains that which seemed to him undisputed or of the greatest importance; while Matthew, on the contrary, clearly presents the tradition formed and established among the Jewish Christians and believers in the Messiah.

If we may speak of communities at this early time, [pg 177] the community for which the first Gospel was intended manifestly consisted of converted Jews, who had recognised in Jesus their long-expected Messiah or Christ, and were, therefore, convinced that everything which had been expected of the Messiah came true in this Jesus. They went still farther. When they were once convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, many traditions arose which ascribed to him what he, if he were the Messiah, must have done. This is the pervading feature of the first Gospel, as every one who reads it carefully may easily be convinced. This alone explains the frequent and frank expression that this and that occurred “for thus it was written, and thus it was spoken by the prophet.” Every idea of intentional invention of Messianic fulfilments, which has so often been asserted, disappears of itself in our interpretation of the origin of the Gospel. It must be so, people thought, and they soon told themselves and their children that it had been so, and all in good faith, for otherwise Jesus could not have been the expected Messiah.

If we examine the gospel of Matthew from this historical standpoint in detail, we find that it begins with an entirely unnecessary genealogy of Joseph, the ostensible father of Jesus. Then follows the birth, and this is confirmed in i. 22, “For all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” namely, Isaiah (vii. 14), “Behold a maiden is with child and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This means simply [pg 178] that it will be the first-born son, and that he will be called “God is with us,” and, therefore, certainly nothing supernatural.

The next story that the birth took place in Bethlehem, and that the wise men from the East saw the star over Bethlehem, is again founded on the prophet's word that the ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem.

When the flight of Joseph and Mary to Egypt with the Christ child is told, it is again set forth in ii. 15, that what the prophet said might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”

The massacre of the children in Bethlehem, with all its difficulties in the eyes of the historian, finds a sufficient reason in verse 17 on the words which were spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, “A voice was heard in Rama, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Later, when Joseph returns with the child and journeys to Nazareth, this too is explained by the words of the prophet, who said, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

On the false idea of the words of the prophet, that a Nazarene is an inhabitant of Nazareth, I shall say nothing here. Everything, even such popular errors, is quite intelligible from this point of view, and only shows how convinced the people were that Jesus was the Messiah, and therefore must have fulfilled everything which was expected of the Messiah. To us [pg 179] these fulfilments of the prophecy may not sound very convincing. But as a presentation of the ideas which then held sway over the people, and as proof of the grasp of the colloquial process, they are of great value to the historian.

The appearance of John the Baptist, too, is immediately explained by reference to prophetic words (iii. 3). And when Jesus, after the imprisonment of John, left his abode and removed to Capernaum, as was quite natural, this, likewise must have occurred (iv. 14-16) that certain words of Isaiah should be fulfilled.

There follows in the fifth to the seventh chapters the real kernel of Christian teaching in the sermon on the mount, and the announcement of the coming kingdom of God upon earth. Here we ask nothing more than a true statement, such as an apostle or his disciples were fully in a position to give us. No miraculous inspiration is needed for it; on the contrary, it would only injure for us the trustworthiness of the reporter. In the next chapters we read of the works done by Jesus, which were soon construed by the people as miracles, while in another place the evangelist sets the forgiveness of sins higher than all miracles, than all healing of the sick, and even declares this to be a power which God had given to men (ix. 8). Jesus himself often makes his healing power depend on the faith of the person to be healed, and of miraculous arts he says not a word (ix. 28). Next follow the appointment and [pg 180] despatch of the disciples, and soon after those words, which are so significant for this Gospel (xi. 27), “All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the son willeth to reveal him.” Here we have in a few words the true spirit, the true inspiration of the teaching which Christ proclaimed, that he was not only the Messiah or the son of David, but the true son of God, the Logos, which God willed when he willed man, the highest thought of God, the highest revelation of God, which was imparted in Jesus to blind humanity. We cannot judge of this so correctly as those who saw and knew Jesus in his corporeal existence, and found in him all those perfections, particularly in his life and conduct, of which human nature is capable. We must here rely on the evidence of his contemporaries who had no motive to discover in him, the son of a carpenter, the realisation on earth of the divine ideal of man, if this ideal had not stood realised in him, before their eyes, in the flesh. What is true Christianity if it be not the belief in the divine sonship of man, as the Greek philosophers had rightly surmised, but had never seen realised on earth? Here is the point, where the two great intellectual currents of the Aryan and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah of the Jews was recognised as the Logos, the true son of God, and that he opened or revealed to every man the [pg 181] possibility to become what he had always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought, the Word, the Logos, the Son of God. Knowing here means being. A man may be a prince, the son of a king, but if he does not know it, he is not so. Even so from all eternity man was the son of God, but until he really knew it, he was not so. The reporters in the Synoptic Gospels only occasionally recognise the divine sonship of man with real clearness, for in their view the practical element in Christianity was predominant, but in the end everything practical must be based upon theory or faith. Our duties toward God and man, our love for God and for man, are as nothing, without the firm foundation which is formed only by our faith in God, as the Thinker and Ruler of the world, the Father of the Son, who was revealed through him as the Father of all sons, of all men. Such sayings are especially significant in the Synoptic Evangelists, because it might appear as though they had not recognised the deepest mystery of the revelation of Christ, but were satisfied with the purely practical parts of his teachings. Shortly after, when Jesus again proves his healing powers among the people, and the Pharisees persecute him because the people were more and more inclined to recognise in him the son of David, the Evangelist again declares (xii. 17) that all this occurred that the words of the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased; I will [pg 182] put my spirit upon him, and he shall declare judgment unto the Gentiles.”

Then follow many of the profoundest and most beautiful parables which contain the secrets of Christ's teaching, and of which some, as we read, and not by any means the most obscure, remained unintelligible even to the disciples. Even at that time his fame had become so great, that on returning to his own birthplace, the people would scarcely believe that he was the same as the son of the carpenter, that his mother was named Mary, and his brothers, Jacob, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, who like his sisters were all still living. Yet among his own people he could accomplish but few works. The Gospel then goes on to relate that as Herod had caused John to be beheaded, Jesus again withdrew to a lonely place, probably to escape the persecutions of Herod. Then follow the really important chapters, full of teachings and of parables, intended to illumine these teachings and to bring them home to the people. Here we naturally do not expect any appeal to the prophets; on the contrary we often find a very bold advance beyond the ancient law or a higher interpretation of the ancient Jewish teachings. As soon, however, as we return to facts like the last journey to Jerusalem, and the arrest of Jesus through the treachery of Judas, the words immediately recur that all this came to pass that the Scriptures should be fulfilled (xxvi. 54). Even Jesus himself, when he commands his disciples to make no resistance, must [pg 183] have added the words, “But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be,” which clearly refers to the famous prophecy of Isaiah in the fifty-third chapter. Even the thirty pieces of silver which were paid Judas for his betrayal, are considered necessary, that a prophesy of Jeremiah's may be fulfilled. But it seems that this prophesy is not to be found in Jeremiah, and must be sought in Zechariah (xi. 12, 13). Such a confusion might easily occur among the people, imperfectly acquainted with the text of the prophets. In this case, therefore, it is quite harmless; but how could it possibly occur in a revealed gospel? At the crucifixion of Jesus the garments are divided, and another passage is immediately recalled, this time in a Psalm (xxii. 19), in which the poet says of himself that his enemies divided his garments between them, but there is no mention of the Messiah. Such an application of the words of the Psalm to Jesus is perfectly intelligible in the contemporary feeling of the Jewish people. Once convinced that Jesus was the Messiah or Christ, all the incidents of his life and death must necessarily remind them of the prophecies which had been current for years, and kept alive among them the hope of their deliverer. Such details were probably employed to deepen the conviction in themselves and others that Jesus was really the Messiah. This is all quite natural and comprehensible; but if we look at it with the idea that the writer was called and inspired by God, what must we say? First, in some [pg 184] cases there are plain errors which would be impossible in an infallible witness. Secondly, must we believe that such events as the birth of Christ in Bethlehem and his betrayal by Judas took place merely in order that certain prophecies might be fulfilled? This would reduce the life of Christ to a mere phantasm and rob it of its entire historical significance. Or shall we assume (as some critics have done) that all these events were simply invented to prove the Messiahship of Jesus?

From all these difficulties we escape when we recognise in the Gospels a record or deposit of what was developed in the first century in the consciousness of the Christians, and concerning the Gospel of Matthew in particular, Christians who were converts from Judaism. In this view everything that borders on intentional deceit drops away of itself. The facts remain as before, as the people had explained and arranged them. According to Matthew and his successors, Christianity originated as is described in the Gospel according to Matthew. Many facts may in the minds and mouths of the people have assumed a more popular or legendary form; that was not to be avoided. We know how much this popular influence, or what I call the colloquial process, has infected the traditions of other nations, and it is very helpful to know this, in order to do justice to the Gospels. For how should this influence have been wanting just in the first and second centuries in Palestine? Everything becomes clear when we accept [pg 185] the historical view, supported by many parallel cases, of the origin of the Gospels in the mouths of the people. The tradition was just such as we should expect under the existing conditions. Of intentional deceit there is no further question. We cannot expect anything other or better than what we have, i.e. what the people, or the young Christian community, related about the life of the founder of the new religion, unless it were a record from the hand of the founder of our religion himself; for even the apostles are only depicted as men, and their comprehension is represented as purely human and often very fallible. When we speak of revelation, the term can only refer to the true revelation of the eternal truths through Jesus himself, as we find them in the Gospels, and the verity of which, even where it is somewhat veiled by the tradition, confers on it the character of revelation. For it is a fact which we should never forget, that even the best attested revelation, as it can only reach us in human setting and by human means, does not make truth, but it is truth, deeply felt truth, which makes revelation. Truth constitutes revelation, not revelation truth. We therefore lose nothing by this view, but gain immensely, and are at once relieved from all the little difficulties which a laborious criticism thinks it discovers by a comparison of the Gospels with one another. The only difficulty that seems to remain is this, that the Synoptic Gospels are so often content to put the Jewish conception of Jesus as the Messiah, as the son of [pg 186] David and Abraham, and finally as the bodily son of God, in the foreground, and only hint at the leading and fundamental truth of Christ's teaching. We must never forget that the apostles were no philosophers, and the Logos idea in its full significance and historical development demands, for its correct understanding, a considerable philosophical training.

Here we are helped by the Fourth Gospel, which must decidedly be ascribed to Christians with more of Greek culture. That Greek ideas had penetrated into Palestine is best seen in the works of Philo Judæus, the contemporary of Jesus. We cannot suppose that he stood alone, and other Jewish thinkers must like him have accepted the Logos idea as a solution of the riddle of the universe. Out of soil like this, permeated and fructified with such ideas, grew the Fourth Gospel. If we ever make it plain to ourselves that Jews who, like Philo, had adopted the Logos idea with all its consequences, necessarily recognised in the Logos the Son of God, the chosen of God (Luke xxiii. 35), the realised image of God, and then in the actual Jesus the incarnation or realisation, or rather the universalising of this image, the Fourth Gospel ascribed to John will become much clearer to us. Here lies the nucleus of true Christianity, in so far as it deals with the personality of Christ, and the relation of God to humanity. It is no longer said that God has made and created the world, but that God has thought and uttered the world. All existences are thoughts, or collectively the thought [pg 187] (Logos) of God, and this thought has found its most perfect expression, its truest word, in a man in Jesus. In this sense and in no other was Jesus the Son of God and the Word, as the Jews of Greek culture believed, and as the author of the Fourth Gospel believed, and as still later the young Athanasius and his contemporaries believed, and as we must believe if we really wish to be Christians. There is no other really Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus what he was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz., children of God. This light or this revelation shines through here and there even in the Synoptic Gospels, though so often obscured by the Jewish Messianic ideas.

In the Fourth Gospel the influence of these ideas and their employment by Jesus and his disciples cannot be mistaken. And why should not Jesus have adopted and fulfilled the Logos ideas of the Greek world as well as the Messianic ideas of the Jewish people? Do the Jews as thinkers rank so much higher than the Greeks? How does the first verse read, which might well have been said by a Neo-platonic philosopher, “In the beginning was the Word”? This Word is the Logos, and this Greek [pg 188] word is in itself quite enough to indicate the Greek origin of the idea. Word (Logos), however, signified at the same time thought. This creative Word was with God, nay, God himself was this Word. And all things were made by this Word, that is to say, in this Word and in all Words God thought the world. Whoever cannot or will not understand this, will never enter into the deepest depths of the teaching of Christ, good Christian as he may otherwise be, and the Fourth Gospel in its deepest meaning does not exist for him. That there was life in these words or things shining forth from God, we know, and this life, be it what it may, was a light to man, the light of the world, even though man had long been blind and imprisoned in darkness, and did not understand the life, the light, the Word.

Now, in passing to the gospel story, the evangelist says that Jesus brought or himself was the true light, while John's duty was merely to announce his coming beforehand. This is certainly a great step—it is the Christian recognition of the Word or of the Son of God in the historical Jesus, whose historical character is confirmed by the character of John the Baptist. The people believed in John, and John believed in Jesus. Of course we must not assume that the philosophical significance of the Word, or of the Logos, was ever clearly and completely present to the people in the form worked out by the Neo-platonists. That was impossible at the time, and it is so even now with the great mass of Christians. [pg 189] On the other hand, the many subtleties and oddities which have made the later Neo-platonism so repulsive to us, hardly existed for the consciousness of the masses, which could only adopt the fundamental ideas of the Logos system with a great effort. Religion is not philosophy; but there has never been a religion, and there never can be, which is not based on philosophy, and does not presuppose the philosophical notions of the people. The highest aim, toward which all philosophy strives, is and will always remain the idea of God, and it was this idea which Christianity grasped in the Platonic sense, and presented to us most clearly in its highest form, in the Fourth Gospel. To John, if for brevity we may so call the author of the Fourth Gospel, God was no longer the Jewish Jehovah, who had created the world in six days, formed Adam out of the dust, and every living creature out of the ground; for him God had acquired a higher significance, his nature was a spiritual nature, his creation was a spiritual creation, and as for man the Word comprehends everything, represents everything, realises everything that exists for him; so God was conceived as being in the beginning, and then expressing Himself in the Word, or as one with the Word. To God the Word, that is the all-comprehensive Word, was the utterance, the actualising or communicating of His subjective divine ideas, which were in Him, and through the Word passed out of Him into human perception, and thereby into objective reality. This [pg 190] second reality, inseparable from the first, was the second Logos, inseparable as cause and effect are inseparable in essence. As the highest of all Logoi was man, the most perfect man was recognised as the son of God, the Logos become flesh, the highest thought and will of God. In this there is nothing miraculous. Everything is consistently thought out, and in this sense Jesus could have been nothing else than the Word or the Son of God. All this sounds very strange to us at first, because we have forgotten the full meaning of the utterance or the Word, and are not able to transfer the creation of the Word and the Thought, even though only in the form of a similitude, to that which was in the beginning. A similitude it is and must remain, like everything that we say of God; but it is a higher and more spiritual similitude than any that have been or can be applied to God in the various religions and philosophies of the world. God has thought the world, and in the act of thinking has uttered or expressed it; and these thoughts which were in Him, and were thought and uttered by Him in rational sequence, are the Logoi, or species, or kinds, which we recognise again by reflection in the objective world, as rationally developing one from another. Here we have the true “Origin of Species” long before Darwin's book.

To the philosophers this is all perfectly intelligible. The step taken by Christ and his disciples (those, namely, who speak to us in the Fourth Gospel) was this, that they believed they recognised in the historical [pg 191] Jesus, the son of the carpenter of Nazareth, the highest Logos “Man” in his complete realisation. It was entirely natural, but it can only have occurred after overpowering experiences, for it must have signified more than we understand under the “ideal of a man,” although originally both expressions are derived from the same source. Nor was the designation of the Saviour as the Word, or, in more human fashion, the Son of God, intended so much for him conceived purely spiritually, but rather for his personality as inspired by the highest ideas.

In all these matters we must think of the ever changing medium, in which these expressions moved. Word and Son in the mouths of the people might coalesce or be kept quite apart; Son of David, Son of Abraham, might at times take the place of Son of God, and all these phrases might appear in popular intercourse to express only what others called the Messiah or Christ. In any case, all these were the highest expressions which could be applied to man or to the son of man. To the ordinary understanding, still permeated with heathen ideas, it was certainly monstrous to elevate a man to Olympus, to transform him into a son of God. But what was there for man higher than man? Intermediate beings, such as demons, heroes, or angels, had never been seen, nor did they answer the purpose. One step, however small, above the human, could only lead to the divine, or bring into consciousness the divine in man. What seemed blasphemy to the Jewish consciousness [pg 192] was just that truth which Christ proclaimed, the truth for which he laid down his human life. If we enter into this thought, we shall understand not only the occasional expressions of the Synoptics, but the Fourth Gospel especially in all its depth. How it was possible to make this last Gospel intelligible without these ideas, is almost incomprehensible.

What, then, did the readers think of the Word, that was in the beginning, that was with God, that even was God, of the Word, by which all things were made? And what was understood when Jesus was called the Word, that was in the world, without the world knowing him, while those who recognised and acknowledged him as the Word, thereby became like him sons of God? We must ascribe some meaning to these words, and what can we ascribe if we do not take the philosophic term “Logos” in its historic sense? One need only attempt to translate the beginning of the Fourth Gospel into a non-Christian language, and we shall realise that without its heathen antecedents the words remain absolutely unintelligible. We find translations that mean simply, “In the beginning was the substantive.” That may seem incredible to us; but what better idea has a poor old peasant woman in reading the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, and what better idea can the village preacher give her if she asks for an explanation?

For us the greatest difficulty remains in verse 14, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” [pg 193] But what grounds have we for setting our opinion against the unhesitating acceptance of contemporaries, and later even of the Alexandrian philosophers? They must have felt the same difficulties as ourselves, but they overcame them in consideration of what they had seen in Jesus, or even only heard of him. They could not comprehend him in his moral elevation and holiness, except as the Logos, the Word, the Son of God. If we follow them, we are safe; if not, we can no doubt say much in excuse, but we place ourselves in the strongest opposition to history. We may say that men have never seen any divine idea, any divine word, any divine thought of any kind realised on earth; nay, that man can never have the right to pass such a deifying judgment, of his own sovereign power, on anything lying within his actual experience. We so easily forget that if God is once brought near to humanity, and no longer regarded as only transcendent, humanity must, at the same time, be thought and brought nearer to the divine. We may acknowledge this and still maintain that others, like the apostles and the philosophers of Alexandria after them, must have felt the same difficulty, perhaps even more strongly than we, who never were eye-witnesses nor Platonic philosophers. Yet they still insisted that Jesus in his life, conduct, and death demonstrated that human nature could rise no higher than in him, and that he was all and fulfilled all that God had comprised in the Logos “man.” Jesus himself declares, when Peter first called him the son of [pg 194] God, that flesh and blood had not revealed it unto him, but his Father which is in heaven (Matthew xvi. 17). And this was perfect truth and applies to us also.

We may go through the whole Fourth Gospel, and we shall find that it remains incomprehensible, except from the standpoint that we ascribe to the author. When we read (i. 18), “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him,” shall we then think only of the son of the carpenter, the bodily Jesus, and not rather of the Word that was in him, and that was as near to the Father as He to himself; that was in the bosom of the Father, and that declared to us the Father, who was in the beginning? Has not Jesus himself stated (iii. 13) that no man hath ascended up to heaven except him who came down from heaven, that is from God, and that no one has seen the Father, save he which is of God, that is the Son (vi. 46)? These are, of course, figurative expressions, but their meaning cannot be doubtful. When Nathanael called Jesus, Rabbi, King of Israel, and Son of God, his ideas may still have been very immature, but in time the true meaning of the Son of God breaks through more and more clearly.

The declaration of Jesus to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born anew,” is a remarkable one—remarkable, because the Brahmans from the earliest times make use of the same expression, and call themselves the reborn, the twice born (Dvija), and both no doubt [pg 195] attributed the same meaning to the second birth, namely, the recognition of the true nature of man, the Brahmans as one with Brahman, that is, the Word; the Christians as one with the Word, or the Son of God. And why should this belief in the Son give everlasting life (ii. 16)? Because Jesus has through his own sonship in God declared to us ours also. This knowledge gives us eternal life through the conviction that we too have something divine and eternal within us, namely, the word of God, the Son, whom He hath sent (v. 38). Jesus himself, however, is the only begotten Son, the light of the world. He first fulfilled and illumined the divine idea which lies darkly in all men (see John viii. 12, xii. 35, 46), and made it possible for all men to become actually what they have always been potentially—sons of God.

Further reading in the Fourth Gospel will of course show us many things that are only indirectly connected with this, which I believe to be the supreme truth of Christianity. To the woman of Samaria Jesus only declares that God is a spirit, and that he must be worshipped in spirit, bound neither to Jerusalem nor to Samaria. She knows only that the Messiah will come, she was scarcely ready for the idea of a son of God, but like the Pharisees (v. 18) would have considered this only as blasphemy (x. 33). But again and again the keynote of the new teaching breaks through. When Jesus speaks of his works, he calls them the works of his [pg 196] Father (v. 19); even the resurrection from the dead is explained by him, as clearly as possible, to be an awakening through the Word, “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life” (v. 14), which means that he is immortal. He, however, who did not recognise the Word and his divine nature, as Jesus taught it, does not yet possess that eternal life, for which he is destined, but which must first be gained through insight, or belief in Jesus. Can anything be clearer than the words (John xvii. 3), “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”? Of course many of these expressions were not understood by the masses, or were even misunderstood. The words were repeated, and when necessary, especially in the questionings of children, they had to be explained somehow, often by a parable or story, which the mother invents at the moment, to quiet them. All this is inevitable; it has happened everywhere, and happens still. Whoever wishes to learn how tradition or common report treats historical facts, should compare the Günther or Etzel of the Nibelungen with the Gundicarius or Attila of history, or Charles the Great crowned by the Pope with the Charlemagne who besieged Jerusalem, or Hruodlandus with Roland, or Arturus with Arthur. Or, to come to later days, we need only recall the wonderful tales of the French journals during the last Franco-German War, and we shall be astonished at [pg 197] the manner in which, quite unintentionally, the people adapt all tidings to their own views. Nineteen hundred years ago there were no newspapers. Why should it have been different then?

What the children had heard and believed, they remembered when they had grown older, or themselves had become parents. It was convenient and natural to tell their children again what they had heard in their own childhood, and like a rolling stone, with each repetition the tradition constantly took up new miraculous elements. There is scarcely a miracle in the New Testament that did not account for itself spontaneously in this way, and that did not in its original form reveal to us a far higher truth than the mere miracle itself. And when the time came for a record, was it not quite natural that everything available should be gathered together, according to the tales told and believed from house to house, or village to village? In this process, moreover, the appeal to a voucher, if possible to a contemporary or eye-witness, was not at all surprising, especially if there was a still living tradition, that this or that had been heard from one of the apostles, and could be traced back to him from son to father. Why should we put aside, nay, indignantly reject, this simple, natural theory, suggested by all the circumstances, and capable of at once removing all difficulties, in order to prefer another, which has the advantage, it is true, of having been generally accepted for centuries, but nevertheless [pg 198] was originally nothing more than a human appeal to a superhuman attestation? It must not be forgotten that if a voice were really heard from heaven, it lies with man to understand it, or, on his own authority, to declare it the voice of God or an angel. With one-half of Christendom the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the four Gospels never became an article of faith. It was first made so among the Protestants to provide something incontestable in place of the councils and the Pope. But this only drove Protestants from Scylla into Charybdis, and landed them in inextricable difficulties, because they withdrew the Gospels from the historical soil out of which they sprang. But we do not escape Charybdis by steering again into Scylla, but by endeavouring to rise above Charybdis, ay, even above the Gospels. In our human shortsightedness we may believe that it would have been better for us had Jesus or the apostles themselves left us something in writing. But as this did not happen, why should we not be content with what we have? The ruins of the true Christianity still remain; why should we not endeavour with their help to restore the ancient temple?

Why should we contemptuously reject the tradition which arose in the mouths of the people? Should we be worse Christians if it were clearly and plainly demonstrated that we only possess popular traditions, out of which we must ourselves form a conception of the career and teaching of Christ? Is it not good for us, [pg 199] that we are free in many points to decide for ourselves what Jesus was and what he taught?

And in a world in which everything develops, everything grows and changes, why should religion alone be an exception? Do we not all freely confess that certain precepts which are ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels are no longer adapted to our times and to our circumstances? Does any Christian turn his left cheek when he has been struck upon the right? Do we give our cloak when our coat has been taken from us? Do we hold everything that we possess in common as the first Christians did? Do we sell all that we have and give it to the poor (Matthew xix. 21)?

It is quite true that under this method a certain personal freedom in the interpretation of the Gospels is unavoidable, but is not this freedom at the same time accompanied by a very important feeling of personal responsibility, which is of the utmost significance for every religious conviction? It cannot be denied, that this open and honest acknowledgment of the undeniable influence of popular tradition has far-reaching consequences, and will take from us much to which we are accustomed, and that has become near and dear, even sacred, to us. But it has this advantage, that we feel we are candid and honest in our faith, to which we may add that we are never forced in dealing with human hypotheses to give our assent blindly, but may follow our own judgment. We may adopt or reject the view that in the development [pg 200] of the gospel story much must be ascribed to popular tradition, and I can readily believe that many who do not know, either through the study of legends or their own experience, the transforming influence which school and family traditions exercise on the form of historical narratives, find it incredible that such a carbonising process could have taken place also in the evangelical tradition as related by the men of the next generation. They must then content themselves with the alternative, that the laws of nature, which they themselves ascribe to the Deity, must have been abrogated by their own founder in order that the truth of the teaching of Christ might gain a certain probability in the eyes of the people by so-called miracles.

Let us take an example in order to see what we shall gain on the one side and lose on the other. The original meaning of making the blind see, Jesus has himself told us (John ix. 39), “For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.” This refers to spiritual, not physical blindness, and which is the more difficult to heal, the spiritual or the physical? But when Jesus was repeatedly said to have healed this spiritual blindness, to have opened the eyes of the blind and unbelieving, how was it possible that the masses, especially the children, should not misunderstand such cures, and interpret and repeat them as cures of physical blindness? Certainly such an [pg 201] idea carries us a long way. We must then, for instance, explain such an expression as that placed in the mouths of the Pharisees (John x. 21), “Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?” as a further extension of a popular notion already in the field. Nor can it be denied that cures of the physically blind have this in their favour, that so exceptional a personality as Jesus may also have possessed an exceptional healing power. It then depends only on the character of the blindness, whether it was curable or incurable, and the solution of this question we may be content to leave to the medical man. I only remark, that if the medical man should deny such a possibility, a true Christian would lose nothing in consequence, for under all circumstances a spiritual healing power in Christ would stand higher with all of us than one merely physical.

This may be called shallow rationalism, but surely the human ratio or reason cannot be entirely rejected. Many know of their own experience that a man of high moral energy can even now drive out devils and base thoughts. Why not also believe that through his appearance and words Jesus made such an impression upon those possessed, for instance, upon the man or the two men who herded swine in the country of the Gadarenes or Gergesenes, that they came to themselves and began to lead new lives? That on such a conversion the swine-herds should forget their swine which rushed headlong into the lake, is easily understood, and when these two incidents [pg 202] came to the ears of the people, what was more natural than the story which we find in Matthew (viii. 28), Mark (v. 1), and Luke (viii. 26), but not in John? We need not now enter into the discrepancies between these three narratives, striking as they would be in a divinely inspired book. Of course it will be said again, that this is a shallow, rationalistic explanation, as if the word “rationalist” contained within itself something condemnatory. At all events, no one can now demonstrate that Jesus did not bewitch the unclean spirits out of the two demoniacs into the two thousand swine; but I confess that the shallow rationalistic explanation seems to me far better calculated to bring clearly to light the influence which Jesus could exercise over the most abandoned men.

One more instance. How often does Jesus say that he is the bread that really satisfies man, and the water that quenches all thirst (vi. 48): “I am the bread of life. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” Would any one, even the woman of Samaria, take these words literally? Does not Jesus himself help us to a correct understanding of them when he says (vi. 35), “I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst,” and again, (vii. 37), “If any man thirst let him come unto me, and drink.” [pg 203] And in order to shield his words against any misunderstanding he himself says (vi. 63), “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” And are we resolved in spite of all this not to understand the deep meaning of his words, to remain blind and deaf; and do we, like the Pharisees, prefer the story of how Jesus by magic means fed thousands with five or seven loaves and two fishes (vi. 9), so that in the end twelve baskets of bread remained after all were satisfied? We can readily comprehend how in the mouths of the people the great miracles of Jesus, the real mira wrought by his life and teaching, became small miracula. But if we surrender these small miracula, is not something far better left us, namely, that Jesus, who so often called himself the bread and the wine, who even at the Last Supper, as he broke bread with his disciples, commanded them to eat the bread which was his body, and drink the wine which was his blood,—that this teacher could by his teaching satisfy, content, and convert thousands, who came to him and believed in him! It is true that the story of the feeding of thousands with five loaves of bread is more intelligible to women and children, and makes a stronger impression than the metaphorical words of Christ; but nothing is more easy to understand than the transformation of a tale of the conversion or spiritual satisfying of thousands, into a parable of the feeding of thousands with five loaves. But have not the truly devout and conscientious [pg 204] thinkers rights of their own in the community? Must they really hold themselves aloof from the church, because they have too deep a reverence for the true teaching of Christ? Grand and beautiful as are St. Peter's in Rome, St. Mark's in Venice, or the Cathedral at Milan, it is heartbreaking to observe the so-called divine service in these buildings. Let us not be deceived by the sayings, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, or that a childlike faith is best. That is quite true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with our question. Of course in every generation millions of children are born, and milk must be provided for these as well; but this milk is not for men, and these should not permit themselves to be frightened by mere words, such as shallow enlightenment, rationalism, unbelief, etc. The worst of it is that we have permitted our ministri to become our masters instead of our servants, and that the weak among them far outnumber the strong. In history, however, the minority is always victorious. Popular legend has certainly at times grievously obscured the gospel of Christ, but not so much as to prevent those who are familiar with its nature and effect from discovering the grains of gold in the sand, the rays of truth behind the clouds. At all events, popular legend refuses to be ruled out. A knowledge of it and its influence on historical events in other nations, and especially a familiarity with the modes of expression in Oriental languages, are of the greatest use in all these investigations. [pg 205] Only let no one confound legend and metaphor with mythology. When Jesus says that he is the water, and that whoever drinks of this water shall never thirst again, every one readily perceives that he speaks metaphorically. And likewise when he says that he is the vine or the good shepherd. But here the transition from parable to reality very soon begins. Among so many pictures of the good shepherd it need occasion no surprise that it is commonly imagined that Jesus actually was a shepherd and carried a lamb on his shoulders. What occurs now was of course equally possible in the earliest times. When the common people saw daily, in old mosaic pictures, a sword coming forth from the mouth of God, they formed a representation of God corresponding to these pictures (Rev. i. 20). And thus many readers of the Gospel suppose that Jesus was really carried up into the air by the devil and placed on the summit of the temple or of a high mountain, that he might show him all the kingdoms of the earth, and tempt him to establish an earthly realm. Is it reverent to imagine Christ borne through the air by the devil, instead of simply learning that Christ himself, as we read, was not a stranger to inward trials, and that he freely confessed them to his disciples? Many parables are represented in the Gospels, as though they had really occurred at the time. Thus, in the parables of the kingdom of heaven, the phrase always runs that it is like seed which a man sowed, and while he slept an enemy came and sowed tares. [pg 206] Or the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, or like a treasure found by a man in a field, or like a merchant seeking goodly pearls, etc. In listening to these parables or looking at pictorial representations of them, there develops almost unconsciously, especially among the young, a belief in their reality, in their actual occurrence at the time of Christ. In many cases this belief is widely spread, as, for example, in the story of the good Samaritan, Now it is quite possible that some such incident as Jesus related had occurred in his time, or shortly before it; but it is just as likely to have been a parable invented for a specific purpose. And why should not this be true of other things, which the Gospels ascribe to Jesus himself?

Is it necessary to believe, that Jesus saw the Pharisees casting their gifts into the treasury with his own eyes (Luke xxi. 1), and the poor widow who threw in two mites, or is it possible to consider this, too, as a parable, without insisting that Jesus really sat opposite the sacred chest, and counted the alms, and knew that the widow had put in two mites, and had really nothing left? Of many things, as of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, or between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, no one could have had any knowledge except those who took part in it. We must therefore assume that Jesus communicated these conversations to his disciples, and that these have reported [pg 207] to us the ipsissima verba. In this manner we are constantly involving ourselves in fresh difficulties of our own making, which we may indeed leave out of consideration, but which would never exist at all if we would only consider the circumstances under which the Gospels arose. I have previously expounded this view of the popular origin of the evangelic narratives in my Gifford lectures before an audience, certainly very orthodox; and although a small number of theologians were much incensed against me,—it was their duty,—the majority, even of the clergy, were decidedly with me. The things themselves and their lessons remain undiminished in value; we merely acknowledge a fact, quite natural from an historical standpoint, viz. that the accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus have not come to us direct from Christ, nor from the apostles, but from men who, as they themselves tell us, received the report from others by tradition. Their narratives, consequently, are not perhaps fictitious, or prepared with a certain object; but they do show traces of the influence that was unavoidable in oral transmission, especially at a time of great spiritual excitement. This is a problem which in itself has nothing whatever to do with religion. We have the Gospels as they are. It remains with the historian alone to pass judgment upon the origin, the transmission, and the authenticity of these texts, just as the reconstruction of the text lies solely with the philologist. For this he need not even be a Christian, [pg 208] merely an historian. Whatever may be the judgment of the historical inquirer, we must learn to be content with what they leave us. In this, too, the half is often better than the whole. Quite sufficient remains, even when the critical historian assures us that the Gospels as we possess them were neither written by Christ nor the apostles, but contain the traditions of the oldest Christian communities, and that the manuscripts in which they have reached us were not written till the fifth or at the earliest the fourth century. We may deal with these materials as with all other historical materials from that period; and we do so rather as independent historians than as Christians.

The view that the four Gospels were miraculously revealed to their authors, miraculously written, miraculously copied and finally printed, is a view no doubt deserving of respect, but it leaves the contents of the Gospels untouched. The difference between the historical and the conventional interpretation of the Gospels comes out most clearly in the doctrine of eternal life. What Jesus understands by the eternal life that he has brought to mankind, is as clear as the sun. He repeats it again and again. Eternal life consists in knowing that men have their Father and their true being in the only true God, and that as sons of this same Father, they are of like nature with God and Christ (John xvii. 3).

This is the fundamental truth of Christianity, and it holds good not only for the contemporaries of [pg 209] Jesus, but for all times. Those who see in this view an overestimate of human nature, need only ask themselves what man could be, if he were not a partaker of the divine nature. This excludes the difference between human and divine nature as little as the difference between the physical father and the physical son. Even in this case we speak figuratively, for how could we speak otherwise of what is supersensual? The repetition of stories among the people, narrating how Jesus raised one or another to life, to eternal life, very soon led among women and children to the misunderstanding that this referred only to a resurrection from bodily death. Nay, this raising passed with them, as it still does with many, for a stronger proof of the divine nature and power of Christ than the resurrection from that spiritual death, which holds in captivity all who have not recognised their own divine sonship and have not understood the glad tidings which Jesus brought to all mankind. Such misunderstandings we find everywhere, as when, for instance, even a man like Nicodemus fails to comprehend the new birth of which Jesus speaks, and asks if a man can enter his mother's womb a second time. If this was possible in a Scribe, how much more so with the uneducated people. In the same way the Jews misunderstand the saying of Jesus, that the truth will make them free, and answer that they are the seed of Abraham, and free men, so that Jesus had to repeat that whosoever commits sin is not free, but a slave of sin (John viii. 33). Such misunderstandings [pg 210] meet us everywhere, and their influence extends much farther than we at first suppose. Naturally the tradition also puts words into Jesus' mouth that could only have issued out of the notions of the people, and almost entirely conceal the depth of his own words. While the revelation of the true divine sonship of man immediately bestows eternal life on him who comprehends or believes in it, heals his blindness, and raises him from spiritual death, Jesus is presented as not purposing to raise the dead until the last day (John vi. 40). Martha makes the same mistake, when to the words of Jesus, “Thy brother shall rise again,” she answers, “I know that he shall rise at the last day” (John xi. 24). Even some of the works which are ascribed to Jesus are plainly derived from the same source. A spiritual resurrection is not sufficient, it even passes for less than a bodily, and this is the very reason for the numerous stories of the raising of the dead. These are matters from which, even to this day, devout Christians are loath to part, especially where the details are given so minutely as in the raising of Lazarus. Now there is absolutely no objection to this, if we are resolved to cling to the historical reality of the raising of Lazarus. Only in that case the terms employed should be exactly defined. If we give the name death to the condition which excludes any return to life, especially when, as with Lazarus, decay had already set in, the condition from which Lazarus returned to life cannot be called death [pg 211] without a contradiction. Jesus even says that his sickness was not fatal (John xi. 4), and that he is not dead, but merely sleeps (John xi. 11). Was he mistaken? Such words should at least not be entirely disregarded, even though the other words follow immediately after, “Lazarus is dead” (John xi. 14). That a highly gifted nature, like that of Jesus, may have possessed wonderful healing powers, cannot be denied, however difficult it may be to determine the boundary between what is and is not possible here. On the other hand, it is firmly established that when once such an idea as the raising from physical death becomes rooted in the popular mind, the details, especially such as can serve as evidence, are provided spontaneously. The nucleus of the story of the raising of Lazarus lies of course in the words (John xi. 25, 26), “I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Here we have the true teaching of Christ, in his own apparently contradictory language. The saying, “Whoever believes in me shall never die,” does not necessarily mean that his body will never die; and so the words, “Though he were dead, yet shall he live,” certainly do not signify that his dead and decayed body shall receive new life. But the people wanted something else. For the true miracles, for the spiritual resurrection, they had no comprehension, they wanted sensuous miracles, they wanted the resurrection of a body already decayed, and this is [pg 212] described in the Gospels in detail. Such is the regular privilege of popular tradition, and it happens without deliberate intention, except that of bringing vividly before us the common interpretation of the fact. Popular tradition is not intentional deception, it is only an unavoidable fusion of facts with conventional ideas, whereby God becomes a laborer wearied by six days' work; his seat becomes Olympus or a golden throne in some corner of the blue sky; the Son of God sinks to the level of a prince of the house of David, the Saviour to a miracle doctor, and his message of salvation to a promise of resurrection from physical death. There are many good men and women fulfilling in their daily walk the commands of Christ, to whom the true historical conception of the gospel story would be a terrible disillusion. Well, such Christians are at liberty to remain in their own views. Our own interpretation of many of the details in the traditional representation of the Gospels, though details certainly of very great significance, makes no claim to papal authority. It gladly concedes the possibility of error, and only claims to give an interpretation of the evangelic writings, founded on nature and history. It should answer, and at the same time appease, the very numerous and, at bottom, honest men, who, like the Horseherd, declare the gospel narratives, as ordinarily understood, full of falsehood and fraud or even pure fancy, and who have consequently broken with the Christian revelation from conscientious scruples. Their number is [pg 213] greater than is generally supposed, and it must on no account be supposed that they are necessarily wicked or even immoral men. When they declare the Christian revelation to be an absurdity, it is because they do not know it in its historical origin and its divine truth. To assume that every word, every letter,—for it has been carried even so far,—that every parable, every figure, was whispered to the authors of the Gospels, is certainly an absurdity, and rests only on human and often only on priestly authority. But the true revelation, the real truth, as it was already anticipated by the Greek philosophers, slowly accepted by Jews like Philo and the contemporaries of Jesus, taught by men like Clement and Origen in the ancient Greek church, and, in fine, realised in the life of Jesus and sealed by his death, is no absurdity; it is for every thinking Christian the eternal life or the kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus wished to establish, and in part did establish. To become a citizen of this kingdom is the highest that man can attain, but it is not attained merely through baptism and confirmation; it must be gained in earnest spiritual conflict.

In nearly all religions God remains far from man. I say in nearly all religions; for in Brahmanism the unity, not the union, of the human soul with Brahman is recognised as the highest aim. This unity with Deity, together with phenomenal difference, Jesus expressed in part through the Logos, in part through the Son. There is nothing so closely allied as thought [pg 214] and word, Father and Son. They can be distinguished, but never separated, for they exist only through each other. In this manner the Greek philosophers considered all creation as the thought or the word of God, and the thought “man” became naturally the highest Logos, realised in millions of men, and raised to the highest perfection in Jesus. As the thought exists only through the word, and the word only through the thought, so also the Father exists only through the Son, and the Son through the Father, and in this sense Jesus feels and declares himself the Son of God, and all men who believe in him his brethren. This revelation or inspiration came to mankind through Jesus. No one knew the Father except the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, and those to whom the Son willeth to reveal him. This is the Christian revelation in the true sense of the word. It has long been attempted to make an essential difference between Jesus, the only begotten Son, and his brethren, through an exaggerated feeling of affected reverence. But if this is carried too far, the temple which Jesus himself erected for mankind is destroyed. It is true that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, and that Jesus is the only begotten Son, for he is in the Father and the Father in him (John xiv. 10), nay, he and the Father are one (John x. 30). The distinction is therefore there, but the unity as well, for Jesus himself says that he is in his disciples as the Father is in him, that they all may be one, as he is one with God, and God [pg 215] with him (John xvii. 21). To many there may be no sense in this, because their ideas of God and of the Son of God are altogether materialistic, but to those who have learned to feel the divine, not only without but also within, these words are the light of the world. In this sense we need not be ashamed of the gospel of Christ, and can be prepared to look all the Horseherds of the world in the face as intellectually free, yet at the same time as true Christians, in the way Jesus himself would have desired; often in error, like the disciples of old, but still loyal and honest followers of the Son of God.

The main issue in all these questions is honesty, honesty toward ourselves even more than toward others. We know how easily we may all be deceived, how easily we are put off with words, especially when they are words of ancient use. It was the sincere tone of the Horseherd that prompted me to public discussion of his doubts, for doubts are generally anticipations of truth, and to be true to oneself is better than to possess all truth. It gave me pleasure to learn recently that he is still among the living, although for an interval he was beyond the range of the usual postal facilities, so that my letters did not reach him. Whether he thinks me as honest as himself, we must wait to know. I did not seek either to persuade or to convince him. Such things depend too much on circumstances and environment. I merely wished to show him that others, who do [pg 216] not agree with him, or with whom he does not agree, are honest, and may honestly hold entirely different views. To learn to understand each other is the great art of life, and to “agree to differ” is the best lesson of the comparative science of religion.

Chapter VI.

Conclusion.

The allusion in the foregoing page is to a very long letter which the Horseherd wrote to my husband, dated September 10, 1897, eighteen months after his first letter. This was followed three days later by a short note, saying that the long letter was not written for publication, and that it was the Horseherd's express wish that it should not be printed. In this note he mentions that he was perfectly well, and that he had been so successful in his trade, that he no longer sat with an oil lamp by an iron stove, but was “every inch a gentleman,” as he expressed it. The Pferdebürla was brought out early in 1899, and my husband sent a copy to the only address he had,—“Pferdebürla, Post-Office, Pittsburgh,”—with the following letter:—

“

(Translation.) 7 Norham Gardens, Feb. 10 /99.

Dear far-off Friend:

“You see I have kept my promise, and after many delays the book is ready. How are you? whether you are sitting by your iron and oil light, or have become a great and rich [pg 218] man. Well, all that is only external, the great thing, the Self, remains unchanged. I am growing old—past seventy-five—and have still so much to do, and am now printing a big book, the Six Systems of Indian Philosophy. That would please you, for those old fellows saw deeper than our philosophers, though they don't talk so much about it. Now write and tell me how it is with you, and whether you are pleased or not with your and my book. But make haste, for who knows how long it may last. It is strange how well one can know those whom one has never seen,”

With all good wishes,

F. Max Müller.

”

The book and letter were returned as unclaimed after three months. But on September 29, 1899, the Horseherd wrote again, giving his real name, Fritz Menzel, and the address Monangahela Hotel, Pittsburgh. This letter I have been unable to find. On October 17, 1899, I wrote by my husband's desire.

“Dear Sir: My husband, who is seriously ill, wishes me to send you this letter from him, written last February and returned late in April, and to say, as he has now received your letter of September 29, with your real name and address, he is sending you the copy of his book, Das Pferdebürla, which was also returned to him.”

[pg 219]

After a few months both letter and book came back unclaimed, and from that time nothing more has been heard from the Horseherd. The book bears the inscription:—

“To the Pferdebürla, with greetings from his Pardner.”

A few words must be said about the translation. In August, 1898, a translation of the first article on Celsus, made by Mr. O. A. Fechter of North Yakima, Washington, U.S.A., was sent to my husband by an old friend, Mrs. Bartlett, wife of the Rev. H. M. Bartlett, rector of the church in the same place. He liked it and returned it at once, begging that the other articles, which had appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau, though not yet published as a book, might be translated. For more than two years nothing was heard from North Yakima, though I wrote more than once during my husband's illness, so anxious was he to see the translation carried out. At length, just before Christmas, 1901, I wrote once more and registered the letter, which was safely delivered, and I then heard that my friend had not only written repeatedly, but that the whole finished translation had been sent, nearly two years before, and that she was astonished at hearing nothing further. Some fault in the post-office had caused the long silence on both sides. A rough copy of the translation had been kept, and was sent over after it had been clearly written out.

[pg 220]

I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the Rev. J. Estlin Carpenter, who has revised the whole work in the most thorough manner, devoting to it much of his very valuable time.

Georgina Max Müller