t Hegel, ^'Religions-pbilosophie,'' i. p. 241. A sketch of the
German philosophies of religion, in so far as they touch the genesis
of the idea of God, although a very tempting subject, is not one that
can be touched within the limits of a short essay. It would have to
start with Lessing, Herder, and Eant, and come down to the younger
Fichte, Von Hartmann, and Pfleiderer, and would lead us into the very
heart of the questions that have agitated the German philosophic
schools for now almost a century. German thought on this matter
forms, on the whole, an admirable counteractive to English and
French. The elements the one ignores are, as a rule, the elements
the other emphasizes, though English empirical and physico-scientific
thought is beginning to tell at the close of this century in Germany,
very much as English rationalistic thought told at the beginning of last.
12 THE IDEA OF GOD.
well to notice a few of their assumptions. They
assume the truth of an 'empirical philosophy. They
resolve religious ideas into impressions of sense. Man's
faculty or tendency to believe in invisible beings is
unexplained. If infant and dog, savage and monkey,
alike think natural objects alive, the man does, the
animal does not, formulate his thoughts into a religion.
Why ? If man can get out of the Fetich stage, he can
also get into it. Why? Faith is not the result of
sensations. Mind is not passive, but active, in the
formation of beliefs. The constitutive element is what
mind brings to nature, not what nature brings to mind,
otherwise no spiritual and invisible could be conceived.
