in the history of thought. Asserting that human society is a gradual
progress of development and of improvement, it regards every age as
manifesting some phase of truth, or of error, and contributing its portion
of knowledge to the student. Humanity is regarded as a divine revelation:
its social and intellectual changes as manifestations of the Eternal.

From this account, brief though it be, the relation will be evident which
such a philosophy and the historic method of eclectic discovery would have
towards religion.

As a system of psychology it is potent, as a means of reasserting the
dignity of human nature against the material and selfish ethics of a
preceding age, and of reconstructing the basis of ethics and natural
religion: but as an ontology, it is in danger of unconscious pantheism; of
identifying God with the universe, and regarding Him merely as a name to
describe a process, instead of a person. As a philosophy of humanity, it
identifies the natural revelation in history with the supernatural; finds
in the psychological faculty of intuition, not merely the basis for, but
the explanation of, the phenomenon of inspiration;(883) and in its view of
religion is essentially antidogmatic, regarding religion as imperfect and
progressive; the idea universal, the symbol transient; and allows the
psychological truthfulness of all creeds; and regards Christianity as only
the most refined species of them, as one of the transient forms that the
religious sentiment has adopted, and as destined to give place to
philosophy; beneficial to humanity, but not constituting it.

This philosophy therefore, though containing so many noble elements, ended
in the view which we have already seen to exist in the Gnostic and German
rationalism, that Christianity was not to be final, the one solitary and
final religious utterance of God to man.(884)

The three schools illustrate the principal tendencies in which unbelief
manifested itself in France previous to the establishment of the
empire;(885) and show clearly the intimate relation of particular kinds of
sceptical views to particular systems of metaphysical philosophy.(886)

In the latter years of Napoleon I. the struggle first commenced between
the Voltairian party and the church; a middle course being taken by the
eclectics. The constitutional tendency of this last school gave them the
moral victory during the restoration, over the democratic tendency of the
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