y call it, as Comte calls it, the Mind of Humanity--it is but the
collective wisdom "of a common humanity with a common aim"; and, that
being so, morality is rooted, not in the will and the love of a
beneficent and omnipotent Providence, but in the self-realising spirit
in man setting up its "common aim" at morality. The very conception of
a beneficent and omnipotent God--having now done its work as an aid to
morality--must now be put aside, because it stands in the way of our
recognising what is the real spiritual whole, besides which there is
none other spirit, viz. the self-realising spirit in man. That spirit
is only realising; it is not yet {214} realised. It is in process of
realisation; and the conception of it, as in process of realisation,
enables it to be brought into harmony, or rather reveals its inner
harmony, with the notion of evolution. There is nothing outside
evolution, no being to whom evolution is presented as a spectacle or by
whom, as a process, it is directed. "Being itself," as Hoeffding says
(_Problems of Philosophy_, p. 136), "is to be conceived as in process
of becoming, of evolution." The spirit in man, as we have just said,
is the real spiritual whole, and it is self-realising; it is evolving
and progressing both morally and rationally. In Hoeffding's words
"Being itself becomes more rational than before" (_ib._, p. 137).
"Being itself is not ready-made but still incomplete, and rather to be
conceived as a continual becoming, like the individual personality and
like knowledge" (_ib._, p. 120). We may say, then, that being is
becoming rationalised and moralised as and because the spirit in man
realises itself. For a time the process of moralisation and
self-realisation was worked by and through the conception of a
beneficent and omnipotent god. That conception was, it would seem, a
hypothesis, valuable as long it was a working hypothesis, but to be
cast aside now that humanitarianism is found {215} more adequate to the
facts and more in harmony with the consistent application of the theory
of evolution. We have, then, to consider whether it is adequate to the
facts, whether, when we regard the facts of the history of religion, we
do find that morality comes first and religion later.

"What," Mr. Hobhouse enquires in his _Morals in Evolution_ (II, 74),
"What is the ethical character of early religion?" and his reply is
that "in the first stage we find that spirits, as such, are not