e, Herbert Spencer._

A more friendly position in reference to religion is taken by those who
hold, not directly negative, but only decidedly sceptical views of the
existence of God; who reduce the relative unsearchableness of God, which
every religious standpoint admits, to an absolute unknowability; and who
find the nature of religion either in a pious acknowledgment of this
unknowability, or in a poetical substitute for the knowledge of God,
_i.e._, comprehending the unknowable in a figure. The most prominent {194}
advocates of this position are, on the side of exact investigation, Wilhelm
Bleek; and on that of philosophy, Albert Lange in Germany and Herbert
Spencer in England. Since all three use the Darwinian theories for their
systems, they also belong to the ranks of our historico-critical essay.

Wilhelm Bleek, in the preface to his "Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of
Language"), rejects all claims of a positively revealed religion to an
objective truth--not in such a way as to substitute the universe in place
of God, but so that he remains sceptical in reference to every attempt at
forming an idea of God, demands a pious and modest confession of this
non-understanding by man, and sees in this reverential modesty the
certainly not very significant nature of his religion. In the preface he
says that all worship originates in reverence for ancestors, and that even
the doctrine of the atonement of modern theology has its origin there. The
next step after reverence for ancestors was the worship of nature. But the
grand turning-point at which the mythological mode of view gives way--in
which mode of view he also reckons Christianity--is the giving up of the
idea of the necessity of an atonement; for this whole idea is but
anthropomorphism. It is when man has recognized the impossibility of a
being, similar to man, as the final cause of all existences, and in
reverential modesty has admitted his ignorance in reference to the nature
of the origin of things, that he learns to understand how narrow a view he
has of God when he thinks that he understands him.

On the side of philosophy, Albert Lange and Herbert Spencer reach similar
results. Albert Lange, in his {195} "History of Materialism," starting
especially from premises of Kant, reaches the conclusion that the "thing
_per se_," the "intelligible world," is absolutely hidden to us. What we
perceive is but the world of appearances; and the fact that we perceive it,
a