nd perceive it as we do, is originally founded in the human organization.
By virtue of this organization we are bound, in all our knowledge of the
world of appearances, to the law of causality. Science does not get beyond
this causal chain of finite and relative causes and effects; to the "thing
_per se_" there is nowhere to be found a bridge, not even as Kant supposes,
in the categoric imperative, nor in ideas. Inasmuch as science does not get
beyond this chain, it is materialistic; inasmuch as it must nevertheless
perceive the existence, or at least the possibility of the existence, of a
"thing _per se_," even if it does not see any way to its perception, it is
idealistic. But man also has ideal impulses, and he has to follow them just
as much as the impulse of perception. By virtue of these ideal impulses, he
makes in imagination a picture of the "thing _per se_" in the activity of
philosophic speculation, art, and religion. Philosophic speculation is but
imaginative conceptions. It has always a value in the history of culture,
as a summing-up of the elements of culture and of the spiritual impulses
and treasures of a certain time; but it errs as soon as it claims to be
more than imaginative conceptions--namely, an adequate representation of
the final cause of all things--for it lacks the necessary basis of
experience. Art does not claim this, and therefore is not exposed to that
danger of deception. Religion satisfies a need of the heart, to have a home
of the spirit in the "thing _per se_"; but {196} since the "thing _per se_"
is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to
rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of
a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of
Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation
of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit."
Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains
that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a
destructive criticism as soon as it seeks its quintessence in something
else--for instance, in certain doctrines of God, the human soul, creation
of the world, etc.

Herbert Spencer is in full accord with Lange in regard to the theory of an
absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things; but he reaches
this result in a somewhat different way, and from his premises infers a
different mod