ve, he admits
into the hymn-book of his religion of the future hymns like that of
Gerhard: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("O Sacred Head, {198} now
wounded"). To be sure, all the concessions he makes to religion sink again
to the value of a beautiful illusion, from the fact that for him they are
but metaphorical approaches to the cause of all things, which after all
still remains inaccessible. But nevertheless, in consequence of that idea
of religion, religious life, and especially also religious service, has
infinitely more room for rich development in Lange than in Spencer. For,
according to the view of the latter, religiousness consists in nothing else
but the perception and acknowledgment of this indiscernibleness of the
final cause. All other things which may be still connected with religious
life and reasoning, are but a misty veil. The acknowledgment of the
indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things alone is the
quintessence of religion. But such a religiousness, which expressly forbids
imagining any quality or any state of the highest being, certainly would
be, as Prof. Huxley correctly says in his "Lay Sermons," for the most part
of the silent sort.

While thus Lange's conception of religion is superior to that of Spencer in
admitting a richer development of religious life, a more various
satisfaction of the religious need, in another direction Spencer is
superior. He comes considerably nearer to a correct and full _conception of
God_ than Lange. His idea of the final cause of all things does not lie
entirely in the conception that it is the absolute indiscernible; but
Spencer is fully in earnest with the idea that this indiscernible is the
real cause of the world and of all single existences in it. He accordingly
forbids giving certain attributes to the absolute--not because it would be
doubtful whether it has attributes or not, but because it stands _above_
all these {199} imaginable attributes as their real cause. Therefore he
forbids, for instance, attributing personality, intelligence, will, to the
highest being--not because it could also be impersonal, and in want of
intelligence and will, but because it stands _above_ all these attributes
as their highest real cause, and because we can think of all these
attributes only in human analogy, and therefore, when attributed to the
highest being, can think of them only in rejectable anthropomorphism. He
says, on page 109: "Those who espouse this positio