Title: The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour
Author: Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
Language: English
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                         *The Silesian Horseherd*

                           *(Das Pferdebürla)*

                    Questions of the Hour Answered By

                          *Friedrich Max Müller*

                        Translated From The German

                           By Oscar A. Fechter

                              With A Forward

                       By J. Estlin Carpenter, M.A.

                         Longmans, Green, and Co.

                        39 Paternoster Row, London

                           New York and Bombay

                                  *1903*



CONTENTS


Preface
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Footnotes



PREFACE


The story of this volume is soon told. In July, 1895, Professor Max Müller
contributed to the _Deutsche Rundschau_ an essay on the lost treatise
against Christianity by the philosopher Celsus, known to us through the
reply of Origen of Alexandria. This essay, entitled “The ‘True History’(1)
of Celsus,” contained an exposition of the doctrine of the Logos and its
place in Christian teaching, with reference also to its applications in
our modern thought. Among the comments upon it which in due time found
their way to Oxford, was a vigorous, if familiar, letter (dated February,
1896) from a German emigrant to the United States, residing in
Pennsylvania, who signed himself by the unusual name of the _Pferdebürla_,
or “Horseherd.”(2) His criticisms served as a fair sample of others; and
his letter was published with a reply from Professor Max Müller in the
_Rundschau_ of November, 1896. More letters poured in upon the unwearied
scholar who had thus set aside precious time out of his last years to
answer his unknown correspondent. One of these, from “Ignotus Agnosticus,”
supplied a text for further comment, and the whole grew into a little
popular _apologia_, which was published at Berlin in 1899, and entitled
_Das Pferdebürla_, or “Questions of the Day answered by Friedrich Max
Müller.”

The veteran teacher thus enforced once more his ideas of the relation of
language and thought, in which he had long since recognised the clue to
man’s knowledge of the relation of his spirit to God. This inner union he
found realised in Christ, according to the testimony of the Fourth
Gospel;(3) and the lucid treatment of this great conception, freed from
the technicalities of theology, will possibly prove to some readers the
most helpful portion of this book. Ranging over many topics, once the
themes of vehement controversy, the discussion has often an intimate,
familiar, personal air. The disputants on opposite sides had drawn nearer;
they could better understand each other’s points of view.(4) These pages,
therefore, reveal the inmost beliefs of one who had devoted more than
fifty years to the study of the history of religious thought on the widest
scale, and had himself passed through severe struggles and deep griefs
with unshaken calm. No reader of Max Müller’s writings, or of the _Life
and Letters_, can fail to recognise in these trusts the secret unity of
all his labours. The record of human experience contained in the great
sacred literatures of the world, and verified afresh in manifold forms
from age to age, provided a basis for faith which no philosophy or science
could disturb.

This is the key to the reasonings and appeals of this little book. It was
translated as a labour of love by Mr. Fechter, Mayor of North Yakima, in
the United States. The translation has been revised on this side of the
Atlantic, and is now offered to the public in the belief that this final
testimony of a “voice that is still” to the reality of “things unseen”
will be welcome to many inquiring and perhaps troubled minds.

J. ESTLIN CARPENTER.
OXFORD, April 2, 1903.



CHAPTER I.


                        The True History Of Celsus


The following essays, which were intended primarily for the Horseherd, but
which were published in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, demand a short
explanatory introduction. This, I believe, can best be given by me, by
means of a reprint of another essay which appeared in the same periodical,
and was the direct cause for the letter, which the writer, under the name
of “Horseherd,” addressed to me. I receive many such anonymous
communications, but regret that it is only rarely possible for me to
answer them or to give them attention, much as I should like to do so. In
this particular case, the somewhat abrupt, but pure, human tone of the
letter appealed to me more than usual, and at my leisure I attempted an
answer. My article, which called forth the letter of the Horseherd, was
entitled “The ‘True History’ of Celsus,”(5) in the July number of the
_Deutsche Rundschau_, 1895, and, with a few corrections, is as follows:—

In an article which appeared in the March number of the _Deutsche
Rundschau_, 1895, entitled “The Parliament of Religions in Chicago,” I
expressed my surprise that this event which I had characterised as in my
opinion the most important of the year 1893, had been so little known and
discussed in Germany—so little, that the editors of the _Wiener
Fremdenblatt_ thought it needful to explain the nature of the Chicago
Congress. Likewise, when in answer to the question as to what I should
consider the most desirable discovery of the coming year in my department,
I answered the discovery of the _Sermo Verus_ of Celsus; this, too,
appeared to be a work so little known, that the editors considered it
necessary to add that Celsus was a renowned philosopher of the second
century, who first subjected the ever spreading system of Christianity to
a thorough criticism in a work entitled _Sermo Verus_. The wish, yes, even
the hope, that this lost book, of which we gain a fair idea from the reply
of Origen, should again make its appearance, was prompted by the recent
discoveries of ancient Greek papyrus manuscripts in Egypt. Where so many
unexpected discoveries have been made, we may hope for yet more. For who
would have believed that ancient Greek texts would be found in a
mummy-case, the Greek papyrus leaves being carelessly rolled together to
serve as cushions for the head and limbs of a skeleton? It was plain that
these papyrus leaves had been sold as waste paper, and that they were
probably obtained from the houses of Greek officials and military
officers, who had established themselves in Egypt during the Macedonian
occupation, and whose furniture and belongings had been publicly sold and
scattered on occasion of their rapid withdrawal. There were found not only
fragments of classical texts, as of Homer, Plato, and the previously
unknown treatise on “The Government of the Athenians,” not, perhaps,
composed, but utilised, by Aristotle, but also many fragments of Christian
literature, which made it probable that the libraries of Christian
families also had been thrown on the market, and that papyrus leaves, when
they appeared useless for any other purpose, were used as waste paper, or
as a kind of papier-maché.

But why should the “True History” of Celsus, the λόγος ἀληθής, or _Sermo
Verus_, excite our curiosity? The reason is quite plain. We know
practically nothing of the history of the teaching of Christ in the first,
second, and even third centuries, except what has been transmitted to us
by Christian writers. It is an old rule, however, that it is well to learn
from the enemy also,—“Fas est et ab hoste doccri.” Celsus was a resolute
foe of the new Christian teaching, and we should, at all events, learn
from his treatise how the Christian religion appeared in the eyes of a
cultivated man of the second century, who, it seems, concurred in many
important points with the philosophical conception cherished in the
Christian church, or at least was familiar with it, namely, the Logos
idea; but who could not comprehend how men, who had once understood and
assimilated a view of the world founded on the Logos, could combine with
it the belief in Christ as the incarnate Logos. To Celsus the Christian
religion is something objective; in all other works of the first three
centuries it is, and remains, almost entirely subjective.

This could hardly be otherwise, for a religion in its first inception
scarcely exists for the outer world. What at that time were Jerusalem and
Palestine in the eyes of the so-called world? A province yielding little
profit, and often in rebellion. The Jews and their religion had certainly
attracted the attention of Rome and Athens by their peculiarities; but the
Jewish sects interested the classical world much less than the sects of
the Platonic and Stoic schools. Christians were regarded as Jews, just as,
not many years ago, Jains were treated by us as Buddhists, Sikhs as
Brahmans, and Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and Brahmans were promiscuously
placed in one pile as Indian idolaters. How should the differences which
distinguished the Christian from the Jew, and the Jewish Christian from
the heathen Christian, have been understood at that time in Rome? To us,
naturally, the step which Paul and his associates took appears an enormous
one—one of world-wide import; but of what interest could these things be
outside of Palestine? That the Jews who looked upon themselves as a
peculiar people, who would admit no strangers, and tolerate no marriages
between Jew and Gentile, who, in spite of all their disappointments and
defeats, energetically clung to their faith in a deliverer, in an earthly
Messiah, and in the coming glory of their nation; that they should
suddenly declare clean what they had always considered unclean; that they
should transform their national spirit into a universal sympathy; yes,
that they should recognise their Messiah in a crucified malefactor,
indicate a complete revolution in their history; but the race itself was
and continued to be, in the eyes of the world, if not beneath notice, at
least an object of contempt. It should not, therefore, surprise us that no
classical writer has given us a really historical account of the Christian
religion, or has even with one word referred to the wonderful events
which, had they actually taken place as described in the Gospels, would
have stirred the uttermost corners of the earth. Celsus is the only writer
of the second century who, being neither Christian nor Jew, was not only
acquainted with representatives of Christianity and Judaism, but had also,
it would seem, carefully read portions of the Old and New Testaments. He
even boasts of having a better knowledge of these religions than many of
their adherents (II, 12). That such a man considered this new Christian
sect of sufficient importance to subject it to a searching investigation,
is proof of his deep insight, and at the same time of the increasing power
of Christianity as a religion independent of Judaism. Who this Celsus
really was, it is not easy to discover. Even his adversary, Origen, seems
to know but little of him; at any rate he tells us nothing of him,—indeed,
we are even still in doubt about his date. It has been thought that he is
the Celsus to whom Lucian (120-200 A.D.) dedicated his work on the false
Alexander. This is possible; but Celsus is a very common name, and Origen
speaks of two men of this name who were both Epicureans and are supposed
to have lived in the times of Nero (54-68 A.D.) and Hadrian (118-138
A.D.). It has been argued that the latter could not have been the author
of the _Sermo Verus_, because it apparently mentions the sect of the
Marcellians, and this was not founded till the year 155 under Bishop
Anicetus. But Origen’s remark, that Celsus may have outlived the reign of
Hadrian, has been overlooked. At any rate Origen speaks of the _Sermo
Verus_ as a work long known, and as he did not die until the year 253
A.D., in his time the work of Celsus would have been recognised as of
considerable age, even if written after the year 155. Much learning has
been expended on the identification of Celsus, which seems to me to have
been wasted. It is remarkable that Origen made no effort to become
personally acquainted with his adversary. He leaves the question open
whether he is the same Celsus who composed two other books against the
Christians (_Contra Celsum_, IV, 36). At the end of his book he speaks of
him as if he had been a contemporary, and asserts that a second book by
him against the Christians, which has either not yet been completed or has
not yet reached him, shall be as completely refuted as the _Sermo Verus_.
Such language is only used of a contemporary. Could it be proved that
Celsus was a friend of Lucian, then we should know that in the judgment of
the latter he was a noble, truth-loving, and cultivated man. It was not
Origen’s interest to emphasise these aspects of his opponent’s character;
but it must be said to his credit, that though he was much incensed at
some of the charges of Celsus, he never attacked his personal character.
Perhaps it was not fair in Origen to accuse Celsus of being ashamed of his
Epicureanism, and of concealing his own philosophical and atheistic
convictions, in order to obtain an easier hearing among Jews and
Christians.(6) This does not appear quite fair, for it was a very
pardonable device for Celsus first to attack a part of Christian teaching
under the mask of a Jew, who represents his faith as the older and more
respectable, and seeks to convince the Christians that they would have
done better had they remained true to the religion of their fathers. On
the contrary, as Celsus, whatever he may have been except a Jew, could not
with a good conscience have undertaken an actual defence of Judaism, it
was quite natural that he should choose a Jew as an advocate of the Jewish
religion, and put into his mouth, like a second Philo, ideas which at all
events sound more Platonic than Epicurean. Origen was entirely justified
in showing that in this process Celsus frequently forgot his part; and
this he did with much skill.

But whatever Celsus may have been,—an Epicurean, or, as has occasionally
been maintained, a Neo-platonist,—he was at all events no mean adversary
and certainly not unworthy of Origen’s steel. If not, why should Origen
have felt the need of such an earnest refutation? He says, certainly, that
he did it only at the request of his old friend and protector, Ambrosius.
But that is what many writers under similar circumstances have said and
still say. We have, at all events, lost much through the loss (or
destruction?) of all manuscripts of Celsus. Not only was he acquainted
with the principal philosophical schools of antiquity, he appears also to
have studied zealously the religions of the ancient world as they were
known at that time to the learned, especially in Alexandria, of which we
have but scant knowledge. Origen expressly states (I, 14) that Celsus
described the various peoples who possessed religious and philosophical
systems, because he supposed that all these views bore a certain
relationship to one another. Without a doubt much has been here lost to
us, not only for the history of Greek philosophy, but also for the history
of Oriental religions and philosophies, whose representatives at that time
sojourned in Alexandria, yet as to whose personal influence we are almost
entirely in the dark. Celsus is presumed to have written of the doctrines
of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Jews, Persians, Odrysians,
Samothracians, Eleusinians, even of the Samaneans, _i.e._ the Buddhists
(I, 24), and to have represented these as better accredited than those of
the Jews. We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we
feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope
of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who
wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the
second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to
understand clearly how men of this age, versed in philosophy, such as
Clement and Origen himself, could confess Christianity, or become
converted to it, or could defend it against other philosophers without in
the least becoming untrue to their philosophical convictions. That the
lower classes among Jews and Greeks followed the new teaching, is much
more intelligible, even without wishing to lay too much stress on the
evidential value of the miracles at that time. The great majority were
accustomed to miracles; what was almost entirely lacking was practical
religion. The Greek thinkers had created systems of philosophy and morals,
but the traditional worship had degenerated into a mere spectacle. Even
among the Jews the old religion had become a rigid temple ritual, which
offered but little comfort and hope to the weak heart of man. In the eyes
of the majority of the philosophers of the age every religion was only
pernicious superstition, good enough for the masses, but scarcely worth
consideration by the cultured. That Celsus made the Christian religion the
object of serious treatment and refutation, not only implies a subtle and
unprejudiced view of his age, but shows us at the same time how the
Christianity of that period, entirely independent of the Jewish religion,
had gained in significance, and had even in the eyes of a heathen
philosopher begun to be esteemed as something important, as something
dangerous, as something that had to be combated with philosophical
weapons.

Christianity is especially indebted for its rapid spread to its practical
side, to the energy of its love, which was bestowed on all who were weary
and heavy laden. Christ and the apostles had understood how to gather
around them the poor, the sinners, the most despised members of human
society. They were offered forgiveness of their sins, love, and sympathy,
if they merely promised to amend and sin no more. Among these earliest
followers of Christ there was scarcely a change of religion in our sense
of the word. Christianity was at first much more a new life than a new
religion. The first disciples were and remained Jews in the eyes of the
world, and that they came from the most despised classes even Origen does
not dispute. Celsus had reproached the Christians because the apostles,
around whose heads even in his time a halo had begun to shine, had been
men of bad character, criminals, fishermen, and tax-gatherers. Origen
admits that Matthew was a tax-gatherer, James and John fishermen, probably
Peter and Andrew as well; but declares that it was not known how the other
apostles gained a livelihood. Even that they had been malefactors and
criminals, Origen does not absolutely deny. He refers to the letter of
Barnabas, in which it is stated “that Jesus chose men as his apostles who
were guilty of sin more than all other evil doers.”(7) He relies upon the
words of Peter, when he says, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O
Lord.”(8)

Paul, in like manner, says in his epistle to Timothy,(9) “This is a
faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”

But it is just in this that Origen recognises the divine power of the
personality and the teaching of Christ, that by means of it men who had
been deeply sunken in sins could be raised to a new life; and he declares
it to be unjust that those who repented of their early sins, and had
entered into a pure life, well pleasing to God, should be reproached with
their previous sinfulness. In this respect he makes, indeed, no
distinction between the apostles and such men as Phædon and Polemo, who
were rescued from the mire of their sins through philosophy; and he
recognises in the teaching of Christ a still greater force, because it had
proved its saving and sanctifying power without any of the arts of
learning and eloquence. What the apostles were, and what they became
through the influence of the Gospel, Origen himself explains in the words
of Paul, “For we also were aforetime foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, and hating
one another.”(10)

He attributes it as an honour to the apostles that, even if their
self-accusations were extravagant, they had so openly acknowledged their
sins, in order to place the saving influence of the Gospel in a clearer
light. But the fact itself, that the apostles had been sinful and despised
men, Origen honestly admits. We also know with what true humanity Christ
himself treated the adulteress: how he challenged the Pharisees, if they
themselves were free from sin, to cast the first stone at her. And who
does not admire the aged Pharisees who silently withdrew, one after the
other, from the oldest to the youngest, without casting a stone? Have we
many such Pharisees in our time? Jesus, however, dismissed the adulteress
with the compassionate words, “Sin no more.” That such a course toward
sin-laden mankind by one who knew no sin, made a deep impression on the
masses, is perfectly intelligible. We see a remarkable parallel in the
first appearance of Buddha and his disciples in India. He, too, was
reproached for inviting sinners and outcasts to him, and extending to them
sympathy and aid. He, too, was called a physician, a healer of the sick;
and we know what countless numbers of ailing mankind found health through
him. All this can be quite understood from a human standpoint. A religion
is, in its nature, not a philosophy; and no one could find fault with
Christianity if it had devoted itself only to the healing of all human
infirmities, and had set aside all metaphysical questions. We know how
Buddha also personally declined all philosophical discussion. When one of
his disciples put questions to him about metaphysical problems, the
solution of which went beyond the limits of human reason, he contended
that he wished to be nothing more than a physician, to heal the
infirmities of mankind. Accordingly, he says to Mâlunkyaputta: “What have
I said to you before? Did I say, ‘Come to me and be my disciple, that I
may teach you whether the world is eternal or not; whether the world is
finite or infinite; whether the life-principle is identical with the body
or not, whether the perfect man lives after death or not?’ ”

Mâlunkyaputta answered, “Master, you did not say that.”

Then Buddha continued, “Did you then say, ‘I will be your disciple,’ but
first answer these questions?”

“No,” said the disciple.

Thereupon Buddha said: “A man was once wounded by a poisoned arrow, and
his friends called in an experienced physician. What if the wounded man
had said, I shall not permit my wound to be examined until I know who
wounded me, whether he be a nobleman, a Brahman, a Vaisya, or a Sûdra;
what his name is; to what family he belongs; if he be large or small, or
of medium size, and how the weapon with which he wounded me looked. How
would it fare with such a man? Would he not certainly succumb to his
wound?”

The disciple then perceives that he came to Buddha as a sick man, desiring
to be healed by him as a physician, not to be instructed about matters
that lie far beyond the human horizon.

Buddha has often been censured because he claimed for his religion such an
exclusively practical character, and instead of philosophy preached only
morality. These censures began in early times; we find them in the famous
dialogues between Nagasena and Milinda, the king Menander, about 100 B.C.
And yet we know how, in spite of all warnings given by the founder of
Buddhism, this religion was soon entirely overgrown with metaphysics; and
how, finally, metaphysics as Abbidharma found an acknowledged place in the
Sacred Canon of the Buddhists.

Christianity presents a parallel case. In the beginning it sought only to
call sinners to repentance. The strong, as Jesus himself said, do not
require a physician, but the sick. He therefore looked upon himself as a
physician, just as Buddha had done in an earlier day. He declared that he
was not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. The truth of his
teaching should be known by its fruits, and there is scarcely a trace in
the Gospels of philosophical discussions, or even of attacks on the
schools of Greek philosophy. But even here it was soon apparent that, for
a practical reformation of conduct, a higher consecration is essential. It
was admitted, as an Indian philosopher is reputed long since to have said
to Socrates, that no one could understand the human element who had not
first understood the divine. Men of Greek culture who felt themselves
attracted by the moral principles of the little Christian congregations
soon, however, wanted more. They had to defend the step which they had
taken, and the Christianity which they wished to profess, or had
professed, against their former friends and co-believers, and this soon
produced the so-called apologies for Christianity, and expositions of the
philosophical and theological views which constituted the foundation of
the new teaching. A religion which was recruited only from poor sinners
and tax-gatherers could scarcely have found entry into the higher circles
of society, or maintained itself in lecture-rooms and palaces against the
cultivated members of refined circles, if its defenders, like Buddha, had
simply ignored all philosophical, especially all metaphysical, questions.

How came it, then, that cultured men in high stations, entirely
independent, professed Christianity? How did they make their friends and
former co-believers understand that such a step was _bona fide_? In
answering this question, we get help from Celsus, as well as his opponent,
Origen.

The bridge which led across from Greek philosophy to Christianity was the
Logos. It is remarkable how much this fundamental doctrine of Christianity
fell, later on, into the background; how little it is understood, even by
the educated of our own time, and how often, without giving it any
consideration, they have cast it aside. In early Christian days this was
probably a consequence of the practical and political development of the
new religion. But the living nerve of the Christian religion, which was
its closest bond to the highest spiritual acquisitions of the ancient
Greek world, was thus severed. First, the Logos, the Word, the Son of God,
was misunderstood, and mythology was employed to make the dogma, thus
misconceived, intelligible. In modern times, through continued neglect of
the Logos doctrine, the strongest support of Christianity has been cut
from under its feet, and at the same time its historical justification,
its living connection with Greek antiquity, has almost entirely passed out
of view. In Germany it almost appears as though Goethe, by his _Faust_, is
answerable for the widespread treatment of the Logos idea as something
obscure, incomprehensible, mystical. Many, when reading the opening of the
Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” say to themselves, “No one
understands that,” and read on. He who does not earnestly and honestly
make an effort to understand this beginning of the Gospel, shows that he
is but little concerned with the innermost essence of Christianity, as
clearly presented to us in the Fourth Gospel. He forgets that not only
faith, but thought, pertains to a religion. It is no excuse to say, “Did
not the learned Dr. Faust torment himself to discover what ‘the word’ here
meant, and did not find it out?” He says in Goethe:—

“’Tis writ: ‘In the beginning was the Word’!
I pause perplexed! Who now will help afford?
I cannot the mere Word so highly prize,
I must translate it otherwise.”

But this is just what he ought not do. It was not necessary to translate
it at all; he only needed to accept the Logos as a technical expression of
Greek philosophy. He would then have seen that it is impossible to prize
the Word too highly, if we first learn what the Word meant in the idiom of
contemporary philosophy. Not even to a Faust should Goethe have imputed
such ignorance as when he continues to speculate without any historical
knowledge:—

“If by the spirit guided as I read,
  “In the beginning was the Sense,” Take heed.
The import of this primal sentence weigh,
Lest thy too hasty pen be led astray.
Is force creative then of sense the dower?
  “In the beginning was the Power.”
Thus should it stand; yet, while the line I trace,
A something warns me once more to efface.
The spirit aids, from anxious scruples freed,
I write: ‘In the beginning was the Deed.’ ”(11)

Had Goethe wished to scourge the unhistorical exegesis of modern
theologians, he could not have done so better than by this attempt of an
interpreter of the Bible, fancying himself illumined by the spirit, but
utterly destitute of all knowledge of history. Knowledge of the history of
the Greek philosophy of the first and second centuries after Christ is
indispensable to the understanding of such a word as Logos—a word that
grew up on Greek soil, and whose first roots reach far into the distant
past of the Greek mind; and for that very reason not admitting of
translation, either into Hebrew or into German. Like many other _termini
technici_, it must be understood historically; just as logic, metaphysic,
analytic, organon, etc., can only be apprehended and understood
historically. Now it is, perhaps, not to be denied, that even now a
majority of educated readers either perfunctorily repeat the first
sentence of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” or believe
that something lies buried therein that is beyond the depth of ordinary
men. This, of course, is partially true, and it cannot be otherwise in
religions which are intended not only for the young, but for the wise and
learned, and which should be strong meat for adults, and not merely milk
for babes. The fault lies chiefly in the translation, in that it should
have been thought necessary to translate a word instead of permitting it
to remain, what it was, a foreign word.

This becomes still worse when, as for instance, in certain Oriental
languages, the newly converted Christian has to read, “In the beginning
was the Noun or the Verb.” The correct translation would, of course, be,
“In the beginning was the Logos.” For Logos is not here the usual word
Logos, but a _terminus technicus_, that can no more be translated out of
the lexicon than one would think of etymologically translating Messiah or
Christ as the “Anointed,” or Angelos as “messenger” or “nuncio.” If we
read at the beginning of the Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos,” at
least every one would know that he has to deal with a foreign, a Greek
word, and that he must gain an understanding of it out of Greek
philosophy, just as with such words as _atom_, _idea_, _cosmos_, etc. It
is remarkable what human reason will consent to. Millions of Christians
hear and read, “In the beginning was the Word,” and either give it no
thought, or imagine the most inconceivable things, and then read on, after
they have simply thrown away the key to the Fourth Gospel. That thought
and reflection also are a divine service is only too readily forgotten.
Repeated reading and reflection are necessary to make the first verse of
the Fourth Gospel accessible and intelligible in a general way; but one
cannot be a true Christian without thinking and reflecting.

An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy is much simpler than is
commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks
thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term, namely, Logos,
expressed both, though they distinguished the inner from the outer Logos.
It is one of the most remarkable aberrations of the human mind, to imagine
that there could be a word without thought or a thought without word. The
two are inseparable: one cannot exist or be even conceived without the
other. I believe that I have clearly shown in my _Science of Thought_ that
thought without word and word without thought are impossible and
inconceivable, and why it is so. Here is the first key to a historical
solution of the riddle at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel. We know that
Greek philosophy after making every possible effort to explain the world
mechanically, had already in the school of Anaxagoras reached the view
that the hylozoic as well as the atomic theory leaves the human mind
unsatisfied; and that it is necessary to posit as the origin of all things
a thought or thinking mind that manifests itself in the universe. This was
the _nous_, the mind, of Anaxagoras. He could just as well have called it
_Logos_, for the word was in use even before the time of Anaxagoras, to
express that reason, the recognition of whose all-pervading presence in
the universe was the great step in advance made by the system of
Anaxagoras. Even Heraclitus had divined the existence of reason in the
universe, and had applied to it the name Logos. While the masses
recognised in _Moira_ or _Heimarmenê_ only destiny, or fate, Heraclitus
declared, that the essence of this Heimarmenê is the _Logos_, the Reason
that pervades the world. This is the oldest expression of Hegel’s thought,
“What is, is rational.” We must not suppose, however, that Heraclitus
considered this Logos as identical with his fire. He merely says that the
fire is subordinate to the Logos, that it operates κατὰ τὸν λόγον,
according to the Logos, or (as we should say) rationally.

Our knowledge of the entire system of Heraclitus is of course so
fragmentary that we can only speak of this, as of many other points, with
great caution. The same is true, although in a lesser degree, of the
system of Anaxagoras. His _nous_, if we translate it by mind, is more
comprehensive than _Logos_. We must not, however, suppose, that this
_nous_ bore a personal character, for Anaxagoras expressly states that it
is a χρῆμα, a thing, even though he would have said that this _nous_
regulated all things. Whether an impersonal mind is conceivable, was still
at that time a remote problem. Even in Plato we cannot clearly determine
whether he represented his _nous_ as God in our sense, or as _Sophia_,
wisdom, a word which with him often replaces _nous_. It is remarkable that
in his genuine works Plato does not generally use the word _Logos_, and in
Aristotle as well _nous_ remains the first term, what we should call the
divine mind, while _Logos_ is the reason, the causal nexus, the οῦ ἔνεκα,
therefore decidedly something impersonal, if not unsubjective.

Plato is the first who distinguishes between essence and being in the
primeval cause, or, as we might say, between rest and activity. He speaks
of an eternal plan of the world, a thought of the world, the world as a
product of thought, inseparable from the creator, but still
distinguishable from him. This is the Platonic world of “Ideas,” which
lies at the foundation of the world perceivable by the senses, the
phenomenal world. What is more natural or more reasonable than this
thought? If the world has an author, what can we imagine as reasonable
men, but that the thought, the plan of the world, belongs to the author,
that it was thought, and thereby realised for the first time? Now this
plan, this idea, was the inner _Logos_, and as every thought finds its
immediate expression in a word, so did this one, which was then called the
outer Logos. The outer was not possible without the inner, even as a word
is impossible without mind and reason. But the inner Logos also first
realises itself in the outer, just as the reasonable thought can only be
made real in the word. This character of the Logos as thought and word, at
once capable of distinction and yet undifferentiated and inseparable, is
of the highest importance for Christian speculation; without an exact
comprehension of it, we shall see that the relation of the Son to the
Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church,
remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology
has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a
concept. We cannot think of “tree” without the word or a hieroglyphic of
some kind. We can even say that, as far as we are concerned, there is no
tree, except in language, for in the nature of things there are only oaks
or beeches, but not and never a tree. And what is true of tree is true of
all words, or to speak with Plato, of all ideas, or to speak with the
Stoics, of all _Logoi_. There are no doubt conjurers who pretend to be
able to think without words, and even take no little pride in being able
to perform this trick. They forget only too often that their inexpressible
thoughts are nothing but obscure feelings, in fact, they do not even
distinguish between presentation and idea, and forget that when we speak
of words, we do not understand by them mere mimicry of sound or
interjections, but only and exclusively intelligible words, that is, such
as are based on concepts and are derived from roots. The old Greek
philosophers, probably favoured by their language, appear never to have
forgotten the true relation between Logos and Logos, and their thought
finally resulted in a view of the world founded upon it. Although it is
now the custom to speak slightingly of the later Platonists, we should
always recognise that we owe to them the preservation of this, the most
precious jewel out of the rich storehouse of Greek philosophy, that the
world is the expression and realisation of divine thought, that it is the
divine word expressed.

We cannot here enter into the various phases in which Plato and his
followers presented these ideas. At times they are represented as
independent of the Creator, as models, as golden statues, to which the
creative mind looks up. Soon, however, they are conceived as thoughts of
this mind, as something secondary, created, sometimes also as something
independent, as much so as is the Son in relation to his Father. The whole
Logos, with all ideas, became in this manner the first-born Son of the
Creator, yet so that the Father could not be Father without the Son, or
the Son without the Father, Son. All these distinctions, insignificant as
they may appear from a purely philosophical point of view, demand
attention because of the influence that they afterward exerted on
Christian dogma, especially on that of the Trinity—a dogma which, however
specifically Christian it may appear to be, must still in all its
essential features be traced back to Greek elements.

It is certainly remarkable that Jewish philosophy also developed on very
similar lines, of course not with the purity and exactness of the Greek
mind, but still with the same object in view,—to bring the reason and
wisdom recognised in nature into renewed connexion with their supernatural
Jehovah. Through the Proverbs of Solomon and similar works the Jews were
well acquainted with Wisdom, who says of herself (viii. 22 ff.): “The Lord
possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was
set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.…
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth.…
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the
face of the depth.… Then I was by him, as a master workman: and I was
daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.” These and similar
thoughts were familiar to Jewish thinkers (see Proverbs viii. and ix., Job
xxviii. 12, Ecclesiasticus i. 4), and it was natural that, in coming in
contact with Greek philosophy, especially in Alexandria, they should seek
to recognise again this traditional conception of divine Wisdom in the
Logos of Greek philosophers. We see this most clearly in Philo, a
contemporary of Christ, of whom it is often difficult to say whether he
reasons more as a Greek or as a Jew. While the Greeks had almost lost
sight of the bridge between the world and God by abstraction, the Jews,
through mistaken reverence, had so far removed the Creator above his
creation that on both sides the need of mediation or a mediator was deeply
felt. The Jewish God was little better than the Epicurean. If the
Epicureans taught that there probably is a God, but that the world is of
no concern to Him, so among the Jews of the first century gnostic ideas
prevailed, according to which not the highest but a subordinate God
created and ruled the world. The task of creation seemed unworthy of the
supreme God. Philo therefore seized the Stoic idea of the Logos or Logoi
in order to bring his transcendental God again into relation with the
visible world. The most important attributes and powers of God were
hypostatised as beings who participated in the creation and government of
the world. Philo’s God first of all creates or possesses within himself a
world that is conceived, an invisible world,(12) which is also called the
world of ideas(13) or the idea of ideas.(14) These ideas are the types(15)
of all things, and the power by which God created them is often called
_Sophia_ or _Epistêmê_, wisdom or knowledge.(16) This world of ideas in
its entirety corresponds, as is readily seen, to the Greek Logos, the
separate types to the Platonic ideas or the Stoic Logoi.

The entire Logos, or the sum of Ideas, is called by Philo, entirely
independent of Christianity, the true Son of God, while the realised world
of Christian teaching passes as the second Son. If the first Logos is
occasionally called the image or shadow of God, the world of sense is the
image of the image, the shadow of the shadow. More logically expressed,
God would be the _causa efficiens_, matter the _causa materialis_, the
Logos the _causa instrumentalis_, while the goodness of God is sometimes
added as the _causa finalis_. At the same time we also see here the
difference between the working of the Jewish and Greek minds. In the Old
Testament and in Philo, the Sophia or wisdom of God becomes a half
mythological being, a goddess who is called the mother, and even the
nurse,(17) of all beings. She bore with much labour out of the seed of
God,(18) as Philo says, the only and beloved visible Son, that is to say,
this Cosmos. This Cosmos is called by him the Son of God,(19) the only
begotten,(20) while the first Logos is the first-born,(21) and as such
often coincides with the Sophia and its activity.(22) He is also called
the elder son,(23) and as such is distinguished from a younger son,(24)
from the real, visible world. But this divine Sophia may not, according to
Philo, any more than God Himself, come into direct contact with impure
matter. According to him this contact occurs through the instrumentality
of certain powers,(25) which in part correspond to the Greek Logoi, and
which in his poetic language are also represented as angels.(26) Philo
says in plain terms that the eternal Logoi, that is the Platonic ideas,
are commonly called angels.

We see by this in how misty an atmosphere Philo lived and wrote, and we
may be certain that he was not the only one who in this manner blended the
Jewish religion with Greek philosophy. In the Samaritan theology also, in
Onkelos and Jonathan, traces of the Logos idea are to be found.(27) If we
now observe in the Fourth Gospel, somewhere in the first half of the
second century, this same amalgamation of Christian doctrine with Platonic
philosophy, only in a much clearer manner, we can scarcely doubt from what
source the ideas of the Logos as the only begotten Son of God, and of the
divine wisdom, originally flowed. Christian theologians are more inclined
to find the first germs of these Christian dogmas in the Old Testament,
and it is not to be denied that in the minds of the authors of some of the
books of the Old Testament analogous ideas struggle for expression. But
they are always tinctured with mythology, and among the prophets and
philosophers of the Old Testament there is absolutely no trace of a truly
philosophical conception of the Logos, such as confronts us as a result of
centuries of thought among the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the Stoics
and Neo-Stoics. We look in vain in Palestine for a word like Logos, for a
conception of the Cosmos as the expression of a rationally thinking mind,
especially for the Logoi as the species of the Logos, as the primeval
thoughts and types of the universe. It is difficult to understand why
theologians should have so strenuously endeavoured to seek the germs of
the Logos doctrine among the Jews rather than the Greeks, as if it was of
any moment on which soil the truth had grown, and as if for purely
speculative truths, the Greek soil had not been ploughed far deeper and
cultivated more thoroughly than the Jewish. That Philo found employment
for Platonic ideas, and especially for the Stoic Logos, nay, even for the
Logoi, in his own house, and that other philosophers went so far as to
declare the fundamental truths of Greek philosophy to have been borrowed
from the Old Testament, is well known; but modern researches have rendered
such ideas impossible. The correspondences to the Greek Logos that are
found in the Old Testament are of great interest, in so far as they make
the later amalgamation of Semitic and Aryan ideas historically more
intelligible, and also in so far as—like the correspondences to be found
among the East Indians and even the red Indians(28)—they confirm the truth
or at least the innate human character of a Logos doctrine. But wherever
we encounter the word Logos outside of Greece, it is, and remains, a
foreign word, a Hellenic thought.

Jewish philosophers, while they adopted the word, only filled their old
skins with new wine, with the natural consequence that the wine burst the
old skins; but without spilling. For it was this which, in the hands of
such men as the writer of the Fourth Gospel, as Hippolytus, Clement,
Origen, and the best of the church fathers, gave them the strength and
enthusiasm to triumph over the world, and especially over the strongholds
of heathen religion, and even over Greek philosophy. Had the Fourth
Evangelist wished to say that Christ was the divine Sophia or the
Shekinah, or, as in Job, Wisdom as the fear of God, would he have said,
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos became flesh, and lived
among us, and we saw his glory, a glory as of the only begotten Son of the
Father, full of grace and truth?” Why not take the facts just as they are,
and why wish to improve that which requires no human improvement? The
Christian doctrine is and remains what it is; it rests on an
indestructible arch, supported on one side by the Old Testament and on the
other by Greek philosophy, each as indispensable as the other. We forget
only too readily how much Christianity, in its victory over Greek
philosophy, owes to this very philosophy. Christianity could no doubt have
achieved the moral and social regeneration of the people without these
weapons of the Greek mind; but a religion, especially in the age of the
downfall of Greek and Roman philosophy, must have been armed for battle
with the best, the most cultured, and the most learned classes of society,
and such a battle demanded a knowledge of the weapons which had been
forged in the schools of Greek philosophy. We cannot therefore put too
high a value on the Fourth Gospel for a knowledge of the intellectual
movement of that day. It is true that a religion need not be a philosophy,
but it must not owe philosophy any answer. Small as may be the emphasis
that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was the centre,
the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the
writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be
surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed
point of departure, and then proceed to prove that the Word is the Son of
God, and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and
philosophical are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain
on the one hand the divinity of the Son of God, on the other hand they
retain the rationality of the created universe. That “the ALL is Logos, is
Word or Reason,” was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing
philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the
Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, _i.e._ the Logoi, the
divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural
selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest.
And what is the fittest, if not the rational, the Platonic “Good,” that
is, the Logos? Why, then, turn back to the stone age of human thinking,
why again turn nature into wood, when for thousands of years Greek
philosophers and Christian thinkers have recognised her as something
spiritual, as a world of eternal ideas? How would such men as Herder,
Schelling, and Hegel have smiled at such a view of the world! Yes, Darwin
himself would be ashamed of his followers, for he saw, though not always
clearly, that everything in this sphere presupposes something beyond, and
in the loftiest utterance of his book he demanded an origin, yes, an
originator. In the writings of the philosophical church fathers we
constantly hear more of the Logos which was in the beginning, and through
which all things were made, than of God, who in the beginning created
heaven and earth.

And in this lies the great interest of the lost treatise of Celsus. Had he
been an Epicurean, as Origen supposed, he would have had no personal
interest in the Logos. But this Logos had become at that time to such an
extent the common property of Greek philosophy, that the Jew, under whose
mask Celsus at the outset attacked the Christians, could quite naturally
express his willingness to acknowledge the Logos as the Son of God.
Origen, it is true, says that the Jew has here forgotten his part, for he
had himself known many Jewish scholars, no one of whom would have
acknowledged such an idea. This shows that Origen did not know the works
of Philo, who would certainly have offered no objection to such a
doctrine, for he himself calls the Logos the first-born Son (υἱὸς
πρωτόονος)(29) When therefore Celsus, the heathen philosopher, admits
through the mouth of the Jew that the Logos is the Son of God, he is
merely on his guard against the identification of any individual with the
Son of God and indirectly with the Logos, that is to say, he does not wish
to be a Christian. At all events we see how general was the view at that
time, that the whole creation was the realisation of the Logos, nay, of
the Son of God; that God uttered Himself, revealed Himself, in the world;
that each natural species is a Word, a Thought of God, and that finally
the idea of the entire world is born of God, and is thereby the Son of
God.

This idea of a Son of God, although in its philosophical sense decidedly
Greek, had, it is true, certain preparatory parallels among the Jews, on
which Christian theologians have laid only too great stress. In the fifth
book of Moses we read, “You are children of the Lord your God.” In the
book of Enoch, chap. cv., the Messiah is also called the Son of God, and
when the tempter says to Christ, Matthew iv. 1, “If thou be the Son of
God,” it means the same as “If thou be the Messiah.”

The question is: Is this Jewish conception of the Son of God as Messiah
the Christian as well? Such it has been, at least in one book of the
Christian church, in the Fourth Gospel, and it found its expression first
in the representation that Joseph was descended from David; secondly, in
the belief that Jesus had no earthly father. We see here at once the first
clear contradiction between Christian philosophy and Christian mythology.
If Joseph were not the father of Jesus, how could Joseph’s descent from
David prove the royal ancestry of Jesus? And how does it follow from his
being the Son of God that he had no earthly father? Although he was the
Son of God, he was called the son of the carpenter, and his brothers and
sisters were well known. The divine birth demands the human; without it,
it is entirely unintelligible. We know from the recently discovered
ancient Syrian translation of the Gospels that the two streams of
thought—that Christ was the Son of God, and that at the same time he had
an earthly father,—could flow side by side, quite undisturbed, without the
one rendering the other turbid.

It was the misunderstanding of the spiritual birth of Christ from his
divine Father, and even from his divine mother (the Ruach, feminine, the
holy spirit), that appeared to make it necessary to deny him an earthly
father, and to assert that even his human mother did not conceive and give
birth to him in the ordinary way. In the earliest period of the Christian
church this was otherwise. It was considered at that time that in Christ
the divine sonship went hand in hand with the human, and further that the
one without the other would lose its true meaning. In a Syrian palimpsest,
which was recently discovered in the convent at Mount Sinai by Mrs. Smith
Lewis, and which, being written in the fifth century, presupposes a still
older Syrian translator, we now see an original Greek text, probably of
the second century, in which the Davidic genealogy of Joseph (Matthew i.
16) is really the genealogy of Jesus, for it is there said, “Jacob begat
Joseph; Joseph to whom the virgin Mary was espoused begat Jesus, who is
called Christ.” In the twenty-first verse it reads also, “And she shall
bear him a son,” and in the twenty-fifth verse, “And took unto him his
wife, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Jesus.” This purely
human birth of Jesus does not in any manner disturb the belief in his true
divine origin, as the Son of God, as the first-born, the image of God,
whose name was called the Word of God, _i.e._ Logos. On the contrary, it
removes all difficulties with which so many Christians have contended,
openly or in silence, when they asked themselves how it is possible to
conceive a human birth, a human mother, without a human father. Even a
deification of the mother, or even of the grandmother, such as is
proclaimed by the Roman church, does not help any honest soul out of this
mire which has been made by well-meaning but ignorant theologians. The old
Christian philosophers, the old church fathers, saints, and martyrs, alone
give us light and leading. As long as we conceive the divine sonship of
Christ from the Jewish or Greek mythological standpoint, the true divine
nature of Christ remains a mere phrase. When, however, we call to our aid
the most orthodox and enlightened men of the second century, we find that
such men as Justin, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Apollonius(30) and
Clement, to say nothing of Origen, believed in Jesus as the only begotten
son of God(31) in the sense which these words had at that time for every
one who spoke and thought in Greek. This Son is often represented as
distinguishable from the Father, but not as separable. Of a Son of God in
the Jewish sense of the word, of a descendant of David, the evangelist
would never have said that all things were made by him. That could be
affirmed only of the true Son of God, of the Logos, as the thought of God,
which is uttered in the visible world.

In what sense this Logos was recognised in Jesus, is certainly a difficult
question, and here the work of Celsus would have been of great use to us,
for he expressly states that he has no objection to the Logos idea; but
how philosophers could accept an incarnation(32) of this Logos in Jesus,
was beyond his understanding. It must be borne in mind that matter and
flesh were held by Celsus to be something so unclean, that according to
him the Deity could only operate on matter by means of an endless number
of intermediaries (a true _fœtus œonum_). This obscurity in the conception
of Jesus as Logos by the Christian church is the reason why Celsus does
not regard Joseph as the natural father of Jesus, but Panthera. Origen, of
course, denounces this very indignantly; and the legend is nothing more
than one of the many calumnies, which are nearly always to be traced among
the opponents of a new religion and its founders. For the true nature and
the divine birth of Christ, as Origen himself seems to feel, such a story
would naturally have no significance whatever. It remains true, however,
that no writer of authority of the second and third centuries has clearly
explained in what sense the Christian church conceived Jesus as the Logos.

Three conceptions are possible. The first appears to have been that of the
Fourth Gospel, that the Logos, in all its fulness, as the Son, who in the
beginning was with God and was God, by whom all things were made, became
flesh in Jesus, and that this Jesus gave to those who believed in him as
Logos the power themselves to become sons of God, born like him not of
blood nor of the will of flesh, but of God. This may also explain why the
legendary details of the birth of Christ are never mentioned in the Fourth
Gospel. But however clear the view of the evangelist is, it nevertheless
remains obscure how he conceived the process of this incarnation of an
eternal being, transcending time and space and comprehending the whole
world, which lived among them, which, as is said in the Epistle of John,
was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen
with our eyes, that which we have beheld and our hands handled, the Word
of life,(33) etc. If we think ourselves for a moment into this view, into
the unity of the Divine that lives and moves in the Father, in the Logos,
and in all souls that have recognised the Logos, we shall comprehend the
meaning of the statement, that whoever believes in Jesus is born of God,
that whoever has the Son, has the life. To have the truth, to have eternal
life, to have the Son, to have the Father, all this then signifies one and
the same thing for the evangelist, and for the greatest among the
ante-Nicene fathers.

But second, the conception that the Logos was born in Jesus might simply
signify the same as Philo means, when he speaks of the Logos in Abraham
and in the prophets. This would be intelligible from Philo’s point of view
in relation to Abraham, but clearly does not go far enough to explain the
deification of Christ as we find it in all the Evangelists.

There remains possible therefore only a third conception. Philo knows very
well that God has an infinite number of powers or ideas, all of which
might be called Logoi, and together constitute the Logos. If now, among
these Logoi, that of humanity were conceived as highest, and Jesus were
regarded as the incarnate Logos, as the expressed and perfectly realised
idea of man, all would be intelligible. Jesus would then be the ideal man,
the one among mortals who had fully realised the idea of man as it existed
in God, who on the one side was the son of God, on the other side the son
of man, the brother of all men, if they would only acknowledge Christ as
the Son of God, and emulate His example. This would be a correct and to us
a perfectly intelligible and acceptable conception. But many as are the
difficulties which this would remove, the objection remains that we can
produce no historical proof of such a conception of Jesus as Logos of
humanity. We are too poor in historical monuments of the first three
Christian centuries to be able to speak with assurance of the inner
processes of thought of even the most prominent personalities of that
time. In everything, even in relation to many of the leading questions of
the Christian religion, we are obliged to rely on combination and
construction. Not only in the Evangelists, but in many of the church
fathers, feeling overcomes reason, and their expressions admit but too
often of the most varied interpretations, as the later history of the
church has only too clearly proved. Nevertheless we must endeavour to
enter not only into their emotions, but also into their thoughts, and not
believe that they used words without thoughts. I do not say that this is
impossible. Unthinkable as it is, that words arise and exist without
ideas, yet we know only too well that words become mere words, that they
grow pale and die, and that they may finally become _vox et prœterea
nihil_. It is, however, the duty of the historian and especially of the
philologist to call back to life such words as have given up the ghost.
May what I have here written about the meaning of the Logos fulfil this
aim, and at the same time make it clear that my desire for the discovery
of the original text of the _Sermo Verus_ was not an idle one. I have
since learned that the same wish was expressed at an earlier date by no
less a person than Barthold Niebuhr.



CHAPTER II.


                       The Pferdebürla (Horseherd)


A contributor to a periodical, which, like the _Deutsche Rundschau_, has a
world-wide circulation, receives many letters from every corner of the
earth. Many of them are nothing more than the twitter of birds in the
trees; he listens and goes his way. Others contain now and then something
of use, for which he is thankful, usually of course in silence, for a day
and night together contain only twenty-four hours, and but little time
remains for correspondence. It is interesting to note how radically one is
often misunderstood. While one person anonymously accuses the writer of
free thinking and heresy, another, and he generally gives his name,
complains of his orthodox narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and blindness,
which for the most part are attributed to poor Oxford, which, in foreign
countries at least, still has the reputation of high church orthodoxy.

Yet, in spite of all this, such letters are useful, for they give us a
knowledge of the public which we desire to influence, but which for the
most part goes its own way, as it may find most convenient. Often such
opinions come to us from the highest circles, at times also from the
lowest, and it is difficult to tell which of the two are the more
instructive. The problems of humanity in all their simplicity are after
all the same for us all, only they are viewed from different standpoints,
and are treated with scientific or practical design. Members of the same
profession readily understand each other; they employ their own technical
language; but the unprofessional person often goes straighter to the heart
of a question, and refuses to be satisfied with authorities or traditional
formulas. These gentlemen it is often difficult to silence. We can easily
contend with combatants who wield their weapons according to the rules
laid down by the schools; we know what to expect, and how to parry a quart
or a tierce. But an opponent who strikes regardless of all rule is often
hard to manage, and we get a scar where it is least expected or deserved.
In this wise I was served by an unknown opponent, who wrote to me from a
place in the neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, not far from Ohio. He had read
in his country solitude my article on Celsus in the _Deutsche Rundschau_.
I know nothing of him, except what he himself writes, but the man
interested me. After all, he says in his rude way very much the same
things as others veil in learned phrases, and his doubts and difficulties
are manifestly products of his heart as well as of his brain. The problems
of humanity have troubled him with genuine pain, and after honestly
thinking them out as well as he knew how, his convictions stand firm as a
rock, and all who disagree with him seem to him not only fools, but
unfortunately hypocrites as well. It is the misfortune of these lonely
thinkers that they cannot comprehend how any one can hold opinions
differing from their own without being dishonest. They cannot doubt that
they have been honest toward themselves, and as a consequence they cannot
conceive how others, who are of a different mind, can be equally honest,
and have come by their convictions by a straightforward path. Often it has
been very difficult for them to break with their old faith, cherished from
childhood, and they can only look upon it as cowardice and weakness if
others, as they think, have not made or wished to make this sacrifice. But
we shall let the horseherd who emigrated to America speak for himself.

I here print his letter exactly as I received it, without any
alterations.(34) To me it seems that the man speaks not only for himself,
but for many who think as he does, but who have not the ability nor the
opportunity to express themselves clearly. I resolved, accordingly, to
reply to him, and once begun, my pen ran on, and my letter unexpectedly
covered more ground than I had intended. Whether he received the letter or
not, I do not know; at least it must have been delivered to his address,
for it was not returned to me. As I have not, however, heard from him
again since February, and as he speaks in his letter of chest catarrh,
which he hopes will in no long time bring him to a joyful end, I must wait
no longer for an answer, and publish the correspondence in the hope that
there are other “Pferdebürle” in the world to whom it may be of value.

                                * * * * *

“



Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S., February 26, 1896.
Dear Colleague Max Müller:

“Your article in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ on Celsus pleased me very much.
What does it matter that you do not know me? I love you, and that gives me
a right to address you. Why those vain regrets over the loss of the
original? I would not stretch out my little finger for that Celsus; gone
is gone like the lost parts of the Annals of Tacitus. More than likely
both of these losses are to be ascribed to Christian fanaticism. Tacitus
hated the Jews and the Christian sect derived from them. But, father Max,
have we not much greater modern Celsuses and Tacituses, for instance David
Hume and Schopenhauer? One would think that after the writings of these
heroes positive Christianity would be an impossibility, and yet the
persistence of error is so great that it may take several centuries more
before the end of the Christian era is reached. Has there ever been
anything in the history of the world more humiliating to the human
understanding than this false and lying tale of the Christian religion?
And is there anything in face of our knowledge, and of the realm of nature
and of man’s position in it, so unbearable, yes so odious, as the
inoculation of such error in the tender consciousness of our school
children? I shudder when I think that in thousands of our churches and
schools this systematic ruin of the greatest of all gifts, the
consciousness, the human brain, is daily, even hourly, going on. Max, can
you, too, still cling to the God-fable? The English atmosphere may serve
as an apology. I could not strike a dog, but I am filled with
bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea of God, the soul-phantom, and the
hallucination of immortality.—The facts are so simple and clear; we are
the highest existing forms of being in the animal world of this planet,
and share one and the same nature with them. After death we are just as
entirely reduced to nothing as before our birth. Nature tells us so
plainly that the eternal conditions before and after our birth are
identical.

“You ask me what this juggling means;
Take this short answer for your pains;
A game of chance from the eternal sea
By the same sea again will swallowed be.
—OMAR KHAYYAM (Bodenstedt).

“But there is nothing in this world so false as the statement that good
can ever come out of lies. Nothing in the world is so wholesome as truth,
and truth is under all circumstances lovable, beautiful, and holy. Let us
kneel before the truth of nature; nature cannot go astray. The distinction
between good and evil, the evil heritage of Judaism, must fall in the end.
Max, on quiet fields, in a mountain village of Silesia, I turned
somersaults with joy at the discovery that this distinction is false, and
that good and evil are identical. Max, you will not be angry with me? I am
no learned fellow. I never attended a high school, and now I rejoice at
it, for what a German calls education can only serve to miseducate after
all. Modern life is, for every open-minded person, the real high school.
Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still
labour under the delusion that the mind is a ‘prius.’ By no means, Max!
Mind is a development, an evolving phenomenon. One would suppose it
impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of
any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of
living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken. Then, Max,
why not be content with the limits of our knowledge, conditioned by
experience, and give up this infamous romancing and tyrannical lying? The
only affection which after fifty years I still cherish in my bosom is the
sweet, unquenchable longing for that truth which fate has denied us.

“Max, you are by no means a free man, as I observe that the religious
congress in Chicago impressed you very much.(35) I was present when the
gayly dressed idolators from Cardinal Gibbons down to the stupid Shinto
priest and the ill-favoured Baptist woman preacher sat together on the
platform. It was very pretty and refreshing to look upon. They all talked
nonsense and thought themselves very wise. There was but one exception
which interested me: a yellow Buddhist monk inquired, what they thought of
English missionaries, who in time of famine distributed bread to the poor,
but only on one condition, that they adopted the Christian superstition
(indifferent whether honestly or not). The so-called ‘Ethical Culture
Societies’ were not admitted by the committee to their congress of many
religions. Max, it was pitiful to listen to the tittle-tattle that was
read. None had learned beforehand what he wanted to say. _Dicere de
scripto_ is a shame for learned men. Only Cardinal Gibbons made a short,
but colourless and dull extemporaneous address, which closed with the
hypocrisy, what a great thing it is to keep oneself unspotted by this
world. Accursed hypocrites, you yourselves are this world,—pitifully
incarnate, it is true,—but you yourselves are this ‘spotted world.’ Why
then still hold to the stupid distinction between good and evil, when we
must admit that evil is essential to the very existence of things, and it
would be impossible for the world to be, except as it is. We must be as we
are, or we should not be at all. O beautiful longing for the primeval
cause! Our ignorance is like evil, welcome. Let us, O Max, embrace the
evil and ignorance, for if we were nothing but wretched cripples of
virtue, and knew everything, we could not bear to live. As it is, we enjoy
the spirited battle, and carry a sweet yearning in our breasts.

“Max, how are you personally? Have you a family? How is your health? How
old are you? What relation do you bear to the learned set in England? Do
you know the one German philosopher, with the courage of his convictions,
Emil Dühring, in Berlin. I consider my knowledge of the writings of Dr.
Dühring as the greatest gift of fate which has been vouchsafed to me. The
Jews and state professors hide his fame under a bushel. Oh! could not such
independent men as you, honoured Max Müller, do something to bring this
hero nearer to our young students? Dühring is the only writer of the
present day who is to be enjoyed almost without drawback. What is to be
said of our German set which is cowardly enough to repress so long the
greatest mind which our century has produced? Were I in _your_ position,
how would I shout my ‘Quos Ego’ across to Germany! Please, my countryman,
favour me with a few lines in answer to this effusion, in order that I may
learn who and what you are. I am a Silesian horseherd (to be distinguished
from the cowherds [_kühbürla’s_], who till their field with pious
moo-moos). Instead of attending a high school, I herded cows, ploughed,
harvested, and helped to thrash in the winter. While herding I played the
flute in the valleys of the Sudetic Mountains; and because the hands of
the old village schoolmaster trembled very much, I begged of him to let me
try to play the organ for him. ‘Ah, you rascal, you can play better than
I,’ and he boxed my ears. Then my eldest brother took possession of the
farm of seventy-five acres, gave us no compensation, and the rest of us
lads had to pack off. We scraped together the passage money to America,
and about thirty years ago I arrived here, where—I almost said God be
praised—it has always gone pretty hard with me. Whether I fare well or ill
is the same to me. I make no distinction, for in view of the rapid passing
of life, it does not pay to give much thought to unnecessary distinctions.
I never could think of marrying, chiefly because the majority of the women
in this country are shrews, cannot cook, and spend much too much money on
the housekeeping. Besides, I have but a short time to live, for I possess
a chest catarrh most loyally devoted to me, verging upon a perfect asthma,
which I hope erelong will bring me to a joyful end. No doubt you will
think what a disconsolate fellow this is who has written to me. O pshaw! I
have always enjoyed the sunshine, and have sat alone hundreds of snug
hours before my winter’s companion, a small iron stove. During the last
three nights I have repeatedly read through your article on Celsus,
published in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, by a tallow-candle. In relation to
your enthusiasm over the religious clap-trap in Chicago, I should like to
observe that you would have been entirely in the right if you had
represented the Exhibition as the greatest event of the past ten years. I
came through Chicago in September, 1892, visited the prospective site of
the Exposition, and found there a mere wilderness, scarcely a single
building half finished, and it was a wonder of wonders what American
enterprise and genius for organisation accomplished within the single
intervening winter. One could scarcely recover from one’s astonishment at
what ten thousand labourers, urged on by the Yankee lash, could make ready
in six months. ‘There was money in the business,’ and for money Jonathan
works real miracles. Its like the world has never produced. The American
is cut on a large pattern, and in spite of his political delusions I
entertain the greatest hopes for the future of a country which is in such
hands.”

With many friendly greetings,
                                                     A Silesian Horseherd.
                                                     Emigrated to America.



”

                                * * * * *

I answered my unknown friend and correspondent as follows:—

                                * * * * *

“



“MY GOOD FRIEND: You are an honest fellow, and I believe that I am one
too, but our views are widely divergent. I am an old professor, am now
seventy-two years old, or as has been often said to me, seventy-two years
young. Like yourself I commenced life with nothing, and have laboured till
I have become not rich, but independent. Here in wealthy England and in
wealthy Oxford I am considered a poor man, but I am quite content, and
call that riches. I have been married thirty-seven years, have one son,
secretary to the Embassy at Constantinople, and a happily married
daughter, with four grandchildren. Now you know all that you wished to
know. Of my sorrow, the loss of two daughters, I must remain silent.

“All my life I have been engaged in investigating the past; I am a
philologist and have therefore been also a student of history, have
especially studied the historical development of the various religions of
mankind, and to this end have had to make a study of ancient languages,
particularly Oriental languages. When one consecrates one’s life to such a
cause, one acquires an interest in and a love for the ancients, and a wish
to know what has consoled them in this vale of grief. As you probably
acquired a love for your colts, mares, and stallions, I acquired an
interest in ancient and modern religions. And as you probably do not
immediately kill or reject your horses because they possess a blemish,
shy, kick, prance about, etc., so I do not immediately destroy all
beliefs, and least of all my own mount, because they are not faultless,
occasionally leave me in the lurch, behave foolishly, even dance on their
hind legs with head in air; but I endeavour to understand them. When we
understand even a little, we can forgive much. That many religions,
including our own, contain errors and weak points, just as your horses do,
I know perhaps even better than you. But have you ever asked yourself,
what would have become of mankind without any religion, without the
conviction that beyond our horizon, that is beyond our limit, there still
must be something? You will answer, ‘How do we know that?’ Well, can there
be any boundary without something beyond it? Is not that as true as any
theorem in geometry? If it were not so, how could we explain the fact that
mankind has never been without a belief in a world beyond, nor without
religion, either in the lowest or in the highest levels.

“This horizon, this boundary, does not relate only to space, as all will
agree, even when carried beyond the Milky Way; it relates as well to time.
You assert, ‘The world is much older than we suppose;’ you are right, but
if it were a million years, still there must have been a time before it
was even a day old. That also is indisputable. But when we reach the limit
of our senses and our understanding, then the horse shies, then we imagine
that nothing can go beyond our understanding. Now let us begin with our
five senses. They seem to be our wings, but seen in the light they are our
fetters, our prison walls. All our senses have their horizon and their
limits; and the limits in the external world are our making. Our sight
scarcely reaches a mile, then it ceases; we can observe the movement of
the second hand, but that of the minute hand escapes us. Why? We might
know that a cannon-ball passes through our field of vision, but we cannot
locate it. Why not? Our sense of touch is also very weak and only extends
over a very limited space. And as it is on the large scale, so is it with
the small. We see the eye of a needle, but infusoria and bacteria, which
we know to be there and which affect us so much, we cannot see. With
telescopes and microscopes we can slightly extend the field of our
perception, but the limitations and weakness of our sense-impressions
remain none the less an undeniable fact. We live in a prison, in a cave as
Plato said, and yet we accept our impressions as they are, and form out of
them general notions and words, and with these words we erect this stately
building, or this tower of Babel, which we then call human science.

“Yes, say certain philosophers, our senses may be finite and
untrustworthy, but our understanding, and still further our reason, they
are unlimited, and recognise nothing which is beyond them. Well, what does
this most wise understanding do for us? Has not Hobbes long since taught
us that it adds and subtracts, and _voilà tout_? It receives the
impressions of the senses, combines them, feels them, comprehends and
designates or names them after any characteristic, and when man has found
words, then the adding and subtracting begin, but unfortunately also the
jumbling and chattering, till we finally establish that philosophy and
religion, which have aroused in so great degree your anger, and even your
blood thirstiness. In spite of all it remains true that we can no more get
beyond the horizon of our senses than we can jump out of our skins. You
know that old saying of Locke’s, although it is much older than Locke,
that there is nothing in our intellect which was not first in our senses.
And therefore, however much we may extend our knowledge by adding and
subtracting, everywhere we feel in the end our horizon, our limitations,
our ignorance, for with the limitations of our senses it cannot be
otherwise. Invariably we receive the old answer, ‘You are like the mind
which you conceive, not me.’

“But you say that we have no right whatever to speak of a mind. That is
possible, but everything depends upon what we understand by the term
‘mind.’ Is not mind, that is to say, a recipient, essential to our seeing
and hearing? The eye can no more see than a camera obscura. True seeing,
hearing, and feeling are not perceptible through the organs of sense, but
through the recipient, for without it the organs of sense could make no
resistance, could not receive, could not perceive. This unknown element
which lies beyond the senses, this recipient must be there. It is true he
cannot be named. Perhaps it would have been better to have called him
‘_x_’ or the Unknown; but when we know what is meant, why not call it mind
or spirit, that is, breath? You call it a soul-phantom. Well, good, but
without such a soul-phantom we cannot get on; you would have to consider
yourself a mere photographic apparatus, and I do not believe that you do.

“Of course you can still say that the mind is a development, a
self-evolving phenomenon. Rightly understood that is quite true, but how
misleading that word ‘evolution’ has been in these latter days. Darwin
certainly brought much that is beautiful and true to the light of day. He
demonstrated that many of the so-called species are not independent
creations, but have been developed from other species. That means that he
has corrected the earlier erroneous nomenclature of Natural History and
has introduced a more correct classification. He has greatly simplified
the work of the Creator of the world. Of that merit no one will deprive
him, and it is a great merit. And those who believed that every species
required its own act of creation, and had to be finished by the Creator
separately (as was the established opinion in England, and still is in
some places), cannot be grateful enough to Darwin for having given them a
simpler and worthier idea of the origin of the earth and of its animal and
vegetable kingdoms.

“But now comes Mr. Herbert Spencer and tells us, ‘We have to deal with man
as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and
with moral phenomena as products of evolution.’ That sounds splendid, but
every one who does not quite ignore the past, knows that evolution or
development is neither anything very new or very useful. Formerly we used
simply to say the tree grows, the child develops, and this was
metaphorically transferred to society, the state, science, and religion.
The study of this development was called history, and occasionally genetic
or pragmatic history; but instead of talking as we do now of evolution
with imperceptible transitions, it was these transitions which industrious
and honest investigators formerly sought to observe. They aimed at
learning to know the men, and the events, which marked a decided step in
advance in the history of society, or in the history of morals. This
required painstaking effort, but the result obtained was quite different
from the modern view, in which everything is evolved, and, what is the
worst, by imperceptible degrees. In Natural History this is otherwise; in
it the term ‘evolution,’ or ‘growth,’ may be correctly applied, because no
one really has ever seen or heard the grass grow, and no one has ever
observed the once generally accepted transition from a reptile to a bird.
In this we must doubtless admit imperceptible transitions. Yet even in
this we must not go beyond the facts; and if a man like Virchow assures us
that the intermediate stages between man and any sort of animal have never
been found to this day, then in spite of all storms we shall probably have
to rest there. But I go still farther. Even supposing, say I, that there
is an imperceptible transition from the Pithecanthropos to man, affecting
his thigh, his skull, his brain, his entire body, have we then found a
transition from the animal to man? Certainly not; for man is man, not
because he has no tail, but because he speaks, and speech implies not only
communication,—an animal can do that perhaps better than a man,—but it
implies thinking, and thinking not only as an animal thinks, but thinking
conceptually. And this small thing, the concept, is the transition which
no animal has ever accomplished. The moment an ape achieved it, he would
be _ipso facto_ a man, in spite of his miserable brain, and in spite of
his long tail.

“Concepts do not present themselves spontaneously (or we should find them
also among animals), but they are a special product, in part the work of
our ancestors, and inherited by us with our language, and in part even now
the work of more gifted men from time to time. This making necessarily
implies the existence of a maker, and if we now provisionally call this
maker, this transcendent, invisible, but very powerful ‘_x_,’ mind, are we
thereby chargeable, as you say, with having conjured up a soul-phantom?
Call it a phantom if you will, but even as a phantom it has a right to
exist. Call it mind, breath, breathing, willing, or (with Schopenhauer)
will, there is always a He or It to be reckoned with. Of this He or It,
this pronominal soul-phantom, you will never rid yourself.

“And if we now perceive with our senses a world as it is given us whether
we will or no, and in this objective world, without us, which so many
regard as within us, we everywhere recognise the presence of purpose, must
we then not also have a name for that which manifests itself in nature as
purposive or rational? Shall we only call it ‘_x_,’ or may we transfer the
word designating what works purposively in us to this Unknown, and speak
of a universal Mind without which nature could not be what it is? Nature
is not crazy nor incoherent. When the child is born, has the mother milk,
and to what purpose? Why, certainly, to nourish the child. And the child
has the lips and muscles to suck. When the fruit has ripened on the tree,
it falls to the earth full of seed. The husk breaks, the seed falls in the
soil, it rains and the rain fertilises the seed, the sun shines and makes
it grow, and when the tree has grown and again bears blossoms and fruit,
this fruit is useful to man, is food and not poison to him. Is all this
without purpose, without reason? Is it a symphony without a composer? Man,
too, needs rain and sunshine, and warmth and darkness; and all this is
given to him so that he may live and work and think. What would man be
without darkness, without the rest afforded by night? Probably crazy. What
would he be without sunshine? Perhaps an Esquimau or a mole. But how
remarkable it is that as the tree always reproduces itself, so also does
man. The son differs from the father, and yet how like they are. Where is
the form which retains the continuous resemblance to itself, and yet
leaves to each separate person freedom and individuality? Whence comes
this purpose in all nature? That is an old question which has received
many answers, both wise and foolish. Unfortunately men so frequently
forget what has already been attained, and then begin again at the
beginning. Darwin was an industrious and delicate observer, and showed
admirable power of combination. But he was no philosopher, and never
sought to be one. He was of opinion that everything in nature which
appeared to show purpose proceeded from the survival of the fittest. But
that is no answer. We ask, Why does the fittest survive? And what is the
answer? Because only the fittest survives. And when we come to Natural
Selection, who is the selector that selects? These are nothing but
phrases, which have long been known and long since been abandoned, and
still are always warmed up again. If we recognise in nature purpose or
reason, then we have a right to conclude that the source of it lies in the
eternal reason, in the eternally rational. Behind all objects lies the
thought or the idea. If there are rational ideas in nature, then there
must be a rational thinker. Behind all trees—oaks, birches, pines—lies the
thought, the idea, the form, the word, the _logos_ of tree. Who made or
thought it before ever the first tree existed? We can never see a tree; we
see only an oak, a birch, a pine, never a tree. But the thought or idea of
tree meets us, realised and diversified in all trees. This is true of all
things. No one has ever seen an animal, a man, a dog, but he sees a St.
Bernard, a greyhound, a dachshund, and strictly not even that. What, then,
is it that is permanent, always recurring in the dog, by means of which
they resemble each other, the invisible form in which they are all cast?
That is the thought, the idea, the _logos_ of dog. Can there be a thought
without a thinker? Did the ideas in nature, the millions of objects which
make up our knowledge, fall from the clouds? Did they make themselves or
did nature make them? Who, then, is nature? Is it a masculine, feminine,
or neuter? If nature can choose, then it can also think and produce. But
can it? No, nature is a word, very useful for certain purposes; but empty,
intangible, and incomprehensible. Nature is an abstraction, as much as dog
or tree, but far more inclusive. When we recognise thought, reason,
purpose in nature, still it is all in vain, we must assume a thinker in,
above, behind nature, and we must as a matter of course have a name for
him. The infinite thinker of all things, of all ideas, of all words, who
can never be seen and never comprehended, because he is infinite, but in
whose thoughts all creatures, the entire creation, have their source, and
who when rightly understood approaches us palpably or symbolically in all
things, in the sole path of sense by which he can approach us sentient
beings, why should we not call him Mind, or God, or as the Jews called
him, Jehovah, or the Mohammedans, Allah, or the Brahmins, Brahman? Either
reason operates in nature, or nature is without reason, is chaos and
confusion. Neither survival of the fittest nor natural selection could
bring order into this confusion; we might as well believe that if the type
in a printing office be thoroughly shaken and mixed, it could produce
Goethe’s _Faust_ by chance. If we insist upon adhering to the theories of
natural selection, or survival of the fittest, be it so; we only transfer
the choice to a Something which can choose, and leave the fitness or
adaptability to the judgment of an originator, who can really judge and
think.

“I hope that I have made this plain to you; but what would be plain to us
would not be plain to children, and still less to mankind in its infancy
five thousand or fifty thousand years ago. I have especially endeavoured
to discover what led these men of old, in many respects so uncultivated,
to believe in something beyond, invisible, superhuman, supernatural. We
can see from their language and from the oldest monuments of their
religion that they early observed that something happened in the world.
The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke,
and asked himself and the sunshine. ‘Whence?’ he said; ‘stop, what is
there? who is there?’ Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own
volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was
considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave
light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay
great honour to the sun; to be grateful to it, to appeal to it for light,
heat, and increase. And therefore the sun became a God, _e.g._ a Deva
(deus), which originally meant nothing more than light. But even then an
old Inca in Peru observed that the sun was not free; could not, therefore,
be a being, to whom man could be grateful, to whom he could pray. It is,
said he, like a beast of burden, which must daily tread its appointed
round. And although the worship of the sun was the religion of his
country, and he himself was worshipped as a child of the sun, he renounced
the ancient faith of his country, and became what is now frequently called
an atheist; that is, he longed after a truer God. What say you to this
Inca? This same thing occurred also in other lands, and instead of
continuing to worship the sun and moon, the dawn, the storm-wind, or the
sky, they worshipped that which must be behind it all, which was called
Heaven-Father, Jupiter, and every conceivable name. These names were no
longer to indicate the visible object, but Him who had thought and created
the object, the thinker and ruler of the world. This is the fundamental
idea from which all religions have arisen: not animism, fetishism,
totemism, or whatever the little tributaries may be called, which have
poured for thousands of years into the main stream. Every people has
produced its own religion, its own language, in the course of thousands of
years; later, religions have been framed for all mankind, and we are still
engaged in that task, even in what you call that clap-trap of Chicago.
Even though we have all been born and educated in some religion, we
nevertheless have the right, even the duty, like the old Inca, to examine
every article of our hereditary religion, to retain it or to cast it
aside, according to our own judgment and conception of the truth. Only the
fundamental principle must remain; there is a thinker and a ruler of the
universe. Of Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, of Joseph and Mary, of the
resurrection and ascension, let each one believe what he will, but the
highest commandment applies to all, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.’

“You see, therefore, that I, too, am a God-romancer. And what objection
can you raise against it? You are of opinion that to love God and your
neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are evidently very proud of
your discovery that there is no distinction between good and evil. Well,
if loving God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, then it
follows that not loving God and not loving your neighbour is equivalent to
not being good, or to being evil. There is, then, a very plain distinction
between good and bad. And yet you say that you turned a somersault when
you discovered that there was no such distinction. It is true that the
nature of this distinction is often dependent on the degree of latitude
and longitude where men are congregated, and still more on the intention
of the agent. This is very ancient knowledge. The old Hindu philosophers
went still farther, and said of an assassin and his victim, ‘The one does
not commit murder, and the other is not murdered.’ That goes still farther
than your somersault. At all events, we entirely agree with each other,
that everything which is done out of love to God and our neighbour is
good, and everything which is done through selfishness is bad. The old
philosopher in India must have turned more somersaults than you; but what
he had in his mind in doing it does not concern us here. But it was not so
bad as it sounds, and I believe that what you say, that there is no real
distinction between good and evil, is not so bad as it sounds.

“We have now reached that stage that we must admit that there is a mind
within us, in our inner world, and a mind without us, in the outer world.
What we call this mind, the Ego, the soul within us, and the Non-ego, the
world-soul, the God without us, is a matter of indifference. The Brahmans
appear to me to have found the best expression. They call the fundamental
cause of the soul, of the Ego, the Self, and the fundamental cause of the
Non-ego, of the World-soul, of God, the highest Self. They go still
farther, and hold these two selves to be in their deepest nature one and
the same—but of this another time. To-day I am content, if you will admit,
that our mind is not mere steam, nor the world merely a steam-engine, but
that in order that the machine shall run, that the eye shall see, the ear
hear, the mind think, add, and subtract, we need a seer, a hearer, a
thinker. More than this I will not inflict on you to-day; but you see that
without deviating a finger’s breadth from the straight path of reason,
that is from correct and honest addition and subtraction, we finally come
to the soul-phantom and to the idea of God, which you look upon with such
blood-thirstiness. I have indicated to you, with only a few strokes, the
historical course of human knowledge. There still remains much to fill in,
which must be gained from history and the diligent study of the sacred
books of mankind, and the works of the leading philosophers of the East
and the West. We shall then learn that the history of mankind is the best
philosophy, and that not only in Christianity and Judaism, but that in all
religions of the world, God has at divers times spoken through the
prophets in divers manners, and still speaks.

“And now only a few words more over another somersault. You say that the
mind is not a _prius_, but a development out of matter. You are right
again, if you view the matter only from an embryological or psychological
standpoint. A child begins with deep sleep, then comes dream-sleep, and
finally awakening, collecting, naming, adding, subtracting. What is that
which awakens in the child? Is it a bone, or is it the soft mass which we
call brain? Can the gray matter within our skulls give names, or add? Why,
then, has no craniologist told us that the monkey’s brain lacks precisely
those tracts which are concerned with speech or with aphasia?(36) I ask
again, Can the eye see, the ear hear? Try it on the body under dissection,
or try it yourself in your sleep. Without a subject there is no object in
the world, without understanding there is nothing to understand, without
mind no matter. You think that matter comes first, and then what we call
mind. Where is this matter? Where have you ever seen matter? You see oak,
fir, slate, and granite, and all sorts of other _materies_, as the old
architects called them, never matter. Matter is the creation of the mind,
not the reverse. Our entire world is thought, not wood and stone. We learn
to think or reflect upon the thoughts, which the Thinker of the world,
invisible, yet everywhere visible, has first thought. What we see, hear,
taste, and feel, is all within us, not without. Sugar is not sweet, we are
sweet. The sky is not painted blue, we are blue. Nothing is large or
small, heavy or light, except as to ourselves. Man is the measure of all
things, as an ancient Greek philosopher asserted; and man has inferred,
discovered, and named matter. And how did he do it? He called everything,
out of which he made anything, matter; _materia_ first meant nothing more
than wood used for building, out of which man built his dwelling. Here you
have the whole secret of matter. It is building-material, oak, pine,
birch, whichever you prefer. Abstract every individual characteristic,
generalise as you will, the wood, the _hyle_, always remains. And you will
have it that thought, or even the thinker, originated from this wood. Do
you really believe that there is an outer world such as we see, hear, or
feel? Where have we a tree, except in our imagination? Have you ever seen
a whole tree, from all four quarters at once? Even here we have something
to add first. And of what are our ideas composed, if not our
sense-perceptions? And these perceptions, imperfect as they are, exist
only in us, for us, and through us. The thing perceived is and always
remains, as far as we are concerned in the outer world, transcendent, a
thing in itself; all else is our doing; and if you wish to call it matter
or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the _prius_
of mind, but the _posterius_, that which is demanded by the mind, but is
always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to
matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed.
From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside
the atoms, or the matter, so that we can never say that there is nothing
in the universe but matter. And now if we ascribe motion to the atoms, or
like other philosophers, perception, then that is nothing more nor less
than to ascribe mind to them, which, however, if you are right, must first
evolve itself out of this matter. If we wind something into these atoms,
then we can also wind something out of them; in doing this, however, we
give up at the outset the experiment of letting mind evolve itself out of
matter. Give an atom the germ-power of an acorn, and it will develop into
an oak. Give an atom the capacity of sense-perception, and it will become
an animal, possibly a man. But what was promised us was the development of
feeling and perception out of the dead atoms of hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen, carbon, etc. Even if we could explain life out of the activities
of these atoms, which may be possible,—although denied by Haeckel and
Tyndall,—still feeling, perception, understanding, all the functions of
mind, would remain unexplained. J. S. Mill is certainly no idealist, and
no doubt is one of your heroes. Well Mr. Mill declares that nothing but
mind could produce mind. Even Tyndall, in his address as President of the
British Association in Belfast, declared in plain words that the
continuity of molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness
constitute the rock on which all Materialism must inevitably be shattered.

“Think over all of this by your iron stove, or better still at some
beautiful sunrise in spring, and you will see before you a more glorious
revelation than all the revelations of the Old World.”

Yours faithfully,
                                                             F. Max Müller
                                                   Oxford, November, 1896.



”



CHAPTER III.


                         Concerning The Horseherd


The appearance of my article in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ seems to have
caused much headshaking among my friends in Germany, England, and America.
Many letters came to me privately, others were sent directly to the
publishers. They came chiefly from two sides. Some were of the opinion
that I dealt too lightly with the Horseherd; others protested against what
I said about the current theory of evolution. The first objection I have
sought to make up for in what follows. The other required no answer, for I
had I think, in my previous writings, quite clearly and fully explained my
attitude in opposition to so-called Darwinism. Some of my correspondents
wished peremptorily to deny me the right of passing judgment upon Darwin’s
doctrine, because I am not a naturalist by profession. Here we see an
example of the confusion of ideas that results from confusion of language.
Darwinism is a high-sounding, but hollow and unreal word, like most of the
names that end in ism. What do such words as Puseyism, Jesuitism,
Buddhism, and now even Pre-Darwinism and Pre-Lamarckism signify?
Everything and nothing, and no one is more on his guard against these
generalising _termini technici_ than the _heroes eponymi_ himself. What
has not been called Darwinism? That the present has come out of the past,
has been called the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century. Darwin
himself is not responsible for such things. He wished to show how the
present has come out of the past, and he did it in such a manner that even
the laity could follow him and sincerely admire him. Now, of course, it
cannot be denied that if we understand _Darwinism_ to mean Darwin’s close
observations concerning the origin of the higher organisms out of lower as
well as the variations of individuals from their specific types, caused by
external conditions, it would as ill become me to pass either a favourable
or unfavourable judgment as it would Darwin to estimate my edition of the
Rig-Veda, or a follower of Darwin to criticise my root theory in
philology, without knowing the ABC of the science of language. If,
however, we speak of Darwinism in the domain of universal philosophical
problems, such as, for instance, the creation or development of the world,
then we poor philosophers also have no doubt a right to join in the
conversation. And if, without appearing too presuming, we now and then
dare to differ from Kant, or from Plato or Aristotle, is it mere
insolence, or perhaps treason, to differ from Darwin on certain points?

This was not the tone assumed by Darwin, giant as he was, even when he
spoke to so insignificant a person as myself.  I have on a previous
occasion published a short letter addressed to me by Darwin (_Auld Lang
Syne_, p. 178). Here follows another, which I may no doubt also publish
without being indiscreet.

                                * * * * *

“



Down, Beckenham, Kent, July 3, 1873.

“DEAR SIR: I am much obliged for your kind note and present of your
lectures. I am extremely glad to have received them from you, and I had
intended ordering them.

“I feel quite sure from what I have read in your work, that you would
never say anything to an honest adversary to which he would have any just
right to object; and as for myself, you have often spoken highly of me,
perhaps more highly than I deserve.

“As far as language is concerned, I am not worthy to be your adversary, as
I know extremely little about it, and that little learnt from very few
books. I should have been glad to have avoided the whole subject, but was
compelled to take it up as well as I could. He who is fully convinced, as
I am, that man is descended from some lower animal, is almost forced to
believe, _a priori_, that articulate language has been developed from
inarticulate cries, and he is therefore hardly a fair judge of the
arguments opposed to this belief.”

With cordial respect I remain, dear sir,
Yours very faithfully,
                                                           Charles Darwin.



”

This will at all events show that a man who could look upon a chimpanzee
as his equal, did not entirely ignore, as an uninformed layman, a poor
philologist. Darwin did not in the least disdain the uninformed layman. He
thought and wrote for him, and there is scarcely one of Darwin’s books
that cannot be read by the uninformed layman with profit. And in the
interchange of acquired facts or ideas, mental science has at least as
much right as natural science. We live, it is true, in different worlds.
What some look upon as the real, others regard as phenomenal. What these
in their turn look upon as the real, seems to the first to be
non-existent. It will always be thus until philology has defined the true
meaning of reality.

It is, however, a worn-out device to place all those who differ from
Darwin in the pillory of science as mystics, metaphysicians, and (what
seems worst of all) as orthodox. It requires more than courage, too, to
class all who do not agree with us as uninformed laymen, “to accuse them
of ignorance and superstition, and to praise our friends and disciples as
the only experts or competent judges, as impartial and consistent
thinkers.” Through such a defence the greatest truths would lose their
worth and dignity. The true scholar simply leaves such attacks alone. It
is to be regretted that this resounding trumpet blast of a few naturalists
renders any peaceful interchange of ideas impossible from the beginning. I
have expressed my admiration for Darwin more freely and earlier than many
of his present eulogists. But I maintain, that when anthropogeny is
discussed, it is desirable first of all to explain what is understood by
_anthropos_. Man is not only an object, but a subject also. All that man
is as an object, or appears to be for a time on earth, is his organic body
with its organs of sense and will, and with its slowly developed so-called
ego. This body is, however, only phenomenal; it comes and goes, it is not
real in the true sense of the word. To man belongs, together with the
visible objective body, the invisible subjective Something which we may
call mind or soul or _x_, but which, at all events, first makes the body
into a man. To observe and make out this Something is in my view the true
anthropogeny; how the body originated concerns me as little as does the
question whether my gloves are made of kid or _peau de suède_. That will,
of course, be called mysticism, second sight, orthodoxy, hypocrisy, but
fortunately it is not contradicted by such nicknames. If an animal could
ever speak and think in concepts, it would be my brother in spite of tail
or snout; if any human being had a tail or a forty-four toothed snout, but
could use the language of concepts, then he would be and remain a man, as
far as I am concerned, in spite of all that. We, too, have a right to
express our convictions. They are as dear to us as to those who believe or
believed in the Protogenes Haeckelii. It is true we do not preach to the
whole world that our age is the great age of the study of language and
mind, and that it has cast more light on the origin of the mind (logogeny)
and on the classification of the human race (anthropology) than all other
sciences together. A little progress, however, we have made. Who is there
that still classifies the human race by their skulls, hair, anatomy, etc.,
and not by their speech? If, like zoölogy, we may borrow countless
millions of years, where is there any pure blood left, amid the endless
wars and migrations, the polygamy and slavery of the ancient world?
Language alone is and remains identical, whoever may speak it; but the
blood, “this very peculiar fluid,” how can we get at that scientifically?
It is, however, and remains a fixed idea with these “consistent thinkers”
that the sciences of language and mind lead to superstition and hypocrisy,
while on the other hand the science of language gratefully acknowledges
the results of zoölogy, and only protests against encroachments. Both
sciences might advance peacefully side by side, rendering aid and seeking
it; and as for prejudices, there are plenty of them surviving among
zoölogists as well as philologists, which must be removed _viribus
unitis_. What is common to us is the love of truth and clearness, and the
honest effort to learn to understand the processes of growth in mind and
language, as well as in nature, in the individual (ontogenetically) as
well as in the race (phylogenetically). Whether we now call this evolution
or growth, philology at all events has been in advance of natural science
in setting a good example, and securing recognition of the genetic method.
Such men as William Humboldt, Grimm, and Bopp did not exactly belong to
the dark ages, and I do not believe that they ever doubted that man is a
mammal and stands at the head of the mammalia. This is no discovery of the
nineteenth century. Linnæus lived in the eighteenth century and Aristotle
somewhat earlier. I see that the Standard Dictionary already makes a
distinction between Darwinism and Darwinianism, between the views of
Darwin and those of the Darwinians, and we clearly see that in some of the
most essential points these two tendencies are diametrically opposed to
each other. There is one thing that naturalists could certainly learn from
philologists, viz., to define their _termini technici_, and not to believe
that wonders can be performed with words, if only they are spoken loud
enough.

The following letter comes from a naturalist, but is written in a sincere
and courteous tone, and deserves to be made public. I believe that the
writer and I could easily come to terms, as I have briefly indicated in my
parentheses.

                                * * * * *

“



An Open Letter To Professor F. Max Müller.

“RESPECTED SIR: Your correspondence in this periodical with the
‘Horseherd’ has no doubt aroused an interest on many sides. There are many
more Horseherds than might be supposed; that is to say, men in all
possible positions and callings, who after earnest reflection have reached
a conclusion that does not essentially differ from the mode of thought of
your backwoods friend.

“The present writer considers himself one of these; he is, indeed, not
self-taught like the Horseherd, but a scientific man, and like you, a
professor; but as he had no philosophical training, and he has only
reached his views through observation and reflection; in contrast to you,
the profound philologist, he stands not much higher than the Silesian
countryman. And to complete the contrast, he adds, that he has long been a
severe sufferer. So that instead of guiding the plough on the field of
science with a strong hand, he must remain idly at home, and modestly
whittle pine shavings for the enlightenment of his home circle.

“I do not know whether the Horseherd will consider that his argument has
been refuted when he reads your letter by his warm stove. In this,
according to my view, you have practically failed. (_My counter arguments
shall follow later._)

“Yes, I find in your reasoning very remarkable contradictions. You
acknowledge for instance the infinity of space and time, and in spite of
this you say that there was a time before the world was a year old. I do
not understand that. We must assume for matter, for that is no doubt what
you mean by the term ‘world,’ the same eternity as for space and time,
whose infinity can be proved but not comprehended. (_Well, when we say
that the world is 1898 years old, we can also say that it once __ was a
year, or half a year old; of course not otherwise_.)

“A ‘creation’ in the sense of the various religions is equally
incomprehensible to us. (_Certainly._)

“But I do not wish to enlarge on this point any farther. Here begins the
limit of our thinking faculties, and it is the defect of all religions
that they require us to occupy ourselves with matters that lie beyond this
limit, that never can be revealed to us, since we are denied the
understanding of them; a revelation is at all events a chimera. For either
that which is to be revealed lies beyond our senses and ideas,—and then it
cannot be revealed to us,—or it lies on this side, and then it need not be
revealed to us. (_This is not directed against me._)

“I believe, moreover, dear sir, that through your comparative studies of
religion you must reach the same conclusion as myself, that all religious
ideas have arisen solely in the brain of man himself, as efforts at
explanation in the broadest sense; that dogmas were made out of
hypotheses, and that no religion as a matter of fact reveals anything to
us. (_Not only religious ideas, but all ideas have arisen in the brain._)

“You express a profound truth when you say that atheism is properly a
search for a _truer_ God. I was reminded by it of a passage in one of
Daudet’s novels, in which the blasphemy of one who despairs of a good God,
is yet called a kind of prayer. You will therefore bear with me if I
explain to you how a scientific man who thinks consistently can reach a
conclusion not far removed from that which prompted the Horseherd to turn
a somersault.

“Good and evil are purely human notions; an almighty God stands beyond
good and evil. He is as incomprehensible to us in moral relations as in
every other. (_From the highest point of view, yes; but in the lives of
men there is such a distinction._)

“Only look at the world! The existence of the majority of living creatures
is possible only through the destruction of others. What refined cruelty
is expressed by the various weapons with which animals are provided. Some
zoölogist ought to write an illustrated work entitled, _The Torture
Chamber of Nature_. I merely wish to touch upon this field; to exhaust it
would require pages and volumes. Your adopted countryman, Wallace, seeks,
it is true, to set aside these facts by a superficial observation. That
most of the animals that are doomed to be devoured, enjoy their lives
until immediately before the catastrophe, takes none of its horror from
the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable
experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a
water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind
legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring
out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as
it reaches the stomach.

“Now I, who am but a poor child of man, full of evil inclinations
according to Biblical lore, liberated the poor frog on my ground. But
‘merciful nature’ daily brings millions and millions of innocent creatures
to a like cruel and miserable end.

“I intentionally leave out of consideration here the unspeakable
sufferings of mankind. Believers in the Bible find it so convenient to
argue about original sin. Where is the original sin of the tormented
animal kingdom?

“Of course man in his unutterable pride looks with deep disdain on all
living creatures that are not human. As if he were not bone of their bone,
as if suffering did not form a common bond with all living creatures! (_I
have never done that, but I think that it is difficult to establish a
thermometer of suffering._)

“Do you not bethink you, honoured student of Sanskrit, of the religion of
the Brahmins? In sparing all animals, the Hindus have shown only the
broadest consistency.

“There will come a time when there will be only one religion, without
dogma: the religion of compassion. (_Buddhism is founded on Kârunya,
compassion._) Christianity, lofty as is its ethical content, is not the
goal, but only a stage in our religious development.

“It is a misfortune that Nietzsche, the great keen thinker, should have
been misled into an opposite conclusion by the mental weakness, the
paralytic imbecility, which gradually enveloped his brain like a growth of
mould. And the foolish youths, who esteem the expressions of this
incipient insanity as the revelations of a vigorous genius, swear by his
later hallucinations about the Over-man and the blond beast.

“A specialist in mental disease can point out the traces of his malady
years before it openly broke out. And as if he had not written enough when
the world still considered him of sound mind, must men still try to glean
from the time when his brain was already visibly clouded?

“How few there are who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing
imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be
people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by
his paradoxical nonsense. (_May be._)

“But—I am straying from the path. Now to the subject. I perfectly
understand that the majority of religions had to assume a good and evil
principle to guard themselves against the blasphemy of attributing all the
suffering of the world to an all-merciful Creator. (_Some religions have
done this, on the theory that an almighty God stands beyond good and
evil._) The devil is a necessary antithesis to God; to deny him is the
first step made by the consistent man of science toward that atheism which
originates really from the search for a better God. The Horseherd is wrong
when he denies the existence of things beyond our power of conception.
There are, as can be proved, tones that we do not hear, and rays that we
cannot see. There are many things that we shall learn to comprehend in the
hundreds of thousands of years that are in store for mankind. We are
merely in the beginning of our development. Something, however, will
always remain over. The ‘Ignorabimus’ of one of our foremost thinkers and
investigators will always retain its value for us. (_Most certainly._)

“The other world is of but little concern to him who has constantly
endeavoured to lead a good life, even if he has never given much thought
to correct belief. If personal existence is continued, our earthly being
must be divested of so many of its outer husks that we should scarcely
recognise each other, for only a part of the soul is the soul. (_What we
call soul is a modification of the Self._) If, however, an eternal sleep
is decreed for us, then this can be no great misfortune. Let the wise
saying in _Stobœi Florilegium_, Vol. VI, No. 19, in ‘praise of death’
serve to comfort us: ‘Ἀναξαγόρας δύο ἔλεγε διδασκαλίας εῖναι θανάτου, τὸν
τε πρὸ τοῦ γενέσθαι χρόνον καὶ τὸν ὕπνον,’—‘Anaxagoras said that two
things admonished us about death: the time before birth and sleep.’

“The raindrop, because it is a drop, may fear for its individuality when
it falls back into the sea whence it came. We men are perhaps only passing
drops formed out of the everlasting changes of the world-sea. (_Of what
does the world-sea consist but drops?_)

“Those who think as I do constitute a silent but large congregation:
silent, because the time is not yet ripe for a view that will rob
thousands of their illusions. We do not preach a new salvation, but a
silent, for many, a painful, renunciation. But the profound peace that
lies in this view is as precious to those who have acquired it as is the
hope of heaven to the believer. In honest doubt, too, lies a saving power
as well as in faith; and your Horseherd is on the path of this salvation.
(_I believe that too._)”

With great respect,
Yours very faithfully,
                                                       Ignotus Agnosticus.



”

                                * * * * *

Whilst I received this and many other letters from many lands, no sign of
life reached me from my Horseherd. He must have received my letter, or it
would have been returned to me through the post. I regretted this, for I
had formed a liking for the man as he appeared in his letter, and he no
doubt would have had much to say in reply to my letter, which would have
placed his views in a clearer light. He was an honest fellow, and I
respect every conviction that is honest and sincere, even if it is
diametrically opposite to my own. Now, my unknown friend could have had no
thought of self in the matter. He knew that his name would not be
mentioned by me, and it would probably have been of little concern to him
if his name had become known. The worst feature of all discussions is the
intrusion of the personal element. If for instance in a criticism of a new
book we emphasise that which we think erroneous, for which every author
should be grateful, we feel at the same time, that while desiring to
render a service to the cause of truth, we may not only have hurt the book
or the writer, but may have done a positive injury. The writer then feels
himself impelled to defend his view not only with all the legitimate arts
of advocacy, but also with the illegitimate. This poor truth is the
greatest sufferer. As long as two paths are open, there is room for quiet
discussion with one’s travelling companion as to which may be the right
and best path by which to reach the desired point. Both parties have the
same object in view, the truth. As soon however as one goes, or has gone
his own way, the controversy becomes personal and violent. There is no
thought of turning back. It is no longer said: “This is the wrong path,”
but “You are on the wrong path,” and even if it were possible to turn
back, the controversy generally ends with, “I told you so.” Poor Truth
stands by sorrowfully and rubs its eyes.

Now what was the Horseherd to me, and what is he now, even if he has been
brought to what he called a joyful end by his catarrh “verging upon a
perfect asthma.” There was nothing personal between us. He knew me only by
that which I have thought and said; I knew of him only what he had
gathered in his hours of leisure, and had laid aside for life. I have
never seen him face to face, do not know the colour of his eyes, hardly
even whether he was old or young. He was a man, but he may be even that no
longer. Everything that in our common view constitutes a man, his body,
his speech, his experience, is gone. We did not bring these things with us
into the world and probably shall not take them away with us. What the
body is, we see with our eyes, especially if we attend a cremation, or if
in ancient graves we look into the urns which contain the grayish black
ashes, whilst near by there sleeps in cold marble, as in the Museo
Nazionale in Rome, the lovely head of the young Roman maiden, to whom two
thousand years ago belonged these ashes, as well as the beautiful mansion
that has been excavated from the earth and rebuilt round about her. And
the language, the language in which all our experience here on earth lies
stored, will this be everlasting? Shall we in another life speak English
or Sanscrit? The philologist knows too well of what material speech is
made, how much of the temporal and accidental it has adopted in its
eternal forms, to cherish such a hope, and to think that the Logos can be
eternally bound to the regular or irregular declensions or conjugations of
the Greek, the German, or even the Hottentot languages. What then remains?
Not the person, or the so-called ego—that had a beginning, a continuation,
and an end. Everything that had a beginning, once was not, and what once
was not, has in itself, from its very beginning, the germ of its end. What
remains is only the eternal One, the eternal Self, that lives in us all
without beginning and without end, in which each one has his true
existence, in which we live, move, and have our being. Each temporal ego
is only one of the million phenomena of this eternal Self, and such a
phenomenon was the Horseherd to me. It is only what we recognise in all
men as the eternal, or as the divine, that we can love and retain.
Everything else comes and goes, as the day comes in the morning and goes
at night, but the light of the sun remains forever. Now it may be said:
This Self, that is and abides, is after all next to nothing. It _is_,
however, and that “_is_” is more than everything else. Light is not much
either, probably only vibration, but what would the world be without it?
Did we not begin this life simply with this Self, continue it with this
Self, and bring it to an end with this Self? There is nothing that
justifies us in saying that this Self had a beginning, and will therefore
have an end. The ego had a beginning, the _persona_, the temporal mask
that unfolds itself in this life, but not the Self that wears the mask.
When therefore my Horseherd says, “After death we are just as much a
nullity as before our birth,” I say, _quoderat demonstrandum_ is still to
be proved. What does he mean by _we_? If we were nothing before birth,
that is, if we never had been at all, what would that be that is born?
Being born does not mean becoming something out of nothing. What is born
or produced was there, before it was born or produced, before it came into
the light of the world. All creation out of nothing is a pure chimera for
us.  Have we ever the feeling or experience that we had a beginning here
on earth, or have we entirely forgotten the most remarkable thing in our
life, viz., its beginning? Have we ever seen a beginning? Can we even
think of an absolute beginning? In order to have had our beginning on
earth, there must have been something that begins, be it a cell or be it
the Self. All that we call ego, personality, character, etc., has unfolded
itself on earth, is earthly, but not the Self. If we now on earth were
content with the pure Self, if in all those that we love, we loved the
eternal Self and not only the appearance, what then is more natural than
that it should be so in the next world, that the continuity of existence
cannot be severed, that the Self should find itself again, even though in
new and unexpected forms? When therefore my friend makes the bold
assertion: “After our death we are again as much a nullity as before our
birth,” I say, “Yes, if we take nullity in the Hegelian sense.” Otherwise
I say the direct contrary to this: “After our death we are again as little
a nullity as before our birth. What we shall be we cannot know; but that
we shall be, follows from this, that the Self or the divine within us can
neither have a beginning nor an end.” That is what the ancients meant in
saying that death was to be best understood from the time before birth.
But we must not think that each single ego lays claim only to a part of
the Self, for then the Self would be divided, limited, and finite. No, the
entire Self bears us, just as the entire light illumines all, every grain
of sand and every star, but for that reason does not belong exclusively to
any one grain of sand or star. It is that which is eternal, or in the true
sense of the word that which is divine in us, that endures in all changes,
that makes all change possible, for without something that endures in
change, there could be no change; without something continuous, that
persists through transformation, nothing could be transformed. The Self is
the bond that unites all souls, the red thread which runs through all
being, and the knowledge of which alone gives us knowledge of our true
nature. “Know thyself” no longer means for us “Know thy ego,” but “Know
what lies beyond thy ego, know the Self,” the Self that runs through the
whole world, through all hearts, the same for all men, the same for the
highest and the lowest, the same for creator and creature, the _Âtman_ of
the Veda, the oldest and truest word for God.

For this reason the Horseherd was to me what all men have always been to
me—an appearance of the Self, the same as I myself, not only a
fellow-creature, but a fellow-man, a fellow-self. Had I met him in life,
who knows whether his ego or his appearance would have attracted me as
much as his letter. We all have our prejudices, and much as I honour a
Silesian peasant who has spent his life faithfully and honestly in a
strange land, I do not know whether I should have sat down by his iron
stove and chatted with him about τὰ μέγιστα.

I also felt as I read his letter, that it was not a solitary voice in the
desert, but that he spoke in the name of many who felt as he felt, without
being willing or able to express it. This also has proved to be entirely
true.

Judging by the numerous letters and manuscripts that reach me, the
Horseherd was not alone in his opinions. There are countless others in the
world of the same mind, and even if his voice is silenced, his ideas
survive in all places and directions, and he will not lack followers and
defenders. The striking thing in the letters that reached me was that the
greater number and the most characteristic among his sympathisers did not
wish their names to be known. What does this signify? Do we still live on
a planet on which we dare not express what we hold to be the truth—planet
Terra so huge and yet so contemptibly small? Has mankind still only
freedom of thought, but not freedom of utterance? The powers may blockade
Greece; can they blockade thoughts on wings of words? It has been
attempted, but force is no proof, and when we have visited the prisons in
which Galilei or even Giordano Bruno was immured, we learn how nothing
lends greater strength to the wings of truth than the heavy chains with
which men try to fetter it. It is still the general opinion that even in
free England thought and speech are not free, that in the realm of thought
there is even less freedom on this side of the Channel than on the
other.(37) Oxford especially, my own university, is still considered the
stronghold of obscurantists, and my Horseherd even considers the fact that
I have lived so long in Oxford a _circonstance atténuante_ of my so-called
orthodoxy. Plainly what is thought, said, and published in England, and
especially in Oxford, is not read. In England we can say anything we
please, we must only bear in mind that the same consideration is due to
others that we claim from others. It is true that from time to time in
England, and even in Oxford, feeble efforts have been made, if not to
curtail freedom of thought, at least to punish those who laid claim to it.
Where possible the salaries of professors were curtailed; in certain
elections very weak candidates were preferred because they were outwardly
orthodox. I do not wish to mention any names, but I myself have received
in England, even if not in Oxford, a gentle aftertaste of this antiquated
physic. When at the request of my friend Stanley, the Dean of Westminster
Abbey, I delivered a discourse in his venerable church, which was crowded
to the doors, petitions were sent to Parliament to condemn me to six
months’ imprisonment. I was accosted in the streets and an ordinary
tradesman said to me, “Sir, if you are sent to prison, you shall have at
least two warm dinners each week from me.” I am, to be sure, the first
layman that ever spoke publicly in an English church, but I had the advice
of the highest authorities that the Dean was perfectly within his rights
and that we were guilty of no violation of law. I therefore waited in
silence; I knew that public opinion was on my side, and that in the end
the petition to Parliament would simply be laid aside. Later on it was
attempted again. At the time that I delivered my lectures on the Science
of Religion at the university of Glasgow, by invitation of the Senate, I
was accused first before the presbytery at Glasgow, and when this attempt
failed, the charge was carried before the great Synod at Edinburgh. In
this case, too, I went on my way, in silence, and in the end, even in
Scotland, the old saying, “Much cry and little wool,” was verified. This
proverb is frequently heard in England. I have often inquired into its
origin. Finally I found that there is a second line, “As the deil said
when he shore the sow.” Of course such an operation was accompanied with
much noise on the part of the sow, but little wool, nothing but bristles.
I have never, however, had to turn my bristles against the gentlemen who
wished to shear me.

I am of opinion, therefore, that those who wished to espouse the cause of
my Horseherd should have done so publicly and with open visor. As soon as
any one feels that he has found the truth, he knows also that what is real
and true can never be killed or silenced; and secondly, that truth in the
world has its purpose, and this purpose must in the end be a good one. We
do not complain about thunder and lightning, but accustom ourselves to
them, and seek to understand them, so as to live on good terms with them;
and we finally invent lightning conductors, to protect ourselves, as far
as we can, against the inevitable. So it is with every new truth, if it is
only maintained with courage. At first we cry and clamour that it is
false, that it is dangerous. In the end we shake our wise heads and say
these are old matters known long since, of which only old women were
afraid. In the end, after the thunder and lightning, the air is made
clearer, fresher, and more wholesome. When I first read the long letter of
my Horseherd, I said to myself, “He is a man who has done the best he
could in his position.” He has let himself be taught, but also
irresistibly influenced, by certain popular books, and has come to think
that the abandonment of views that have been instilled into him from his
youth is so brave and meritorious, that all who disagree with him must be
cowards. This inculcation of truth into childish minds is always a
dangerous matter, and even if I do not use the strong expressions that are
used by my friend,—for I always think, the stronger the expression the
weaker the argument,—I must admit that he is right up to a certain point.
It does not seem fair that in the decision of the most important questions
of life the young mind should have no voice. A Jewish child becomes a Jew,
a Christian child a Christian, and a Buddhist child a Buddhist. What does
this prove? Unquestionably, that in the highest concern in life the child
is not allowed a voice. My friend asks indignantly: “Is there anything in
face of our knowledge, and of the realm of nature and of man’s position in
it, so unbearable, yes so odious, as the inoculation of such error in the
tender consciousness of our school children? I shudder when I think that
in thousands of our churches and schools this systematic ruin of the
greatest of all gifts, the consciousness, the human brain, is daily, even
hourly, going on. Max, can you, too, still cling to the God-fable?” etc.

Now I have explained clearly and concisely in what sense I cling to the
God-fable, and I should like to know if I have convinced my Horseherd. I
belong, above all, to those who do not consider the world an irrational
chaos, and also to those who cannot concede that there can be reason
without a reasoner. Reason is an activity, or, as others have it, an
attribute, and there can neither be an activity without an agent, nor an
attribute without a subject; at least, not in the world in which we live.
When ordinary persons and even professional philosophers speak of reason
as if it were a jewel that can be placed in a drawer or in a human skull,
they are simply myth-makers. It is precisely in this ever recurring
elevation of an adjective or a verb to a noun, of a predicate to a
subject, that this disease of language, as I have called mythology, has
its deepest roots. Here lies the genesis of the majority of gods, not by
any means, as it is generally believed I have taught, merely in later
quibbles and misunderstandings, which are interesting and popular, but
have little reference to the deepest nature of the myth. We must not take
these matters too lightly.

I recognise therefore a reasoner, and consequent reason in the world, or
in other words, I believe in a thinker and ruler of the world, but gladly
concede that this Being so infinitely transcends our faculties of
comprehension, that even to wish only to give him a name borders on
madness. If, in spite of all of this, we use such names as Jehovah, Allah,
Deva, God, Father, Creator, this is only a result of human weakness. I
cling therefore to the God-fable in the sense which is more fully set
forth in my letter, and it pleased me very much to see that at least a few
of those, who as they said were formerly on the side of the Horseherd, now
fully agree with me, that the world is not irrational. Here is the
dividing line between two systems of philosophy. Whoever thinks that an
irrational world becomes rational by the survival of the fittest, etc.,
stands on one side; I stand on the other, and hold with the Greek
thinkers, who accept the world as the expression of the Logos, or of a
reasonable thought or thinker.

But here the matter became serious. To my Horseherd I thought that I could
make myself intelligible in a humorous strain, for his letter was
permeated with a quiet humour. But my known and unknown opponents take the
matter much more seriously and thoroughly, and I am consequently obliged
at least to try to answer them seriously and thoroughly. What my readers
will say to this I do not know. I believe that even in short words we can
be serious and profound. When Schiller says that he belongs to no
religion, and why? because of religion, the statement is short and
concise, and yet easily understood. I shall, however, at least attempt to
follow my opponents step by step, even at the risk of becoming tedious.

And first of all a confession. It has been pointed out to me that in one
place I did my Horseherd an injustice. I wrote: “You are of opinion that
to love God and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are
evidently very proud of your discovery that there is no distinction
between good and evil. Well,” I then continue, “if loving God and your
neighbour is equivalent to being good, then it follows that not loving God
and not loving your neighbour is equivalent to not being good, or to being
evil. There is, then, a very plain distinction between good and evil. And
yet you say that you turned a somersault when you discovered that there
was no such distinction.”

Well, that looked as though I had driven my friend into a corner from
which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. But I did him an
injustice and shall therefore do everything in my power to right it. My
memory, as it so frequently does, played me a prank. At the same time that
I answered him, I was in active correspondence with one of the delegates
to the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at which the love of God and one’s
neighbour had been adopted, as a sort of article of agreement which the
followers of any or every faith could accept. Thus it befell that I
supposed the Horseherd in America to stand at the same point of view, and
consequently to be guilty of a contradiction. Such is, however, not the
case; he made no such concession of love of God and one’s neighbour in his
letter. If he therefore insists that there is no distinction between good
and evil, I cannot at least refute him out of his own mouth. The only
place where he is inconsistent is where he concedes that he could not
strike a dog, but is filled with bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea
of God. Here he clearly holds it good that he cannot be cruel to an
animal, and that he looks upon bloodthirstiness as a contrast. He also
concedes that a lie can never accomplish any good, and believes that the
truth is beautiful and holy. If a lie can accomplish no good, only evil,
then there must be a distinction between good and evil.  And what is the
meaning of beautiful and holy, if there is no contrast between good and
evil.  But I shall argue this point no farther, but simply say _peccavi_,
and I believe that he, and those like-minded with him, will be satisfied
with that. How different it would have been, however, had I been guilty of
such a mistake in a personal dispute! The injured party would never have
believed that my oversight was accidental, and not malicious, in spite of
the fact that it would have been the most stupid malevolence to say that
which every one who can read would instantly recognise as untrue. But
enough of this, and enough to show that my Horseherd at least remained
consistent. Even when he so far forgets himself as to say, “God be
praised,” he excuses himself. Only he has unfortunately not told us what
he really means when he says that good and evil are identical. Good and
evil are relative ideas, just like right and left, black and white, and
although he has told us that he turned somersaults with joy over the
discovery that this distinction is false, he has left us in total darkness
as to how we shall conceive this identity.

But let us turn back to more important things. My opponents further call
me sharply to account, and ask how I can imagine that the material world
can be rational, or permeated with reason. I believed that it must be
clear to every person with a philosophical training, that there are things
that are beyond our understanding, that man can neither sensibly apprehend
nor logically conceive an actual beginning, and that to inquire for the
beginning of the subjective self, or of the objective world, is like
inquiring for the beginning of the beginning. All that we can do is to
investigate our perceptions, to see what they presuppose. A perception
plainly presupposes a self that perceives, or that resists, and on the
other side, something that forces itself upon us, or, as Kant says,
something that is given. This “given” element might be mere confusion, but
it is not; it displays order, cause and effect, and reveals itself as
rational. This revelation of a rational world may, however, be explained
in two ways. That there is reason in nature, even the majority of
Darwinians admit, but they think that it arises of itself, since in the
struggle for life that which is most adapted to its conditions, fittest,
best, necessarily survives. In this view of the world, however, if I see
it aright, much is admitted surreptitiously. Whence comes all at once this
idea of the best, of the good, the fit, the adapted, in the world? Do
roasted pigeons fall from the sky? Is the pigeon itself an accidental
combination, an evolution, that might as well have been as it is, or
otherwise? It is all very fine to recognise in the ascending series of
protozoa, cœlenterata, echinoderms, worms, mollusks, fishes, amphibia,
reptiles, the stages of progress toward birds and finally to mammals and
man. But whence comes the idea of bird or pigeon? Is it no more than an
abstraction from our perceptions of thousands of birds or pigeons, or must
the idea of bird, of pigeon, even of the wood pigeon, be there already,
that we may detect it behind the multiplicity of our perceptions?

Is the pigeon, in whose wing each feather is counted, a mere accident, a
mere survival which might have been what it is or something different, or
is it something willed and thought, an organic whole? It is the old
question whether the idea preceded or followed the reality, on which the
whole Middle Ages broke their teeth, the question which separated and
still separates philosophers into two camps,—the Realists and the
Nominalists. I think that the latest investigations show us that the Greek
philosophers, and especially Plato, saw more correctly when they
recognised behind the multiplicity of individuals the unity of the idea,
or the species, and then sought the true sequence of evolution not in this
world, in a struggle for existence, but beyond the perception of the
senses, in a development of the Logos or the idea. The circumstances, it
appears to me, in this view remain just the same; the sequence, and the
purposiveness in this sequence, remain untouched, only that the Greeks saw
in the rational and purposive in nature the realisation of rational
progressive thoughts, not the bloody survivals of a monstrous gladiatorial
combat in nature. The Darwinians appear to me to resemble the Roman
emperors, who waited till the combat was ended, and then applauded the
survival of the fittest. The idealist philosophy, be it Plato’s or
Hegel’s, recognises in what actually is, the rational, the realisation of
eternal, rational ideas. This realisation, or the process of what we call
creation, can never be conceived by us otherwise than figuratively. But we
can make this figurative presentation clearer and clearer. That the world
was made by a wood cutter, as was originally implied in the Hebrew word
_bara_, and in the German _schoepfer_, _schaffer_, in the English
_shaper_, or in the Vedic _tvashtâ_, and the Greek τέκτων, was quite
comprehensible at a time in which man’s highest product was that of the
carpenter and the stone mason; and in which the name of timber
(_materies_) could become the universal name for matter (ὕλη, wood). After
this idea of the founder of the universe as a carpenter or builder was
abandoned as inadequate, the world was divided into two parties. The one
adopted the theory of material primitive elements, whether they be called
atoms, or monads, or cells, which by collision or struggle with each
other, and by mutual affinity, became that which we now see around us. The
other saw the impossibility of the rise of something rational out of the
irrational, and conceived a rational being, in which was developed the
original type of everything produced, the so-called Logos of the universe.
How this Logos became objectively and materially real, is as far beyond
human comprehension as is the origin of the cosmos out of countless atoms,
or even out of living cells. So far, then, one hypothesis would be as
complete and as incomplete as the other. But the Logos hypothesis has the
far-reaching advantage, that instead of a long succession of wonders,—call
them if you like the wonder of the monads, or the worm, or the mollusk, or
the fish, or the amphibian, or the reptile, or the bird, or, lastly,
man,—it has but one wonder before it, the Logos, the idea of thought, or
of the eternal thinker, who thought everything that exists in natural
sequence, and in this sense made all. In this view we need not even
abandon the survival of the fittest, only it proceeds in the Logos, in the
mind, not in the outward phenomenal world. It would then also become
conceivable that the embryological development of animated nature runs
parallel with the biological or historical, or as it were recapitulates
it, only the continuity of the idea is far closer and more intimate than
that of the reality. Thus, for instance, in the development of the human
embryo, the transition from the invertebrate to the vertebrate may be
represented in the reality by the isolated amphioxus, which remains
stationary where vertebrate man begins, and can make no step forward,
while the human embryo advances farther and farther till it reaches its
highest limit.

In order now to infer from these and similar facts that man at one time
really existed in this scarcely vertebrate condition of the amphioxus,—a
conclusion which, strictly understood, yields no meaning,—we can make the
case much more easily conceivable if we represent the thinking, or
invention of the world, as an ascending scale, in which even the least
chromatic tone must have a place without a break, while the principal
tones do not become clear and full until the requisite number of
vibrations is attained. These gradations of tone are the really
interesting thing in nature. As the full, clear tones imply certain
numerical relations among the vibrations, so the successive stages or the
true species in nature imply a will or thought in which the true _Origin
of Species_ has its foundation. That natural selection, as it is called,
could suffice to explain the origin of species, was doubted even by
Huxley,(38) who yet described himself as Darwin’s bull-dog.

If we have followed the supporters of my Horseherd so far, I should like
here to enter a caveat, that is indeed of no great significance, but may
turn one or another from a by-way, which the Horseherd himself has not
avoided. He speaks of the place of man in nature; he thinks (like so many
others) that man is not only an animal belonging to the mammalia, which no
one has ever denied, but that he is of the same nature as the animal
world. He need not therefore have accepted the whole simian theory, at
least he does not say so; but that each man, and the entire human race,
has descended from an unknown pair of animals, he appears to receive as
indubitable. This would not, so far as I can see, make the slightest
difference in the so-called dignity of mankind. If man had a prehensile
tail, it would not detract from his worth. I myself have little doubt that
there were men with tails in prehistoric or even in historic times. I go
still farther and declare that if ever there should be an ape who can form
ideas and words, he would _ipso facto_ be a man. I have therefore no
prejudices such as the advocates of the simian theory like to attribute to
us. What I and those who agree with me demand of our opponents, is merely
somewhat keener thought, and a certain consideration for the results of
our knowledge, such as we on our side have bestowed on their researches.
They have taught us that the body in which we live was at first a simple
cell. The significance of this “at first” is left somewhat vague. This
cell was really what the word means, the _cella_ (room) of a dumb
inhabitant, the Self. The essential thing is and remains what was in the
cell. Through gemmation, differentiation, segmentation, evolution, or
whatever other technical expressions we may use for division,
multiplication, budding, increase, etc., each cell became a hundred, a
thousand, a million. Within this cell is a bright spot into which not even
the microscope can penetrate, although whole worlds may be contained
therein. If it is now remembered that no one has ever succeeded in
distinguishing the human cell from the cell of a horse, an elephant, or an
ape, we shall see how much unnecessary indignation has been expended in
recent years over the simian origin of the human race, and how much
intelligent thought has been wasted about the animal origin of man, that
is of the individual. My body, your body, his body, is derived
(ontogenetically) from the cell, is in fact the cell which has remained
persistently the same from beginning to end, without ever, in spite of all
changes, losing its identity. This cell in its transformations has shown
remarkable analogies with the transformations of other animal cells.
While, however, the other animal cells in their transformations remain
stationary here and there, either at the boundary line of worms, fishes,
amphibia, reptiles, or mammals, the one cell which was destined to become
man moves on to the stage of the tailed catarrhine apes, then of the
tailless apes, and without staying here it irresistibly strides towards
its original goal, and only stops where it is destined to stop. Speaking,
however, not phylogenetically, but ontogenetically, at what point does our
own cell come in contact with the cell that was intended to become an ape,
and that became and remained an ape? If we accept the cell theory in its
latest form, what meaning can there be in the statement of the late Henry
Drummond, that “In a very distant period the progenitors of birds and the
progenitors of men were one and the same”?(39) Would not a very small
quantity of strictly logical thought have cut off _a priori_ the bold
hypothesis that directly or indirectly we descend from a menagerie? Every
man, and consequently all mankind, has accomplished his uninterrupted
embryological development on his own account; no man and no human cell
springs from the womb of an ape or any other animal, but only from the
womb of a human mother, fertilised by a human father. Or do men owe their
being to a miscarriage?

As many streams may flow alongside of each other and through the same
strata, and one ends in a lake while the others flow on and grow larger
and larger, till finally one river attains its highest goal, the sea, so
the cells develop for a time alongside of each other, then some remain
stationary at their points of destination, while others move on farther;
but the cell that has moved forward is as little derived from the
stationary cell as the Indus from the Sarasvati. It is at the points of
destination that the true species digress, and when these points are
reached, the specific development ceases, and there remains only the
possibility of the variety, the origin of which is conditioned by the
multiplicity of individuals; but which must never be confounded with a
true species. Every species represents an act of the will, a thought, and
this thought cannot be shaken from its course, however close temptation
may often come.

With this I believe I have cleared up and refuted one of the objections
that my correspondents made, at any rate to the best of my ability.
Whoever is convinced that each individual, be it fish or bird, springs
from its own cell, knows _ipso facto_ that a human cell, however
undistinguishable it may be to the human eye from the cell of a catarrhine
ape, could never have been the cell of an ape. And what is true
ontogenetically, is of course true phylogenetically. For myself this
inquiry into the simian origin of man never had any great interest; I even
doubt whether the Horseherd would have laid great stress upon it. His
champions, however, plainly consider it one of the principal and
fundamental questions on which our whole view of the world must be
erected. In my opinion so little depends on our covering of flesh, that as
I have often said, I should instantly acknowledge an ape that could speak,
that is, think in concepts, as a man and brother, in spite of his hide, in
spite of his tail, in spite of his stunted brain. We are not that which is
buried or burned. We are not even the cell, but the inhabitant of the
cell. But this leads me to new questions and objections, which have been
made by the representatives and successors of the Horseherd, and to which
I hope to reply on some other occasion, assuming that my own somewhat
dilapidated cell holds out so long against wind and rain.

F. MAX MÜLLER.
FRASCATI, April, 1897.



CHAPTER IV.


                            Language And Mind


The number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to
see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me
clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have
refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June
number of the _Deutsche Rundschau_ is a good example of these
communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt
with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time
to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more
fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But
first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter
of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly
recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to
give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may
be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers
were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand
what attraction there can be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally
left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a
blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of
cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite
distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of
abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their
unsuitable attire.

Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and
friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself,
much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one
must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.

I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many
have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd’s
heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time,
have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so
thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything
new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we
need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world,
that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world
as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the
beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man,
because here, as Lord Kelvin has shown, astronomical physics and geology
have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old
our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that
though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was
one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our
world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be
said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary
implies something beyond, _i.e._ an unbounded, until we arrive at the
region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many
years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real
boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us
everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do
with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate
and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive
only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (_On the Perception of
the Infinite_) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is
we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our
perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite
the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and
the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the
transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical
beginnings of religion. When the Aryans felt, thought, and named their
god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the
limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky
Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as
stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely
have had anything to object.

His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show
that the human mind was a mere phantom of man’s making, that there are
only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and
therefore constituted, not the _prius_, but the _posterius_ of those
bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very
abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me. “The mind,” so
wrote the Horseherd, “is not a _prius_, it is a development, a
self-evolving phenomenon.” Everything is now development, and there is no
better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of
development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then
we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In
order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A
much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite
intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last
work, _The Ascent of Man_, that “Order of events is history, and evolution
is history” (p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is
what I have been preaching in season and out of season for at least thirty
years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with
scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had
been content to say, “The human mind is also a development,” certainly no
student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted
him. But he says: “Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the
majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is a _prius_.
But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One
would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a
child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind
is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a
chicken.”

In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk
in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion
be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain
what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language
swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them
has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then
we must consider that “spirit,” in such expressions as “He has yielded up
his spirit,” means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The
same is true of “spirit” in such a phrase as “his spirit has departed.”
But easy as it is to distinguish between spirit in the sense of the breath
of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such
words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or
self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and
feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English
and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now
if we say that the mind is a development, and is not a _prius_, what idea
ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the
understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real
and very dangerous _embarras de richesse_. The words are often intended to
signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there
were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various
things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions
of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names
must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only
signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason,
and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities
of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns
was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still
prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient
Aryan peoples.

It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed
expressions, and introduce a word that simply means what is not understood
by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no
means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the
body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body
perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the
five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to
be the Vedantic term _Âtman_, which I translate into “the Self” (neuter),
because our language will scarcely allow the phrase “the Self”
(masculine). “Soul” has a too tender quality to be the equivalent of
_Âtman_.

This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While
everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it
is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives.
While the _Esse_ of all objects is a percipi, a something perceived, which
has come into knowledge, the _Esse_ of the self is a _percipere_, a
perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as
self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know
itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires
long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as
different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to
itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta
philosophers called _Avidyâ_ (not knowing, ignorance), or also _Mâyâ_
(appearance, or illusion), vanishes.

The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance,
is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions
which must be set aside as simply _ultra vires_ by every reasonable
philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain
colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things?
The Vedânta philosophers consider the _Avidyâ_ (ignorance) as
inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which
they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such an
_Avidyâ_, not to discover its origin; and then in the _Vidyâ_, the Vedânta
philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed.
How or when the Self came into this ignorance, _Avidyâ_, or _Mâyâ_
(illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more
sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the
body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We
begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in
its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is
blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then,
even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal
existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.

How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the
phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to
biology. So far as is possible to the human understanding, this question
has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development
of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal
world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense,
as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend
upon bodily vibrations, _i.e._ the nerves; and if we wish to make plain
the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so
through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the
nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for
an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that
atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that
so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther.
Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank
admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and
modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed
over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary
weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very
characteristic of Darwin.

In one place(40) he says, “I have nothing to do with the origin of the
primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.” In
another place(41) he speaks still more plainly and says, “In what manner
the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as
hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.” Let no one suppose,
therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word
“evolution” or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond,
“Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and
within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into
the future such as science has never witnessed before.”(42) Those are bold
words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long
before, “How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is
beyond our comprehension.” In the _Contemporary Review_, November,
1871,(43) Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of
biology, “I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything,
of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of
consciousness is effected.” Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge.
If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of
Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into
them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The
nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions
of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if
there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of
these vibrations of ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone
illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the
Indian philosophers call _sak-kid-ânanda_, that it exists, that it
perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed, _i.e._ that it is complete
in itself, serene and eternal.

If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (for _kid_ is
not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no
question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only
let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is,
understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living
organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the
same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are
all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne,
another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and
then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond
the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its
fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It
is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that
cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes
the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals,
that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did
not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who
remained behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as
the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and
should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can
journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross
the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to
the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken,
as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow
as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line?
It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right
and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and
no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of
all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or
the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway
station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will
again readily recognise the Greek Logos?

These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the
confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not
only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human
mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of
natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the
question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness, or to
understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not
something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual
man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end
by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the
human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in
that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be
thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the
higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach
to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in
the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher
quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has
absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was
originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in
its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains,
an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human
mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning
can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and
to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a
legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought,
even if it struts about in kingly robes.

Above all things we must settle what we are really to understand by the
mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What
is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do
they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with
man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal
psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of
Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural
genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as
not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer,
says, “Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my
favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs
generically from my own.”(44) Undoubtedly by “generically” is meant,
according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same
savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a
difference _in kind_, that is _in genere_, between the human mind and the
mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions
would in time become impossible.

What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self
consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been
said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be
explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to
illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its being
is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find
it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides
its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body;
but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any
way conceivable to us. It _is_ so—that is all that we can say, just as in
an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the
eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come
any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is
where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of
the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient
perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a
development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that
it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where
the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our
knowledge of this wonderful development?

Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has
been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the
following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a
child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest
culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still
living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own
melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they
are applied to explain the genesis of the human mind. They do not reach
far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the
result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The
observations on the development of a child’s mind are very attractive,
especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery
psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of
observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely
isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted
child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early
smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and
blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I
admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception
or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from
week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to
control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of
a child develop in the following order:—

After three weeks fear is manifested;

After seven weeks social affections;

After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;

After five months sympathy;

After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;

After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.(45)

We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit
the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found
who would agree in such an interpretation of their children’s looks. Add
to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the
strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and
penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the
mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a
child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a
child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one
child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.

The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly
regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end
the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this
psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to
make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a
similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was
sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals,
the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in
insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and
curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds,
sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and
lastly, in the anthropoid apes, remorse, shame, and a sense of the
ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this
scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of
thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise
explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that
of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such
observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for
instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from
those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first
place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in
insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses
would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition,
and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints
either in embryological or physiological development, about the real
historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery
or out of a zoölogical garden.

As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses
into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the
struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood,
horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks
that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for
kindling fire belonged to a higher period, _post hominem natum_, although
it has been thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons,
though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book on _Mental
Evolution in Animals_, has collected a large number of illustrations of
animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere
mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their
wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there
is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires
reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less
trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading,
and an English weekly, _The Spectator_, has from week to week given us
similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the
earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.

What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development
of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we
only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more
untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must
wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of
the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as
far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and
inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its
greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which
in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although we can
only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their
sentient perceptions.

Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple
perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language
alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man’s mental
power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than
hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this
continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed
or had died, the Tasmanian language _ipso facto_ ceased; and even if any
literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be
reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may
have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have
changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it
remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German
the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a
Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically,
we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least
fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before
these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged
so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals
are the same in these three languages, and yet _katvāras_ sounds quite
differently from τέσσαρες and _quatuor_ and our four. The words for eight,
_octo_ in Latin, ὀκτώ in Greek, and _ashtau_ in Sanskrit, are nearly
identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the
pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now
let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the
elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν),
Sanskrit _satám_, _centum_. There is the formation and fixing of names for
these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary,
because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of
those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these
words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so
weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their
etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight
are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But
why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two
tetrads, which, combined in _asht-au_, _oct-o_, ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the
number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible that
_asht-i_ was a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four
fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families
of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what
mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure
general recognition and value for the name given to each number, we shall
readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind
open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to
establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs
may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not
only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and
the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also
was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The
immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the
mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan
world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which
nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold
of our thinking, have found their expression.

Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race,
and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of
the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute
the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses
to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race
is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all
Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive
monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure
invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life
to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian,
or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a
lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will
no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first
beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it
and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The
difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on
the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and
Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a
very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and
especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest
condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again
mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the
salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first
separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from
this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who
were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is
remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human
mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has
occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with
the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have
been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the makers of
these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.

But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has
traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known
language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions,
can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the
race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in
Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the
oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing
materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which
every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in
the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a
transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar.
Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots,
to which Indian grammarians such as _Pânini_ have systematically traced
back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose
that these roots really constituted the original and complete material
with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is
not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its
development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not
think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest
mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that
philologists accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in
spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised
nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write
about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over
notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the
principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the
small number of 121.(46) With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges
itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that
fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists
say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that
many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking,
could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient
word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged
to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are
indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have
never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the
primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of
apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to
clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they
are actually there?

These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the
learning of a language, as is done by every child, with the first
invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically
different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold
ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a
rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different,
and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to
the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least
now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that
language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the
development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.(47) They
do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still
think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the
signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of
ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that “Any means by which
information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”(48) That
is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as
it is, must be treated quite differently by the philologist, compared with
the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of
telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy,
even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger
language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my
fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly
do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which
cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor
does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists
who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a
sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it
appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the
first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages
of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after
work, which signifies and communicates to every observer, “It is warm” or
“I am tired,” and the man who can actually say, “It is warm,” “I am
tired.” Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We
do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are
lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids’ sieves.

Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say, “It
is warm.” We shall say nothing of “it”; it may be a simple demonstrative
stem, which needed little for its formation. But before this “i-t” or “id”
could become an impersonal “it,” long-continued abstraction, or, if you
prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the word _is_. Whence
comes such a verbal form, Sanskrit _as-ti_, Greek ἔστι, Latin _est_? Was
the abstract “to be” onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we
cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is
possible. The root _as_ in _asti_, that we now translate as _is_, means as
we see from _as-u_, breath, originally _to breathe_. Whoever likes may see
in _as_, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or
lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken
from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such
acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which
is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.

This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight
deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger’s breadth, but in time
changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the
world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a
still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small
matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from
the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old
track. Nay, more, this “concept” has caused much shaking of the head among
philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four,
four and four, eight, eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so
very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an
eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen
an ape so well trained that as the word “seven” was spoken, he picked up
seven straws. But what is such child’s play in comparison with the first
formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such
an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities,
requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an
animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for
seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only,
whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their
aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still
know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what
takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a
dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal
certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And
sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the
realm of feeling; but language—never.

This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians,
even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts
before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any
danger there could be no fear. The facts are there and show us the right
path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting
conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man
absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has
neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds.
That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now
use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such
pantomimes as _L’enfant prodigue_. We have long known that imitations of
sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far
they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by
myself.(49) But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all
others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is
now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times
have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is
really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by
conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem
of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of
ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the
other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure,
and that even Noiré’s _clamor concomitans_ does not explain every case.
Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language
leaves a certain number of roots which are not mere sound-imitations, such
as “bow wow,” or “moo moo.” There are people who have taken much pains to
discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they
have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in
which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course
come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of
the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the
most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that
approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same
form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit
roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as
soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be
called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving
one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit
language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots
denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations
of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we
may say much but can prove little, we have at least a που στῶ for our
researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon
roots as _clamor concomitans_, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as
actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even
now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained _ad_ for eat, _tan_ for
stretch, _mar_ for rub, _as_ for breathe, _sta_ for stand, _ga_ for go, no
human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was
so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than
the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has
sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.

If we now return, to our _is_,—Sanskrit _as-ti_, Greek ἔστι, Latin
_est_,—we see that it originally meant “to breathe out.” This blowing or
breathing was then used for “life,” as in _as-u_, breath of life, and from
life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing,
and meant nothing more than the abstract “to be.” There are languages that
possess no such pale word as “be” and could not form such a sentence as
“It is warm.” The auxiliary verb “to have” is also lacking in many
languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even
classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such
languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there
was no such word as “be,” “stand” was employed; where there was no word
for “have,” then “hold,” _tenere_, would render the same, or at least
similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different
thought.

But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which
a language must pass, before it could reduce “breathe” to “be” and form
such a sentence as “It is warm.” Even an animal feels warmth, and can in
various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a
question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us
consider “warm.” Of course “warm” may represent a mere feeling, and then a
simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not
language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary.
Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in
this case _ghar_ (in _gharmá_, θερμός), and this meant at first to be
bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is
to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the
sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects,
and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of
being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account
anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man
alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what
man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an
idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in
the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of
sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as
the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general,
is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given
us.

Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as children, we have no
suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and
proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation
between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no
idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and
idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they
are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to
think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so
accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually
believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and
words. Our so-called thinking _before_ speaking, however, refers simply to
reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs
only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not
uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he
cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These
are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always
been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they
must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are
actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be
inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot
do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible
without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that
is not speaking, only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that
he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly
interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have
to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something
that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been
maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there
are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we
see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking
without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other
signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is
shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the
abstract word “dog,” not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel,
poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found, _in rerum natura_, or in
domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often
quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for “thing” is
_padârtha_; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that
they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist
that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can
speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can
also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only
what is necessary to form so simple a word as “white.” The idea of white
must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping
everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as
snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by
means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a
comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token
originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The
simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this
and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or
snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only
recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a
word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I
believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was
named _nix nivis_, from a root _snigh_ or _snu_, denoting everything which
melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities
that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed
the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example,
this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception,
before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case
men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a
root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under
this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like
snow; that is, that which is formed into a ball, so that they had the
sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality,
distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could
extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things,
just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will
ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This
goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It
goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and
thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind.
How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such
early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may
settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so,
and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general
concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated
action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously
present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is,
as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first
natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was
denoted by _mar_, eat by _ad_, go by _ga_, strike by _tud_, we may perhaps
apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it.
Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of
languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a
reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it
historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact
would it have any significance for science.

At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us
really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the
development of the human mind. I say, “which we can reach,” for what lies
beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history of
_homo alalus_. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the
mind. If we take such a word as the Vedic _deva_, there may have been many
older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose
etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we
know from _deva_ and the Latin _deus_, that even before the Aryan
separation a root _dyu_ or _div_ had been formed, as well as the
conception “shine.” If this root was first used actively for the act of
shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to
transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces
in us, and to call it a “shiner,” _dyu_ (nom. _dyaus_), and then with a
new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings, _deva_, _deus_.
Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under
this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and
stars, from which “shining” had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus
obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the idea “shine,” and further
formations such as _Dyaus_ (shiner) and _deva_ (shining). Now observe how
_Dyaus_, as “shiner,” at the same time assumed the significance of an
otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient
Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the
still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the
human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of
language.

All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the
Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas,
and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have
one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings,
and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from
one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not
impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is
enough, _sapienti sat_. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we
shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the
human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace
back the French _dieu_, the Latin _deus_, the Sanskrit _deva_, divine, to
the physical idea _div_, “shine,” so we can with thousands of other words,
of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into
the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of
other ideas and sounds for “shine,” etc., before the formation of _div_,
_Dyaus_, and _deva_, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how
naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea
conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated
and continued inseparable one from the other.

If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the
enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here
we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find,
for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the root _bhar_ with the
simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly in _bharâmi_, in _bibharmi_,
in _bibharti_ (I bear, he bears), also in _bháras_ or _bhartár_ (a
bearer), and _bhârás_ (load) and _bhárman_ and _bhartí_ (bearing), etc.

But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no
idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its
ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we have φέρω, in Latin
_fero_, in Gothic _bairan_, in English _to bear_. The principal meanings
which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in,
to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives
such as the German _Bahre_, English _bier_ (French _bière_, borrowed), and
also φέρετρον and _feretrum_, as well as _ferculum_ (a litter). On the
other hand there is φόρετρον (a porter’s wages), and φaρέτρa (quiver). And
_barrow_ in wheel-barrow has the same origin. _Burden_ is that which is
borne, then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther
takes us to φερτός (bearable) and ἄφερτος (unbearable). We also find in
Greek δύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskrit _durbhara_, with
the meaning “heavy to bear.” In Latin, however, _fertus_ signifies
fruitful, like _fertilis_, _ferax_. We say, “The earth bears” (_trägt_),
and _Getreide_ (grain) meant originally that borne (_getragen_) by the
earth (hence in Middle High German _Geträgede_). So we have also _far_,
the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived from _fero_, and along with
it _fārina_ (flour), if it stands for _farrina_. _Far_ may originally,
however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxon _bere_,
the English _barley_, are again related to it. Of course we have the same
root in derivatives, such as _lucifer_, _frugifer_, in Greek καρποφόρος or
φερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, as _fruchtbar_, _dankbar_,
_scheinbar_, _urbar_. Like φόρος, φορά means also what is carried or
brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in
the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such
as _birth_, _born_, and Gothic _berusjos_ (parents), _parentes_ and _barn_
(the child), like the Greek φέρμα.

If δίφρος (carriage) stands for διφόρος, it means originally a carriage
for two persons, just as ἀμφορεύς, Latin _amphora_, was a vessel with two
handles. We should scarcely believe that the same root is concealed in the
German _Zuber_ (tub) and _Eimer_ (bucket). But _Zuber_ was originally
_Zwiber_, a vessel with two handles, and _Eimer_ was _Einber_, a bucket
with one bail. We may compare _manubrium_ (handle) and derivatives like
_candelebrum_, _lugubris_, as well as _luctifer_. If _bhartri_ meant
bearer and then husband, as _bhâry[~a]_ meant wife, _i.e._ the one to be
maintained, we are probably justified in seeing in _bhrâtar_ (brother) the
original meaning of helper, protector. Although the wife is to be
maintained and sustained, she, too, brings something to the household, and
that is the φέρνω (dowry). The Middle Latin expression _paraphernalia_ is
properly dowry, though it has now assumed an entirely different meaning.
“To be carried” easily takes the meaning of being torn away, _s’emporter_,
and this we find in the Greek represented by φέρεσθαι, in the Sanskrit in
the secondary form _bhur_ (to hasten), yielding _bhuranyú_, _bhúrni_
(hasty, violent), and other derivatives.

We have already seen how φόρος and φορά signified that which is
contributed, then duty, tribute. This is the Gothic _gabaur_, that is,
_gebühr_ (due), and consequently all things that are proper or becoming.

_Offerre_ (bring before) leads to _Opfer_ (sacrifice) and to the simpler
_offrir_, as _sufferre_ to _souffrir_ (suffer).

It has been usual to derive _Fors_, _Fortuna_, from _ferre_,(50) the
goddess who brings, although she takes away as well. The ancients had no
doubts of this derivation, and τὸ φέρον (fate) and τὸ φερόμενον (chance)
seem to substantiate it. But the old divine character of _Fors_, _Fortuna_
(as related to Harit), points to other sources, which had already entirely
vanished from the consciousness of the ancients. Yet the expression, _es
trägt sich zu_ (it happens), the old _gaburjan_, Anglo-Saxon _gebyrian_,
and _kipuri_ (_zufällig_, casual), must be taken into account, and forms
such as _forte_, _forsan_, _fortassis_ (_forte an si vis_), _fortuitus_,
are very remote from their supposed mythological meaning. If _ferre_ were
the root, we should have further proof of the immeasurable fertility to
which we owe such words as _fortune_ and _misfortune_.

It would lead us too far if we tried to collect all the meanings which our
roots had in the various ancient Aryan tongues in combination with
prepositions. It must suffice to select a small number from a modern
language such as French, which give us an idea of the endless
modifications to which every root is more or less adapted. Thus from
_circumferre_ we have _circonférence_, also _périphérie_, from _conferre_,
_conférence_ and also _confortable_, from _deferre_ _déférence_, from
_differre_ _différence_, from _praeferre_ _préférence_, from _proferre_
_proférer_, from _referre_ _référence_, each word again with numerous
offshoots. We are not at the end yet, and still less when we keep in view
also the parallel formations _tuli_ and _latum_, or _portare_. We then see
what a root in this language has to signify, whether considered as a
concrete word or as a mere abstraction. This is prolific of contention and
has been much disputed; the main thing is to know the facts. From these we
may infer how in all this multiplicity the unity of the root element can
be best explained.

I do not say that all ideas can be so clearly traced to their origin as in
this root. In some the intermediate forms have been lost, and the
etymologies become uncertain, often impossible. But the result on the
whole remains the same. Wherever we can see clearly, we see that what we
call mind and thought consists in this, that man has the power not only to
receive presentations like an animal, but to discover something general in
them. This element he can eliminate and fix by means of vocal signs; and
he can further classify single presentations under the same general
concepts, and mark them by the same vocal signs. What we call derivative
forms, such as _deva_ besides _div_, are originally varieties in the
formation of words, that in time proved useful, and through repeated
employment obtained their special application. Often, too, there are real
compounds, just as the German _bar_ in _fruchtbar_, _furchtbar_, etc., was
originally the same word that we have in _Bahre_ (bier), but was very
different from _bar_ in _Nachbar_ (neighbour), which in spite of the
similarity in sound comes from an entirely different root, seen in _bauen_
(build), _bebauen_ (cultivate), _bauer_ (peasant), and in the English
neighbour.

If we have the ideas and the words, the process of thought, as Hobbes has
taught us, is nothing but an addition and subtraction of ideas. We add
when we say, A is B; when we say, for instance, man, or Caius, is mortal,
adding Caius, or man, to all that we call mortal; we subtract when we say,
A is not B; that is, when we abstract Enoch from all that we call mortal.
Everything that man has ever thought, humiliating as it may sound,
consists in these two operations; just as the most abstruse operations of
mathematics go back in the end to addition and subtraction. To what else
could they go back? Whether these mental operations are true or false, is
another question, with which the method of the thinker has nothing to do;
any more than formal logic inquires whether all men are mortal, but only
infers on the basis of these premises that Caius, because he is a man, is
also mortal.

We see, therefore, how language and thought go hand in hand; where there
is as yet no word, there is not yet an idea. The thinking capacity of the
mind has its source in language, lives in language, and develops
continuously in language. The human mind is human language, and as animals
possess no language, they do not _ipso facto_ possess what philosophers
understand by mind. We need not for this reason ascribe any special
faculty to men. Speech and thought are only a wider development of the
faculty of presentation such as an animal may have; but in an animal it
never develops any farther, for an animal has no general ideas; it remains
at the individual, and never attains unity in plurality. It knows, as
Plato would say, a horse, but not “horsedom.” If we wish to say that the
perceiving self is present in animals as in men, there is no objection,
though in all such, questions relating to animals we are always groping in
the dark. But the fact remains that the step, whether small or vast, that
leads from the individual to the general, from the concrete to the
abstract, from perceiving (that is, being acted upon) to conceiving,
thinking, speaking, that is, to acting, is for the animal impossible. An
animal might speak, but it cannot; a stone might grow, but it cannot; a
tree might walk, but it cannot. Why not? Because there are natural
boundaries that are apparently easy to pass, and yet impassable. The tree
grows up a tree, the animal an animal, but no farther, just as man never
surpasses the human, and therefore can never think except through
language, which often is very imperfect.

In one sense, therefore, the Horseherd is quite right. The mind is a
development, an eternal, ceaseless development; but when he calls it a
function possessed by all living organisms, even a goose and a chicken, he
goes far beyond the facts. No goose speaks, although it cackles, and
although by cackling it apprised the Romans of the important fact that
their Capitol was in danger. How much a dog could tell us if he could
speak! As if this capacity or incapacity is not as much the result of
intention as every other capacity and incapacity in nature! If we
translate this ability by _facultas_, that is _facilitas_, we need not for
that reason assume in man a faculty, or as the Horseherd calls it, a
phantom, but the thing remains the same. We can speak, and an animal
cannot; we can think, and an animal cannot.

But it must not be supposed that because we deny thought and speech to
animals, we wish to degrade them. Everything that has been told us of the
ingenious tricks of animals, even the most incredible, we shall gladly
believe, only not that _bos locutus est_, or that an actual utterance lies
hidden in the bark of a dog. A man who sees no difference between language
and communication will of course continue to say that a dog speaks, and
explain in how many dialects he barks, when he is hungry, when he wants to
go out with his master, when he hears burglars in the house, or when he
has been whipped and whines. It would be more natural if scientists
confined themselves to facts, without asking for reasons, and primarily to
the great fact that no animal, with the exception of man, speaks, or ever
has spoken. The next duty of the observer is to ask: Why is this? There is
no physical impossibility. A parrot can imitate all words. There must
therefore be a non-physical cause why there has never been a parrot or dog
language. Is that true or false? And if we now call that non-physical
cause mind, or still better the Logos, namely, the gatherer of the many
into the one, comprehending, conceiving, is our argument so erroneous if
we seek the distinction between man and animal in the Logos, in speech and
thought, or in mind? This mind is no ghost, as the Horseherd asserts, nor
is it a mere phantom of the brain as is imagined by so many scientists. It
is something real, for we see its effects. It is born, like everything
that belongs to our ego, of the self-conscious Self, which alone really
and eternally exists and abides.

So far I hope to have answered the second objection of the Horseherd or
Horseherds, that the mind is a function possessed also by a goose or a
chicken. Mind is language, and language is mind, the one the _sine qua
non_ of the other, and so far no goose has yet spoken, but only cackled.



CHAPTER V.


                      The Reasonableness Of Religion


The most difficult and at all events the thorniest problem that was
presented to me by the Horseherd still remains unanswered, and I have long
doubted whether I should attempt to answer it in so popular a periodical
as the _Deutsche Rundschau_.

There are so many things that have been so long settled among scholars
that they are scarcely mentioned, while to a great majority of even
well-informed people they are still enveloped in a misty gloom. To this
class belong especially the so-called articles of faith. We must not
forget that with many, even with most men, faith is not faith, but
acquired habit. Why otherwise should the son of a Jew be a Jew, the son of
a Parsi a Parsi? Moreover, no one likes to be disturbed in his old habits.
There are questions, too, on which mankind as it is now constituted will
never reach a common understanding, because they lie outside the realm of
science or the knowable. Concerning such questions it is well to waste no
more words. But it is on just such a question, namely, the true nature of
revelation, that the Horseherd and his companions particularly wish to
know my views. The current theory of revelation is their greatest
stumbling block, and they continually direct their principal attack
against this ancient stronghold. On the other hand there is nothing so
convenient as this theory, and many who have no other support cling fast
to this anchor. The Bible is divine revelation, say they, therefore it is
infallible and unassailable, and that settles everything.

Now we must, above all things, come to an understanding as to what is
meant by revelation before we attribute revelation to the Bible. There are
not many now who really believe that an angel in bodily form descended
from heaven and whispered into the ear of the apostles, in rather bad
Greek, every verse, every word, even every letter of our Gospels. When
Peter in his second Epistle (i. 18) assures us that he heard a voice from
heaven, that is a fact that can only be confirmed, or invalidated, by
witnesses. But when he immediately after says (i. 21) that “holy men of
God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” he presents to us a view
of inspiration that is easily intelligible, the possibility or truth of
which must yet be first determined by psychologists. If it be conceded,
however, that holy men may partake of such an inspiration, even then it is
plain that it requires a much higher inspiration to declare others to be
divinely inspired than to make such a claim for oneself alone. This
theory, that the Gospels are inspired by God, and therefore are infallible
and unassailable, has gained more and more currency since the time of the
Reformation. The Bible was to be the only authority in future for the
Christian faith. Pope and ecclesiastical tradition were cast aside, and a
greater stress was consequently laid on the _litera scripta_ of the New
Testament. This naturally led to a very laborious and detailed criticism
of these records, which year by year assumed a wider scope, and was
finally absorbed in so many special investigations that its original
purpose of establishing the authority of the Scriptures of the New
Testament seems to have quite passed out of sight. These critical
investigations concerning the manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex
Sinaiticus, Alexandrimus, and Vaticanus, down to Number 269, Bentley’s Q,
are probably of less interest to the Horseherd; they are known to those
who make a special study of this subject, and are of no interest outside.

If, as might have happened, without any miracle, the original autograph of
the Gospels, as they were written by the apostles or some one else with
their own hands, had been carefully preserved in the archives of the first
popes, our professors would have been spared much labour. But we nowhere
read that these successors and heirs of Peter showed any special
solicitude for this prime duty of their office, the preservation of this
precious jewel of their treasure, the New Testament. What they neglected,
had therefore to be recovered by our philologists. Just as those who
wished to study the Peloponnesian war resorted to the manuscripts of
Thucydides, the Christian scholars, to become acquainted with the origins
of Christianity, betook themselves to the manuscripts of the New
Testament. And as the manuscripts of Thucydides vary widely from one
another and in certain passages leave us quite helpless, so do the
manuscripts of the New Testament. Bentley speaks of thirty thousand _variæ
lectiones_ in the New Testament; but since his time their number must have
increased fourfold. The manuscripts of the New Testament are more numerous
than those of any classic. Two thousand are known and have been described,
and more yet may lie buried in libraries. Now while this large number of
manuscripts and various readings have given the philologists of the New
Testament greater difficulties than the classical philologist encounters,
still on the other hand the New Testament has the advantage over all
classical texts, in that some of its manuscripts are much older than those
of the majority of classical writers. We have, for instance, no complete
manuscripts of Homer earlier than the thirteenth century, while the oldest
manuscripts of the New Testament descend from the fourth and fifth
centuries. It is frequently said that all these things are of no
importance for the understanding of the New Testament, and that
theologians need not trouble themselves about them. But this is saying too
much. There are _variæ lectiones_, which are certainly not without
importance for the facts and the doctrines of Christianity, and in which
the last word belongs not to the theologian, but to the philologist. No
one would say that it makes no difference if Mark xvi. 9-20 is omitted or
not; no one would declare that the authenticity or spuriousness of the
section on the adulteress (John vii. 53-viii. 11) was entirely
indifferent. When we consider what contention there has been over the
seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first Epistle of John, and how
the entire doctrine of the Trinity has been based on that (“For there are
three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost:
and these three are one”), it will hardly be maintained that the
manuscripts are of no importance for Christian dogma. Whether in the first
Epistle to Timothy iii. 16, we read ΟΣ for ΘΣ, that is, θεός, is also not
quite immaterial. Still I admit that in comparison to the problems
presented to me by the Horseherd and his comrades, these _variæ lectiones_
will not rack our brains nearly so badly. I have been reproached for still
owing my friends an answer to the attacks which they directed exclusively
against Christian religion. It was, however, impossible to deal thoroughly
with these matters, without first taking into consideration their
objections against all religion.

I therefore first endeavoured to make clear to my unknown friends two
things, which constitute the foundation of all religion: first, that the
world is rational, that it is the result of thought, and that in this
sense only is it the creation of a being which possesses reason, or is
reason itself (the Logos); and secondly, that mind or thought cannot be
the outcome of matter, but on the contrary is the _prius_ of all things.
To this end a statement of the results of the philosophy of language was
absolutely necessary, partly to establish more clearly the relation of
thought to speech, partly to comprehend the true meaning of the Logos or
the Word in the New Testament, and understand in how easily intelligible
and perfectly reasonable a sense the term “Word” (Logos) can be applied to
the Son of God.

I am not one of those who pretend to find no difficulties in all these
questions. On the contrary, I have wrestled with them for years, and
remember well the joy I felt when first the true historical meaning of the
opening of the Fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the word,” became
clear to me. It is true that I turned no somersaults like the Horseherd,
but I was well satisfied. I do not therefore consider the objections
raised by him as unfounded or without justification; on the contrary, it
were better if others would speak with the same freedom as he has done,
although a calmer tone in such matters would be more effective than the
fortissimo of the Horseherd.

What aided me most in the solution of these religious or theological
difficulties, was a comparative study of the religions of mankind. In
spite of their differences, they are all afflicted with the same ailments,
and when we find that we encounter the same difficulties in other
religions as those with which we are ourselves contending, it is safe to
consider them as deeply rooted in human nature, and in this same nature,
be it weak or strong, to seek their solution. As comparative philology has
proved that many of the irregular nouns and verbs are really the most
regular and ancient, so it is with the irregular, that is, the miraculous
occurrences in the history of religion. Indeed, we may now say that it
would be a miracle if there were anywhere any religion without miracles,
or if the Scriptures on which any religion is based were not presented by
the priests and accepted by the believers as of superhuman, even divine
origin, and therefore infallible. In all these matters we must seek for
the reasons, and in this manner endeavour to understand their truth as
well as error.

Whether or not I have succeeded in proving that the world is rational, and
that mind is the _prius_ of matter, I must leave to the decision of the
Horseherd and his friends. Fortunately these questions are of that nature
that we may entertain different opinions upon them without accusing each
other of heresy. Many Darwinians, for instance, Romanes, and even Huxley,
have always considered themselves good Christians, although they believed
the doctrine of Darwin to be the only way of salvation. If, however, we
take up such questions as were propounded to me by the Horseherd, and
which have more to do with Christian theology than Christian religion,
there is an immediate change of tone, and unfortunately the difference of
view becomes at once a difference of aim. The moral element enters
immediately, and those who _believe_ otherwise are designated unbelievers,
though we do not at once stamp those who _think_ otherwise as incapable of
thought. Here lies the great difficulty in considering and treating calmly
religious, or rather, theological questions. There is little hope of
reaching a mutual understanding when the first attack is characterised by
such vigour as was shown by the Horseherd and many of his comrades. He
speaks at once of tales of fraud and deceit, and of the fantasies of the
Christian religion. He says that he is full of bloodthirstiness against
the Jewish idea of God, and believes that since the writings of Hume and
Schopenhauer, positive Christianity has become a sheer impossibility, and
more of the same import. This is certainly “fortissimo,” but not therefore
by any means “verissimo.”

Other correspondents, such as Agnosticus, declare all revelation a
chimera; in short, there has been no lack of expressions subversive of
Christianity, and, in fact, of all revealed religion.

At this point a glance at the development of the religion of the Hindus
may be of great service to us. Nowhere is the idea of revelation worked
out so carefully as in their literature. They have a voluminous
literature, treating of religion and philosophy, and they draw a very
sharp distinction between revealed and unrevealed works (_S_ruti and
Sm_ri_ti). Here much depends upon the name. Revealed meant originally
nothing more than plain and clear, and when we speak of a revelation, in
ordinary life, this is not much more than a communication. But erelong
“reveal” was used in the special sense of a communication from a
superhuman to a human being. The question of the possibility of such a
communication raised little difficulty. But this possibility depends
naturally on the prior conception of superhuman beings and of their
relationship to human beings. So long as it was imagined that they
occasionally assumed human form, and could mingle in very human affairs, a
communication from a Not-man, I will not say a monster, presents no great
difficulties. The Greeks went so far as to ascribe to men of earlier times
a closer intercourse with the gods. But even with them the idea that man
should not enter too closely into the presence of the gods breaks forth
here and there, and Semele, who wished to be embraced by Zeus in all his
glory, found her destruction in this ecstasy. As soon as the Deity was
conceived in less human fashion, as in the Old Testament, intercourse
between God and man became more and more difficult. In Genesis this
intercourse is still represented very simply and familiarly, as when God
walks about in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve are ashamed of their
nakedness before Him. Soon, however, a higher conception of God enters, so
that Moses, for example (Exodus xxxiii. 23), may not see the face of
Jehovah, but still ventures at least to look upon His back. The writer of
the Fourth Gospel goes still farther and declares (i. 18), “No man hath
seen God at any time, the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the
Father, he hath declared Him.” Here we clearly see that the possibility of
intercourse between man and God, and a revelation of God to man, depends
chiefly or exclusively on the conception which man has previously formed
of God and man. In all theological researches we must carefully bear in
mind that the idea of God is _our_ idea, which we have formed in part
through tradition, and in part by our own thinking; and we must not forget
that existence formed an essential attribute of this idea, whatever
opposition may have been raised against the ontological proof in later
times. After what we have seen of the true relationship between thought
and speech, it follows that the name, and with it the idea of a divine
being, can only proceed from man. God is and remains _our_ God. We can
have a knowledge of Him only through our inner consciousness, not through
our senses. God Himself has no more imparted His name to mankind than the
fixed stars and planets to which we have given names, although we only
see, but do not hear or touch them. This must be absolutely clear to us
before we dare speak of the possibility or impossibility of a revelation.

Now it is very useful, before we treat of our own idea of a revelation
emanating from God, to look round among other nations and see how they
reached the idea of a revelation. We see in India that a number of hymns
in an ancient dialect and in fixed metres were preserved by oral
tradition—the method was wonderful, but is authenticated by history—before
there could have been a thought of reducing them to writing. These hymns
contain very little that would appear to be too high or too deep for an
ordinary human poet. They are of great interest to us because they make
known, as clearly as possible, the sound of the oldest Aryan language, and
the nature of the oldest Aryan gods. As Professor Deussen, in his valuable
History of Philosophy says, (I, 83), the Vedic religion, which he at the
same time calls the oldest philosophy, is richer in disclosures than any
other in the world. In this sense he very properly calls the study of the
Rigveda the high school of the science of religion, so that as he says no
one can discuss these matters without a knowledge of it. This unique
distinction rests, as he truly remarks, on the fact, “That the process on
which originally all gods depend, the personification of the phenomena of
nature, while it is more or less obscured by all other religions, in the
Rigveda still takes place, so to speak, before our eyes visibly and
palpably.” I have long preached this in vain. All who have studied the
Rigveda say this, and all who have not studied it say just the contrary,
and lay especial stress upon the fact that these hymns contain ideas that
once and for all they declare as modern. But no one has ever contended
that this is not so. What is historically the oldest, may from a higher
point of view be quite modern, and there are scholars who even look upon
Adam as a reformer of mankind. Those who best know the Rigveda have often
shown that it stands at a tolerably advanced stage, and here and there
casts a distant glance into its own past. I myself have often said that I
would give much if I could escape from my own proofs of the age of this
collection of hymns, and could clearly show that at least some of these
Vedic hymns had been added later.

These hymns, therefore, just because, judging from their language and
metre, they are older than everything else in India, or even in the entire
Aryan world, and because they are mainly concerned with the ancient gods
of nature, appeared to the Hindus themselves as _apaurusheya_, that is,
not wrought by man. They were called _S_ruti, (that which was heard), in
distinction from other literature, which was designated as Sm_ri_ti, or
recollection.

All this is easily intelligible. There followed a period, however, during
which the true understanding of the hymns became considerably obscured,
and a new series of works, the so-called Brâhma_n_as, arose. These were
very different from the hymns. They are composed in a younger language and
in prose. They treat of the sacrifice, so full of significance in India,
at which the hymns were employed, and which seems to me to have been
originally designed for measuring time, and thus served to mark the
progress of civilisation. They explain the meaning of the hymns, often
quite erroneously; but they contain some interesting information upon the
condition of India, long after the period when the hymns first appeared,
and yet before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century before Christ. It
has been supposed that, as the Brâhma_n_as were composed in prose, they
were originally written, according to the hypothesis of Wolf, that prose
everywhere presupposes the knowledge of writing. I cannot admit this in
the case of India; at any rate, there is no trace of any acquaintance with
writing in the whole of this extensive mass of literature. It was
throughout a mnemonic literature, and just because the art of writing was
unknown, the memory was cultivated in a manner of which we have no idea.
At all events, the Brahmans themselves knew nothing of the Brâhma_n_as in
written form, and included them with the hymns under the names Veda and
_S_ruti; that is, they regarded them, in our phraseology, as revealed, and
not the work of men.

The remarkable thing, however, is that they did not assume, like the
Romans in the case of Numa and Egeria, a communication from the Vedic gods
of nature to ordinary men, but contented themselves with declaring that
the Veda had been seen by the Rishis, whose name Rishi they explained
etymologically as “seer.”

It is clear, therefore, that what the Brahmans understood under _S_ruti
was nothing more than literature composed in an ancient language (for the
Brâhma_n_as are also composed in an ancient language, though not as
ancient as that of the hymns), and treating of matters on which apparently
man alone can establish no authority. For how could ordinary man take on
himself to speak about the gods or to give directions for the sacrifice,
to make promises for the reward of pious works, or even to decide what is
morally right or wrong? More than human authority was necessary for this,
and so the Brâhma_n_as, as well as the hymns, were declared to be
_apaurusheya_, that is, not human, though by no means divine, in the sense
of having been imparted by one of the Devas.

We see, therefore, that the idea of the _S_ruti, while approaching to our
idea of revelation as _apaurusheya_, that is, not human, does not quite
coincide with it. What was ancient and incomprehensible, was called
superhuman, and soon became infallible and beyond assault. If we look at
other religions, we find that Buddhism denied the Veda every authority,
and in conformity with its own character especially excluded every idea of
superhuman revelation. In China, too, we look in vain for revelation. In
Palestine, however, we find the idea that the Lord Himself spoke with
Moses, who delivered His commands to Israel, and the tables of the
commandments were even written by God’s own fingers on both sides. But
this must not be confounded with written literature. The idea that the
entire Old Testament was written or revealed by Jehovah is absolutely not
of ancient Jewish origin, whatever respect may have been shown to the holy
books as recognised in the Synagogue.

As for Islam, the Koran is looked upon as communicated to Mohammed by the
angel Gabriel, even as Zoroaster in the Avesta claims to have received
certain communications in conversation with Ahuramazda.

In Christianity, in whose history the theory of revelation has played so
great a part, there is in fact—and this is frequently overlooked—no
declaration on the subject by Christ or the apostles themselves. That the
Gospels, as they have come down to us, have been revealed, is nowhere
stated in them, nor can it be gathered from the Acts of the Apostles or
the Epistles. No one has ever maintained that any New Testament Scripture
was known to Christ or even to the apostles.(51) On the contrary, if we
take the titles of the Gospels in their natural meaning, they do not
purport to have been written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
themselves: they are simply the sacred history as it was recorded by
others according to each of these men. Attempts have indeed been made to
reason away the meaning of κατά, “according to,” and interpret it as “by,”
but it is more natural to take it in its ordinary sense. When Paul, in his
second Epistle to Timothy (iii. 16), says, “Every scripture inspired of
God is also profitable for teaching,” this is the usual mode of expression
applied to the Scriptures of the Old, not of the New Testament (John v.
39), and would merely signify inspired, breathed in, not revealed in each
word and letter.

In any case we learn this much from a comparative study of religions, that
the majority of them have their holy books, which are usually the oldest
remains of literature, oral or written, that they possess. They look upon
the authors of these Scriptures as extraordinary, even superhuman beings;
and the later theologians in order to remove from the minds of the people
every doubt as to their truth, devised the most ingenious theories, to
show how these books were not produced by men, but were merely seen by
them, and how in the end even the words and letters of the original text
were dictated to certain individuals. It is imagined, therefore, that the
Deity condescended to speak Hebrew or Greek in the dialect of that period,
and that therefore no letter or accent may be disturbed.

This would, of course, make the matter very easy, and this is no doubt the
reason why the theory has found so many adherents. It is only strange that
no founder of any religion ever appears to have felt the necessity of
leaving anything in his own writing either to his contemporaries or to
posterity. No one has ever attempted to prove that Moses wrote books, nor
has it ever been said of Christ that he composed a book (John vii. 15).
The same is true of Buddha, in spite of the legend of the alphabets; and
of Mohammed we know from himself that he could neither read nor write.
What we possess, therefore, in the way of holy Scriptures is always the
product of a later generation, and subject to all the hazards involved in
oral tradition. This was not to be avoided, and ought not to surprise us.
If we attempt ourselves to write down without the aid of books or
memoranda, occurrences or conversations of which we were witnesses fifty
years ago, we shall see how difficult it is, and how untrustworthy is our
memory. We may be entirely veracious, but it by no means follows that we
are also true and trustworthy. Let any one try to describe the incidents
of the Austro-Prussian War without referring to books, and he will see
how, with the best intentions, names and dates will waver and reel. When
did the German National Assembly elect the German Emperor? Who were the
members of the regency? Who was Henry Simon, and were there one or more
Simons, like the nine Simons in the New Testament? Who can answer these
questions now without newspapers, and yet these are matters only fifty
years old, and at the time were well known to all of us. Was it different
with the Christians in the year 50 A.D.? It was therefore very natural
that a certain inspiration or preëminent endowment should be demanded for
the authors of the Gospels; if some do so still, it is on their own
responsibility, just as if we demanded for the mother of Mary the same
immaculate birth as for Mary herself, _et sic ad infinitum_. These are for
the most part merely excuses for human unbelief. Nothing proves the
veracity of the authors of the Gospels so clearly as the natural, often
derogatory words which they use of themselves, or even more of the
apostles. These did not understand, as they say, the simplest parables or
teachings; they were jealous of one another; Peter even denied the Lord;
in short, the authors of the Gospels cannot be credited with sinlessness
and infallibility, supposing that they were really the apostles.

If they were not, then all these difficulties of our own making disappear.
We then find in the Gospels just what we might expect: no ingeniously
prepared statements without inconsistencies and without contradictions,
but simple, natural accounts, such as were current from the first to the
third generations in certain circles or localities, and even according to
the attachment of certain families to the personal narrations of one or
another of the apostles. We must not forget that in the first generation
the necessity for a record was not even felt. Children were still brought
up as Jews, for Christianity did not seek to destroy, only to fulfil; and
as all the Scriptures, that is the Old Testament, were derived from God
and were good for instruction, they continued in use for teaching without
further question. But in the second and third generations the breach
between Jews and Christians became wider and wider, and the number of
those who had known Christ and the apostles, less and less; the need of
books especially for the instruction of children consequently became more
urgent, and the four Gospels thus arose by a natural process in answer to
a natural and even irresistible want. The difficulties involved even in
the smallest contradiction between the Gospels on a theory of inspiration
thus disappear of themselves; nay, their discrepancies become welcome,
because they entirely exclude every idea of intentional deviation, and
simply exhibit what the historical conditions would lead us to expect. Of
what harm is it, for instance, that Matthew (viii. 28), in relating the
expulsion of the devils in the land of the Gergesenes, speaks of two
possessed men, while Mark (v. 2) knows only of one among the Gadarenes?
Mark also speaks only of unclean spirits, while Matthew speaks of devils.
Mark and Luke know the name of the sufferer, Legion; Matthew does not
mention the Roman name. These are matters of small import in human
traditions and records; in divine revelations they would be difficult to
explain.

But it becomes still more difficult when we come to expressions which are
really significant and essential for Christianity, for even in these we
find inconsistencies. What can be more important than the passage in which
Christ asks his disciples, “But whom say ye that I am,” and Peter answers,
“Thou art the Messiah” (Mark viii. 29). That was a purely Jewish-Christian
answer, and Jesus accepts it as the perfect truth, which, however, should
still remain secret. In (Matthew xvi. 16) Peter says not only, “Thou art
the Messiah,” but adds, “Son of the living God.” This makes a great
difference, and the remarkable thing is, that later on Jesus only commands
his disciples to keep secret that he, Jesus, was the Messiah, and says
nothing of himself as the Son of God. So much has been written about other
discrepancies in this passage, particularly of the promise of the building
of the church upon this rock (Peter), which is only found in (Matthew xvi.
18), that we have nothing further to say about it, unless it be that in
Mark in this very passage Jesus rebukes Peter because he thinks more of
the world than of God, like so many of his later successors.

Let us bear in mind further that neither revelation nor divine inspiration
was really necessary for recording most of the things related in the
Gospels. The less, the better; for either the witnesses knew that Pilate
was at the time governor in Palestine, that Caiaphas was high priest, and
that Jairus was ruler of a synagogue, or they did not know it, and in that
case we cannot assume that these things were revealed to them by God
without irreverence. If, however, it is impossible that God should have
inspired or sanctioned the historical part of the Gospels, why then the
other part, which contains the teachings of Christ? Is it not much better,
much more honest and trustworthy for the writers to have communicated them
to us, as they knew and understood them (and that they occasionally
misunderstood them they themselves quite honestly admit), than to have
been supernaturally inspired for the purpose, and even to have received a
revelation in the form of a theophany? Through such weak human ideas we
merely drag the Real, the truly Divine, into the dust, and from whom do
these ideas of a divine inspiration or revelation come, if not from men as
they were everywhere, whether in India or Judea? Everywhere the natural is
divine, the supernatural or miraculous is human.

Even for the Apostles and the authors of the Gospels there was only one
revelation: that was the revelation through Christ; and this has an
entirely different meaning. To understand this, however, we must glance at
what we know of the intellectual movements of that time. The Jewish nation
cherished two great expectations. The one was ancient and purely Jewish,
the expectation of the Messiah, the anointed (Christ), who should be the
political and spiritual liberator of the chosen but enslaved people of
Israel. The other was also Jewish, but transfused with Greek philosophy,
the recognition of the word (Logos) as the Son of God, who should
reconcile or unite humanity with God. The first declares itself most
clearly, though not exclusively, in the three so-called Synoptic Gospels,
the second in the so-called Gospel of John. But it is worthy of note how
often these apparently remote ideas are found combined in the Gospels. The
idea that a man can be the Son of God was blasphemy in a strict Jewish
view, and it was for this reason that the last question of the high priest
was, “I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be
the Christ, the Son of God” (Matthew xxvi. 63). The Jewish Messiah could
never be the Son of God, the Word, in the Christian sense of the term, but
only in the sense in which many nations have called God the Father of men.
In this sense, also, the Jews say (John viii. 4), “We have one father,
even God,” while they start back affrighted at the idea of a divine
sonship of man. The Messiah, according to Jewish doctrine, was to be the
son of David (Matthew xxii. 42), as the people appear to have called Jesus
(Mark x. 47, xv. 39), and in order to counteract this view Christ himself
said, in a passage of great historical import: “How then doth David in
spirit call the Messiah Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou
on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If then David
called him Lord, how is he his son?” With these words the true Messiah
publicly renounced his royal descent from David, whilst he immediately
laid claim to a much higher one. Of what use is it, then, that the author
of the Gospel takes such pains in the first chapter to trace Joseph’s
descent genealogically from David, in spite of the fact that he does not
represent Joseph himself as the natural father of Jesus?

These contradictions are quite conceivable in an age strongly influenced
by different intellectual currents, but they would be intolerable in a
revealed or divinely inspired book. All becomes intelligible, clear, and
free from contradiction, if we see in the Synoptic Gospels that which they
profess to be—narratives of what had long been told and believed in
certain circles about the teaching and person of Christ. I say, what they
themselves profess to be; for can we believe, that if the authors had
really witnessed a miraculous vision, if every word and every letter had
been whispered to them, they would have made no mention of it? They relate
so many wonders, why not this one, the greatest of all? But it is not
enough that they do not claim any miraculous communication for themselves
or their works. Luke states in plain words the character of his gospel,
“For as much as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning
those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered
them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers
of the word (Logos); it seemed good to me also, having traced the course
of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most
excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the
things wherein thou wast instructed.”

What can be clearer? Theophilus had evidently received a not very
systematic Christian training, such as was possible under the conditions
of that time. As Luke says, there were even then several works on the
matters of common belief among Christians. In order, however, that
Theophilus may have a trustworthy knowledge of them, his friend (whether
Luke or any one else) determines to communicate them to him in regular
order, as they had been imparted to him, without asserting that he had
himself been from the beginning an eye-witness of them, or a minister of
the Word. It is apparent, therefore, that the writer rests upon a
tradition derived from eye-witnesses, and that he had even investigated
everything with care. Is it credible that he would not have made mention
of a revelation or a theophany, had either fallen to his lot? He also lays
stress upon his orderly arrangement, which probably implies that even at
that time there were the same discrepancies in the sequence of events that
we observe in the four Gospels, to say nothing about the numerous
apocryphal Gospels. This is just what we as historians expected, in fact
it could scarcely be otherwise. Christ’s message had first to pass through
the colloquial process, the leavening process of oral transmission; then
followed the reduction to written form, and it is this that we have, apart
from the corruptions of copyists. It is difficult to conceive how it could
have been otherwise, and still we are not content with these facts, and
imagine that we could have done it much better ourselves.

When we take the Synoptic Gospels one by one, we find in Luke the most
complete and probably the latest sequence of all the important events; in
Mark, the shortest and probably most original narrative, which only
contains that which seemed to him undisputed or of the greatest
importance; while Matthew, on the contrary, clearly presents the tradition
formed and established among the Jewish Christians and believers in the
Messiah.

If we may speak of communities at this early time, the community for which
the first Gospel was intended manifestly consisted of converted Jews, who
had recognised in Jesus their long-expected Messiah or Christ, and were,
therefore, convinced that everything which had been expected of the
Messiah came true in this Jesus. They went still farther. When they were
once convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, many traditions arose which
ascribed to him what he, if he were the Messiah, must have done. This is
the pervading feature of the first Gospel, as every one who reads it
carefully may easily be convinced. This alone explains the frequent and
frank expression that this and that occurred “for thus it was written, and
thus it was spoken by the prophet.” Every idea of intentional invention of
Messianic fulfilments, which has so often been asserted, disappears of
itself in our interpretation of the origin of the Gospel. It must be so,
people thought, and they soon told themselves and their children that it
had been so, and all in good faith, for otherwise Jesus could not have
been the expected Messiah.

If we examine the gospel of Matthew from this historical standpoint in
detail, we find that it begins with an entirely unnecessary genealogy of
Joseph, the ostensible father of Jesus. Then follows the birth, and this
is confirmed in i. 22, “For all this was done, that it might be fulfilled
which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” namely, Isaiah (vii.
14), “Behold a maiden is with child and shall bear a son, and shall call
his name Immanuel.” This means simply that it will be the first-born son,
and that he will be called “God is with us,” and, therefore, certainly
nothing supernatural.

The next story that the birth took place in Bethlehem, and that the wise
men from the East saw the star over Bethlehem, is again founded on the
prophet’s word that the ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem.

When the flight of Joseph and Mary to Egypt with the Christ child is told,
it is again set forth in ii. 15, that what the prophet said might be
fulfilled, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”

The massacre of the children in Bethlehem, with all its difficulties in
the eyes of the historian, finds a sufficient reason in verse 17 on the
words which were spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, “A voice was heard in
Rama, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she
would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Later, when Joseph returns with the child and journeys to Nazareth, this
too is explained by the words of the prophet, who said, “He shall be
called a Nazarene.”

On the false idea of the words of the prophet, that a Nazarene is an
inhabitant of Nazareth, I shall say nothing here. Everything, even such
popular errors, is quite intelligible from this point of view, and only
shows how convinced the people were that Jesus was the Messiah, and
therefore must have fulfilled everything which was expected of the
Messiah. To us these fulfilments of the prophecy may not sound very
convincing. But as a presentation of the ideas which then held sway over
the people, and as proof of the grasp of the colloquial process, they are
of great value to the historian.

The appearance of John the Baptist, too, is immediately explained by
reference to prophetic words (iii. 3). And when Jesus, after the
imprisonment of John, left his abode and removed to Capernaum, as was
quite natural, this, likewise must have occurred (iv. 14-16) that certain
words of Isaiah should be fulfilled.

There follows in the fifth to the seventh chapters the real kernel of
Christian teaching in the sermon on the mount, and the announcement of the
coming kingdom of God upon earth. Here we ask nothing more than a true
statement, such as an apostle or his disciples were fully in a position to
give us. No miraculous inspiration is needed for it; on the contrary, it
would only injure for us the trustworthiness of the reporter. In the next
chapters we read of the works done by Jesus, which were soon construed by
the people as miracles, while in another place the evangelist sets the
forgiveness of sins higher than all miracles, than all healing of the
sick, and even declares this to be a power which God had given to men (ix.
8). Jesus himself often makes his healing power depend on the faith of the
person to be healed, and of miraculous arts he says not a word (ix. 28).
Next follow the appointment and despatch of the disciples, and soon after
those words, which are so significant for this Gospel (xi. 27), “All
things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son, but
the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the son willeth to reveal _him_.” Here we have in a few words
the true spirit, the true inspiration of the teaching which Christ
proclaimed, that he was not only the Messiah or the son of David, but the
true son of God, the Logos, which God willed when he willed man, the
highest thought of God, the highest revelation of God, which was imparted
in Jesus to blind humanity. We cannot judge of this so correctly as those
who saw and knew Jesus in his corporeal existence, and found in him all
those perfections, particularly in his life and conduct, of which human
nature is capable. We must here rely on the evidence of his contemporaries
who had no motive to discover in him, the son of a carpenter, the
realisation on earth of the divine ideal of man, if this ideal had not
stood realised in him, before their eyes, in the flesh. What is true
Christianity if it be not the belief in the divine sonship of man, as the
Greek philosophers had rightly surmised, but had never seen realised on
earth? Here is the point, where the two great intellectual currents of the
Aryan and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah
of the Jews was recognised as the Logos, the true son of God, and that he
opened or revealed to every man the possibility to become what he had
always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought, the
Word, the Logos, the Son of God. Knowing here means being. A man may be a
prince, the son of a king, but if he does not know it, he is not so. Even
so from all eternity man was the son of God, but until he really knew it,
he was not so. The reporters in the Synoptic Gospels only occasionally
recognise the divine sonship of man with real clearness, for in their view
the practical element in Christianity was predominant, but in the end
everything practical must be based upon theory or faith. Our duties toward
God and man, our love for God and for man, are as nothing, without the
firm foundation which is formed only by our faith in God, as the Thinker
and Ruler of the world, the Father of the Son, who was revealed through
him as the Father of all sons, of all men. Such sayings are especially
significant in the Synoptic Evangelists, because it might appear as though
they had not recognised the deepest mystery of the revelation of Christ,
but were satisfied with the purely practical parts of his teachings.
Shortly after, when Jesus again proves his healing powers among the
people, and the Pharisees persecute him because the people were more and
more inclined to recognise in him the son of David, the Evangelist again
declares (xii. 17) that all this occurred that the words of the prophet
Isaiah might be fulfilled, “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my
beloved in whom my soul is well pleased; I will put my spirit upon him,
and he shall declare judgment unto the Gentiles.”

Then follow many of the profoundest and most beautiful parables which
contain the secrets of Christ’s teaching, and of which some, as we read,
and not by any means the most obscure, remained unintelligible even to the
disciples. Even at that time his fame had become so great, that on
returning to his own birthplace, the people would scarcely believe that he
was the same as the son of the carpenter, that his mother was named Mary,
and his brothers, Jacob, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, who like his sisters
were all still living. Yet among his own people he could accomplish but
few works. The Gospel then goes on to relate that as Herod had caused John
to be beheaded, Jesus again withdrew to a lonely place, probably to escape
the persecutions of Herod. Then follow the really important chapters, full
of teachings and of parables, intended to illumine these teachings and to
bring them home to the people. Here we naturally do not expect any appeal
to the prophets; on the contrary we often find a very bold advance beyond
the ancient law or a higher interpretation of the ancient Jewish
teachings. As soon, however, as we return to facts like the last journey
to Jerusalem, and the arrest of Jesus through the treachery of Judas, the
words immediately recur that all this came to pass that the Scriptures
should be fulfilled (xxvi. 54). Even Jesus himself, when he commands his
disciples to make no resistance, must have added the words, “But how then
shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be,” which clearly
refers to the famous prophecy of Isaiah in the fifty-third chapter. Even
the thirty pieces of silver which were paid Judas for his betrayal, are
considered necessary, that a prophesy of Jeremiah’s may be fulfilled. But
it seems that this prophesy is not to be found in Jeremiah, and must be
sought in Zechariah (xi. 12, 13). Such a confusion might easily occur
among the people, imperfectly acquainted with the text of the prophets. In
this case, therefore, it is quite harmless; but how could it possibly
occur in a revealed gospel? At the crucifixion of Jesus the garments are
divided, and another passage is immediately recalled, this time in a Psalm
(xxii. 19), in which the poet says of himself that his enemies divided his
garments between them, but there is no mention of the Messiah. Such an
application of the words of the Psalm to Jesus is perfectly intelligible
in the contemporary feeling of the Jewish people. Once convinced that
Jesus was the Messiah or Christ, all the incidents of his life and death
must necessarily remind them of the prophecies which had been current for
years, and kept alive among them the hope of their deliverer. Such details
were probably employed to deepen the conviction in themselves and others
that Jesus was really the Messiah. This is all quite natural and
comprehensible; but if we look at it with the idea that the writer was
called and inspired by God, what must we say? First, in some cases there
are plain errors which would be impossible in an infallible witness.
Secondly, must we believe that such events as the birth of Christ in
Bethlehem and his betrayal by Judas took place merely in order that
certain prophecies might be fulfilled? This would reduce the life of
Christ to a mere phantasm and rob it of its entire historical
significance. Or shall we assume (as some critics have done) that all
these events were simply invented to prove the Messiahship of Jesus?

From all these difficulties we escape when we recognise in the Gospels a
record or deposit of what was developed in the first century in the
consciousness of the Christians, and concerning the Gospel of Matthew in
particular, Christians who were converts from Judaism. In this view
everything that borders on intentional deceit drops away of itself. The
facts remain as before, as the people had explained and arranged them.
According to Matthew and his successors, Christianity originated as is
described in the Gospel according to Matthew. Many facts may in the minds
and mouths of the people have assumed a more popular or legendary form;
that was not to be avoided. We know how much this popular influence, or
what I call the colloquial process, has infected the traditions of other
nations, and it is very helpful to know this, in order to do justice to
the Gospels. For how should this influence have been wanting just in the
first and second centuries in Palestine? Everything becomes clear when we
accept the historical view, supported by many parallel cases, of the
origin of the Gospels in the mouths of the people. The tradition was just
such as we should expect under the existing conditions. Of intentional
deceit there is no further question. We cannot expect anything other or
better than what we have, _i.e._ what the people, or the young Christian
community, related about the life of the founder of the new religion,
unless it were a record from the hand of the founder of our religion
himself; for even the apostles are only depicted as men, and their
comprehension is represented as purely human and often very fallible. When
we speak of revelation, the term can only refer to the true revelation of
the eternal truths through Jesus himself, as we find them in the Gospels,
and the verity of which, even where it is somewhat veiled by the
tradition, confers on it the character of revelation. For it is a fact
which we should never forget, that even the best attested revelation, as
it can only reach us in human setting and by human means, does not make
truth, but it is truth, deeply felt truth, which makes revelation. Truth
constitutes revelation, not revelation truth. We therefore lose nothing by
this view, but gain immensely, and are at once relieved from all the
little difficulties which a laborious criticism thinks it discovers by a
comparison of the Gospels with one another. The only difficulty that seems
to remain is this, that the Synoptic Gospels are so often content to put
the Jewish conception of Jesus as the Messiah, as the son of David and
Abraham, and finally as the bodily son of God, in the foreground, and only
hint at the leading and fundamental truth of Christ’s teaching. We must
never forget that the apostles were no philosophers, and the Logos idea in
its full significance and historical development demands, for its correct
understanding, a considerable philosophical training.

Here we are helped by the Fourth Gospel, which must decidedly be ascribed
to Christians with more of Greek culture. That Greek ideas had penetrated
into Palestine is best seen in the works of Philo Judæus, the contemporary
of Jesus. We cannot suppose that he stood alone, and other Jewish thinkers
must like him have accepted the Logos idea as a solution of the riddle of
the universe. Out of soil like this, permeated and fructified with such
ideas, grew the Fourth Gospel. If we ever make it plain to ourselves that
Jews who, like Philo, had adopted the Logos idea with all its
consequences, necessarily recognised in the Logos the Son of God, the
chosen of God (Luke xxiii. 35), the realised image of God, and then in the
actual Jesus the incarnation or realisation, or rather the universalising
of this image, the Fourth Gospel ascribed to John will become much clearer
to us. Here lies the nucleus of true Christianity, in so far as it deals
with the personality of Christ, and the relation of God to humanity. It is
no longer said that God has made and created the world, but that God has
thought and uttered the world. All existences are thoughts, or
collectively the thought (Logos) of God, and this thought has found its
most perfect expression, its truest word, in a man in Jesus. In this sense
and in no other was Jesus the Son of God and the Word, as the Jews of
Greek culture believed, and as the author of the Fourth Gospel believed,
and as still later the young Athanasius and his contemporaries believed,
and as we must believe if we really wish to be Christians. There is no
other really Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and
uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God.
We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again
nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into
objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought
and life that made Jesus what he was, and what we should be if we only
tried, viz., children of God. This light or this revelation shines through
here and there even in the Synoptic Gospels, though so often obscured by
the Jewish Messianic ideas.

In the Fourth Gospel the influence of these ideas and their employment by
Jesus and his disciples cannot be mistaken. And why should not Jesus have
adopted and fulfilled the Logos ideas of the Greek world as well as the
Messianic ideas of the Jewish people? Do the Jews as thinkers rank so much
higher than the Greeks? How does the first verse read, which might well
have been said by a Neo-platonic philosopher, “In the beginning was the
Word”? This Word is the Logos, and this Greek word is in itself quite
enough to indicate the Greek origin of the idea. Word (Logos), however,
signified at the same time thought. This creative Word was with God, nay,
God himself was this Word. And all things were made by this Word, that is
to say, in this Word and in all Words God thought the world. Whoever
cannot or will not understand this, will never enter into the deepest
depths of the teaching of Christ, good Christian as he may otherwise be,
and the Fourth Gospel in its deepest meaning does not exist for him. That
there was life in these words or things shining forth from God, we know,
and this life, be it what it may, was a light to man, the light of the
world, even though man had long been blind and imprisoned in darkness, and
did not understand the life, the light, the Word.

Now, in passing to the gospel story, the evangelist says that Jesus
brought or himself was the true light, while John’s duty was merely to
announce his coming beforehand. This is certainly a great step—it is the
Christian recognition of the Word or of the Son of God in the historical
Jesus, whose historical character is confirmed by the character of John
the Baptist. The people believed in John, and John believed in Jesus. Of
course we must not assume that the philosophical significance of the Word,
or of the Logos, was ever clearly and completely present to the people in
the form worked out by the Neo-platonists. That was impossible at the
time, and it is so even now with the great mass of Christians. On the
other hand, the many subtleties and oddities which have made the later
Neo-platonism so repulsive to us, hardly existed for the consciousness of
the masses, which could only adopt the fundamental ideas of the Logos
system with a great effort. Religion is not philosophy; but there has
never been a religion, and there never can be, which is not based on
philosophy, and does not presuppose the philosophical notions of the
people. The highest aim, toward which all philosophy strives, is and will
always remain the idea of God, and it was this idea which Christianity
grasped in the Platonic sense, and presented to us most clearly in its
highest form, in the Fourth Gospel. To John, if for brevity we may so call
the author of the Fourth Gospel, God was no longer the Jewish Jehovah, who
had created the world in six days, formed Adam out of the dust, and every
living creature out of the ground; for him God had acquired a higher
significance, his nature was a spiritual nature, his creation was a
spiritual creation, and as for man the Word comprehends everything,
represents everything, realises everything that exists for him; so God was
conceived as being in the beginning, and then expressing Himself in the
Word, or as one with the Word. To God the Word, that is the
all-comprehensive Word, was the utterance, the actualising or
communicating of His subjective divine ideas, which were in Him, and
through the Word passed out of Him into human perception, and thereby into
objective reality. This second reality, inseparable from the first, was
the second Logos, inseparable as cause and effect are inseparable in
essence. As the highest of all Logoi was man, the most perfect man was
recognised as the son of God, the Logos become flesh, the highest thought
and will of God. In this there is nothing miraculous. Everything is
consistently thought out, and in this sense Jesus could have been nothing
else than the Word or the Son of God. All this sounds very strange to us
at first, because we have forgotten the full meaning of the utterance or
the Word, and are not able to transfer the creation of the Word and the
Thought, even though only in the form of a similitude, to that which was
in the beginning. A similitude it is and must remain, like everything that
we say of God; but it is a higher and more spiritual similitude than any
that have been or can be applied to God in the various religions and
philosophies of the world. God has thought the world, and in the act of
thinking has uttered or expressed it; and these thoughts which were in
Him, and were thought and uttered by Him in rational sequence, are the
Logoi, or species, or kinds, which we recognise again by reflection in the
objective world, as rationally developing one from another. Here we have
the true “Origin of Species” long before Darwin’s book.

To the philosophers this is all perfectly intelligible. The step taken by
Christ and his disciples (those, namely, who speak to us in the Fourth
Gospel) was this, that they believed they recognised in the historical
Jesus, the son of the carpenter of Nazareth, the highest Logos “Man” in
his complete realisation. It was entirely natural, but it can only have
occurred after overpowering experiences, for it must have signified more
than we understand under the “ideal of a man,” although originally both
expressions are derived from the same source. Nor was the designation of
the Saviour as the Word, or, in more human fashion, the Son of God,
intended so much for him conceived purely spiritually, but rather for his
personality as inspired by the highest ideas.

In all these matters we must think of the ever changing medium, in which
these expressions moved. Word and Son in the mouths of the people might
coalesce or be kept quite apart; Son of David, Son of Abraham, might at
times take the place of Son of God, and all these phrases might appear in
popular intercourse to express only what others called the Messiah or
Christ. In any case, all these were the highest expressions which could be
applied to man or to the son of man. To the ordinary understanding, still
permeated with heathen ideas, it was certainly monstrous to elevate a man
to Olympus, to transform him into a son of God. But what was there for man
higher than man? Intermediate beings, such as demons, heroes, or angels,
had never been seen, nor did they answer the purpose. One step, however
small, above the human, could only lead to the divine, or bring into
consciousness the divine in man. What seemed blasphemy to the Jewish
consciousness was just that truth which Christ proclaimed, the truth for
which he laid down his human life. If we enter into this thought, we shall
understand not only the occasional expressions of the Synoptics, but the
Fourth Gospel especially in all its depth. How it was possible to make
this last Gospel intelligible without these ideas, is almost
incomprehensible.

What, then, did the readers think of the Word, that was in the beginning,
that was with God, that even was God, of the Word, by which all things
were made? And what was understood when Jesus was called the Word, that
was in the world, without the world knowing him, while those who
recognised and acknowledged him as the Word, thereby became like him sons
of God? We must ascribe some meaning to these words, and what can we
ascribe if we do not take the philosophic term “Logos” in its historic
sense? One need only attempt to translate the beginning of the Fourth
Gospel into a non-Christian language, and we shall realise that without
its heathen antecedents the words remain absolutely unintelligible. We
find translations that mean simply, “In the beginning was the
substantive.” That may seem incredible to us; but what better idea has a
poor old peasant woman in reading the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel,
and what better idea can the village preacher give her if she asks for an
explanation?

For us the greatest difficulty remains in verse 14, “The Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us.” But what grounds have we for setting our
opinion against the unhesitating acceptance of contemporaries, and later
even of the Alexandrian philosophers? They must have felt the same
difficulties as ourselves, but they overcame them in consideration of what
they had seen in Jesus, or even only heard of him. They could not
comprehend him in his moral elevation and holiness, except as the Logos,
the Word, the Son of God. If we follow them, we are safe; if not, we can
no doubt say much in excuse, but we place ourselves in the strongest
opposition to history. We may say that men have never seen any divine
idea, any divine word, any divine thought of any kind realised on earth;
nay, that man can never have the right to pass such a deifying judgment,
of his own sovereign power, on anything lying within his actual
experience. We so easily forget that if God is once brought near to
humanity, and no longer regarded as only transcendent, humanity must, at
the same time, be thought and brought nearer to the divine. We may
acknowledge this and still maintain that others, like the apostles and the
philosophers of Alexandria after them, must have felt the same difficulty,
perhaps even more strongly than we, who never were eye-witnesses nor
Platonic philosophers. Yet they still insisted that Jesus in his life,
conduct, and death demonstrated that human nature could rise no higher
than in him, and that he _was_ all and _fulfilled_ all that God had
comprised in the Logos “man.” Jesus himself declares, when Peter first
called him the son of God, that flesh and blood had not revealed it unto
him, but his Father which is in heaven (Matthew xvi. 17). And this was
perfect truth and applies to us also.

We may go through the whole Fourth Gospel, and we shall find that it
remains incomprehensible, except from the standpoint that we ascribe to
the author. When we read (i. 18), “No man hath seen God at any time; the
only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared
him,” shall we then think only of the son of the carpenter, the bodily
Jesus, and not rather of the Word that was in him, and that was as near to
the Father as He to himself; that was in the bosom of the Father, and that
declared to us the Father, who was in the beginning? Has not Jesus himself
stated (iii. 13) that no man hath ascended up to heaven except him who
came down from heaven, that is from God, and that no one has seen the
Father, save he which is of God, that is the Son (vi. 46)? These are, of
course, figurative expressions, but their meaning cannot be doubtful. When
Nathanael called Jesus, Rabbi, King of Israel, and Son of God, his ideas
may still have been very immature, but in time the true meaning of the Son
of God breaks through more and more clearly.

The declaration of Jesus to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born anew,” is a
remarkable one—remarkable, because the Brahmans from the earliest times
make use of the same expression, and call themselves the reborn, the twice
born (Dvija), and both no doubt attributed the same meaning to the second
birth, namely, the recognition of the true nature of man, the Brahmans as
one with Brahman, that is, the Word; the Christians as one with the Word,
or the Son of God. And why should this belief in the Son give everlasting
life (ii. 16)? Because Jesus has through his own sonship in God declared
to us ours also. This knowledge gives us eternal life through the
conviction that we too have something divine and eternal within us,
namely, the word of God, the Son, whom He hath sent (v. 38). Jesus
himself, however, is the only begotten Son, the light of the world. He
first fulfilled and illumined the divine idea which lies darkly in all men
(see John viii. 12, xii. 35, 46), and made it possible for all men to
become actually what they have always been potentially—sons of God.

Further reading in the Fourth Gospel will of course show us many things
that are only indirectly connected with this, which I believe to be the
supreme truth of Christianity. To the woman of Samaria Jesus only declares
that God is a spirit, and that he must be worshipped in spirit, bound
neither to Jerusalem nor to Samaria. She knows only that the Messiah will
come, she was scarcely ready for the idea of a son of God, but like the
Pharisees (v. 18) would have considered this only as blasphemy (x. 33).
But again and again the keynote of the new teaching breaks through. When
Jesus speaks of his works, he calls them the works of his Father (v. 19);
even the resurrection from the dead is explained by him, as clearly as
possible, to be an awakening through the Word, “He that heareth my word,
and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life” (v. 14), which
means that he is immortal. He, however, who did not recognise the Word and
his divine nature, as Jesus taught it, does not yet possess that eternal
life, for which he is destined, but which must first be gained through
insight, or belief in Jesus. Can anything be clearer than the words (John
xvii. 3), “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”? Of course many of these
expressions were not understood by the masses, or were even misunderstood.
The words were repeated, and when necessary, especially in the
questionings of children, they had to be explained somehow, often by a
parable or story, which the mother invents at the moment, to quiet them.
All this is inevitable; it has happened everywhere, and happens still.
Whoever wishes to learn how tradition or common report treats historical
facts, should compare the Günther or Etzel of the Nibelungen with the
Gundicarius or Attila of history, or Charles the Great crowned by the Pope
with the Charlemagne who besieged Jerusalem, or Hruodlandus with Roland,
or Arturus with Arthur. Or, to come to later days, we need only recall the
wonderful tales of the French journals during the last Franco-German War,
and we shall be astonished at the manner in which, quite unintentionally,
the people adapt all tidings to their own views. Nineteen hundred years
ago there were no newspapers. Why should it have been different then?

What the children had heard and believed, they remembered when they had
grown older, or themselves had become parents. It was convenient and
natural to tell their children again what they had heard in their own
childhood, and like a rolling stone, with each repetition the tradition
constantly took up new miraculous elements. There is scarcely a miracle in
the New Testament that did not account for itself spontaneously in this
way, and that did not in its original form reveal to us a far higher truth
than the mere miracle itself. And when the time came for a record, was it
not quite natural that everything available should be gathered together,
according to the tales told and believed from house to house, or village
to village? In this process, moreover, the appeal to a voucher, if
possible to a contemporary or eye-witness, was not at all surprising,
especially if there was a still living tradition, that this or that had
been heard from one of the apostles, and could be traced back to him from
son to father. Why should we put aside, nay, indignantly reject, this
simple, natural theory, suggested by all the circumstances, and capable of
at once removing all difficulties, in order to prefer another, which has
the advantage, it is true, of having been generally accepted for
centuries, but nevertheless was originally nothing more than a human
appeal to a superhuman attestation? It must not be forgotten that if a
voice were really heard from heaven, it lies with man to understand it,
or, on his own authority, to declare it the voice of God or an angel. With
one-half of Christendom the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the four
Gospels never became an article of faith. It was first made so among the
Protestants to provide something incontestable in place of the councils
and the Pope. But this only drove Protestants from Scylla into Charybdis,
and landed them in inextricable difficulties, because they withdrew the
Gospels from the historical soil out of which they sprang. But we do not
escape Charybdis by steering again into Scylla, but by endeavouring to
rise above Charybdis, ay, even above the Gospels. In our human
shortsightedness we may believe that it would have been better for us had
Jesus or the apostles themselves left us something in writing. But as this
did not happen, why should we not be content with what we have? The ruins
of the true Christianity still remain; why should we not endeavour with
their help to restore the ancient temple?

Why should we contemptuously reject the tradition which arose in the
mouths of the people? Should we be worse Christians if it were clearly and
plainly demonstrated that we only possess popular traditions, out of which
we must ourselves form a conception of the career and teaching of Christ?
Is it not good for us, that we are free in many points to decide for
ourselves what Jesus was and what he taught?

And in a world in which everything develops, everything grows and changes,
why should religion alone be an exception? Do we not all freely confess
that certain precepts which are ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels are no
longer adapted to our times and to our circumstances? Does any Christian
turn his left cheek when he has been struck upon the right? Do we give our
cloak when our coat has been taken from us? Do we hold everything that we
possess in common as the first Christians did? Do we sell all that we have
and give it to the poor (Matthew xix. 21)?

It is quite true that under this method a certain personal freedom in the
interpretation of the Gospels is unavoidable, but is not this freedom at
the same time accompanied by a very important feeling of personal
responsibility, which is of the utmost significance for every religious
conviction? It cannot be denied, that this open and honest acknowledgment
of the undeniable influence of popular tradition has far-reaching
consequences, and will take from us much to which we are accustomed, and
that has become near and dear, even sacred, to us. But it has this
advantage, that we feel we are candid and honest in our faith, to which we
may add that we are never forced in dealing with human hypotheses to give
our assent blindly, but may follow our own judgment. We may adopt or
reject the view that in the development of the gospel story much must be
ascribed to popular tradition, and I can readily believe that many who do
not know, either through the study of legends or their own experience, the
transforming influence which school and family traditions exercise on the
form of historical narratives, find it incredible that such a carbonising
process could have taken place also in the evangelical tradition as
related by the men of the next generation. They must then content
themselves with the alternative, that the laws of nature, which they
themselves ascribe to the Deity, must have been abrogated by their own
founder in order that the truth of the teaching of Christ might gain a
certain probability in the eyes of the people by so-called miracles.

Let us take an example in order to see what we shall gain on the one side
and lose on the other. The original meaning of making the blind see, Jesus
has himself told us (John ix. 39), “For judgment I am come into this
world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be
made blind.” This refers to spiritual, not physical blindness, and which
is the more difficult to heal, the spiritual or the physical? But when
Jesus was repeatedly said to have healed this spiritual blindness, to have
opened the eyes of the blind and unbelieving, how was it possible that the
masses, especially the children, should not misunderstand such cures, and
interpret and repeat them as cures of physical blindness? Certainly such
an idea carries us a long way. We must then, for instance, explain such an
expression as that placed in the mouths of the Pharisees (John x. 21),
“Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?” as a further extension of a
popular notion already in the field. Nor can it be denied that cures of
the physically blind have this in their favour, that so exceptional a
personality as Jesus may also have possessed an exceptional healing power.
It then depends only on the character of the blindness, whether it was
curable or incurable, and the solution of this question we may be content
to leave to the medical man. I only remark, that if the medical man should
deny such a possibility, a true Christian would lose nothing in
consequence, for under all circumstances a spiritual healing power in
Christ would stand higher with all of us than one merely physical.

This may be called shallow rationalism, but surely the human _ratio_ or
reason cannot be entirely rejected. Many know of their own experience that
a man of high moral energy can even now drive out devils and base
thoughts. Why not also believe that through his appearance and words Jesus
made such an impression upon those possessed, for instance, upon the man
or the two men who herded swine in the country of the Gadarenes or
Gergesenes, that they came to themselves and began to lead new lives? That
on such a conversion the swine-herds should forget their swine which
rushed headlong into the lake, is easily understood, and when these two
incidents came to the ears of the people, what was more natural than the
story which we find in Matthew (viii. 28), Mark (v. 1), and Luke (viii.
26), but not in John? We need not now enter into the discrepancies between
these three narratives, striking as they would be in a divinely inspired
book. Of course it will be said again, that this is a shallow,
rationalistic explanation, as if the word “rationalist” contained within
itself something condemnatory. At all events, no one can now demonstrate
that Jesus did not bewitch the unclean spirits out of the two demoniacs
into the two thousand swine; but I confess that the shallow rationalistic
explanation seems to me far better calculated to bring clearly to light
the influence which Jesus could exercise over the most abandoned men.

One more instance. How often does Jesus say that he is the bread that
really satisfies man, and the water that quenches all thirst (vi. 48): “I
am the bread of life. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven,
that a man may eat thereof and not die. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh
my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Would any one, even the woman of Samaria, take these words literally? Does
not Jesus himself help us to a correct understanding of them when he says
(vi. 35), “I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never
hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst,” and again, (vii.
37), “If any man thirst let him come unto me, and drink.” And in order to
shield his words against any misunderstanding he himself says (vi. 63),
“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing; the words
that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” And are we
resolved in spite of all this not to understand the deep meaning of his
words, to remain blind and deaf; and do we, like the Pharisees, prefer the
story of how Jesus by magic means fed thousands with five or seven loaves
and two fishes (vi. 9), so that in the end twelve baskets of bread
remained after all were satisfied? We can readily comprehend how in the
mouths of the people the great miracles of Jesus, the real _mira_ wrought
by his life and teaching, became small _miracula_. But if we surrender
these small _miracula_, is not something far better left us, namely, that
Jesus, who so often called himself the bread and the wine, who even at the
Last Supper, as he broke bread with his disciples, commanded them to eat
the bread which was his body, and drink the wine which was his blood,—that
this teacher could by his teaching satisfy, content, and convert
thousands, who came to him and believed in him! It is true that the story
of the feeding of thousands with five loaves of bread is more intelligible
to women and children, and makes a stronger impression than the
metaphorical words of Christ; but nothing is more easy to understand than
the transformation of a tale of the conversion or spiritual satisfying of
thousands, into a parable of the feeding of thousands with five loaves.
But have not the truly devout and conscientious thinkers rights of their
own in the community? Must they really hold themselves aloof from the
church, because they have too deep a reverence for the true teaching of
Christ? Grand and beautiful as are St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Mark’s in
Venice, or the Cathedral at Milan, it is heartbreaking to observe the
so-called divine service in these buildings. Let us not be deceived by the
sayings, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, or that a
childlike faith is best. That is quite true, but it has absolutely nothing
to do with our question. Of course in every generation millions of
children are born, and milk must be provided for these as well; but this
milk is not for men, and these should not permit themselves to be
frightened by mere words, such as shallow enlightenment, rationalism,
unbelief, etc. The worst of it is that we have permitted our _ministri_ to
become our masters instead of our servants, and that the weak among them
far outnumber the strong. In history, however, the minority is always
victorious. Popular legend has certainly at times grievously obscured the
gospel of Christ, but not so much as to prevent those who are familiar
with its nature and effect from discovering the grains of gold in the
sand, the rays of truth behind the clouds. At all events, popular legend
refuses to be ruled out. A knowledge of it and its influence on historical
events in other nations, and especially a familiarity with the modes of
expression in Oriental languages, are of the greatest use in all these
investigations. Only let no one confound legend and metaphor with
mythology. When Jesus says that he is the water, and that whoever drinks
of this water shall never thirst again, every one readily perceives that
he speaks metaphorically. And likewise when he says that he is the vine or
the good shepherd. But here the transition from parable to reality very
soon begins. Among so many pictures of the good shepherd it need occasion
no surprise that it is commonly imagined that Jesus actually was a
shepherd and carried a lamb on his shoulders. What occurs now was of
course equally possible in the earliest times. When the common people saw
daily, in old mosaic pictures, a sword coming forth from the mouth of God,
they formed a representation of God corresponding to these pictures (Rev.
i. 20). And thus many readers of the Gospel suppose that Jesus was really
carried up into the air by the devil and placed on the summit of the
temple or of a high mountain, that he might show him all the kingdoms of
the earth, and tempt him to establish an earthly realm. Is it reverent to
imagine Christ borne through the air by the devil, instead of simply
learning that Christ himself, as we read, was not a stranger to inward
trials, and that he freely confessed them to his disciples? Many parables
are represented in the Gospels, as though they had really occurred at the
time. Thus, in the parables of the kingdom of heaven, the phrase always
runs that it is like seed which a man sowed, and while he slept an enemy
came and sowed tares. Or the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a
woman took and hid in three measures of meal, or like a treasure found by
a man in a field, or like a merchant seeking goodly pearls, etc. In
listening to these parables or looking at pictorial representations of
them, there develops almost unconsciously, especially among the young, a
belief in their reality, in their actual occurrence at the time of Christ.
In many cases this belief is widely spread, as, for example, in the story
of the good Samaritan, Now it is quite possible that some such incident as
Jesus related had occurred in his time, or shortly before it; but it is
just as likely to have been a parable invented for a specific purpose. And
why should not this be true of other things, which the Gospels ascribe to
Jesus himself?

Is it necessary to believe, that Jesus saw the Pharisees casting their
gifts into the treasury with his own eyes (Luke xxi. 1), and the poor
widow who threw in two mites, or is it possible to consider this, too, as
a parable, without insisting that Jesus really sat opposite the sacred
chest, and counted the alms, and knew that the widow had put in two mites,
and had really nothing left? Of many things, as of the conversation
between Jesus and Nicodemus, or between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, no
one could have had any knowledge except those who took part in it. We must
therefore assume that Jesus communicated these conversations to his
disciples, and that these have reported to us the _ipsissima verba_. In
this manner we are constantly involving ourselves in fresh difficulties of
our own making, which we may indeed leave out of consideration, but which
would never exist at all if we would only consider the circumstances under
which the Gospels arose. I have previously expounded this view of the
popular origin of the evangelic narratives in my Gifford lectures before
an audience, certainly very orthodox; and although a small number of
theologians were much incensed against me,—it was their duty,—the
majority, even of the clergy, were decidedly with me. The things
themselves and their lessons remain undiminished in value; we merely
acknowledge a fact, quite natural from an historical standpoint, viz. that
the accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus have not come to us direct
from Christ, nor from the apostles, but from men who, as they themselves
tell us, received the report from others by tradition. Their narratives,
consequently, are not perhaps fictitious, or prepared with a certain
object; but they do show traces of the influence that was unavoidable in
oral transmission, especially at a time of great spiritual excitement.
This is a problem which in itself has nothing whatever to do with
religion. We have the Gospels as they are. It remains with the historian
alone to pass judgment upon the origin, the transmission, and the
authenticity of these texts, just as the reconstruction of the text lies
solely with the philologist. For this he need not even be a Christian,
merely an historian. Whatever may be the judgment of the historical
inquirer, we must learn to be content with what they leave us. In this,
too, the half is often better than the whole. Quite sufficient remains,
even when the critical historian assures us that the Gospels as we possess
them were neither written by Christ nor the apostles, but contain the
traditions of the oldest Christian communities, and that the manuscripts
in which they have reached us were not written till the fifth or at the
earliest the fourth century. We may deal with these materials as with all
other historical materials from that period; and we do so rather as
independent historians than as Christians.

The view that the four Gospels were miraculously revealed to their
authors, miraculously written, miraculously copied and finally printed, is
a view no doubt deserving of respect, but it leaves the contents of the
Gospels untouched. The difference between the historical and the
conventional interpretation of the Gospels comes out most clearly in the
doctrine of eternal life. What Jesus understands by the eternal life that
he has brought to mankind, is as clear as the sun. He repeats it again and
again. Eternal life consists in knowing that men have their Father and
their true being in the only true God, and that as sons of this same
Father, they are of like nature with God and Christ (John xvii. 3).

This is the fundamental truth of Christianity, and it holds good not only
for the contemporaries of Jesus, but for all times. Those who see in this
view an overestimate of human nature, need only ask themselves what man
could be, if he were not a partaker of the divine nature. This excludes
the difference between human and divine nature as little as the difference
between the physical father and the physical son. Even in this case we
speak figuratively, for how could we speak otherwise of what is
supersensual? The repetition of stories among the people, narrating how
Jesus raised one or another to life, to eternal life, very soon led among
women and children to the misunderstanding that this referred only to a
resurrection from bodily death. Nay, this raising passed with them, as it
still does with many, for a stronger proof of the divine nature and power
of Christ than the resurrection from that spiritual death, which holds in
captivity all who have not recognised their own divine sonship and have
not understood the glad tidings which Jesus brought to all mankind. Such
misunderstandings we find everywhere, as when, for instance, even a man
like Nicodemus fails to comprehend the new birth of which Jesus speaks,
and asks if a man can enter his mother’s womb a second time. If this was
possible in a Scribe, how much more so with the uneducated people. In the
same way the Jews misunderstand the saying of Jesus, that the truth will
make them free, and answer that they are the seed of Abraham, and free
men, so that Jesus had to repeat that whosoever commits sin is not free,
but a slave of sin (John viii. 33). Such misunderstandings meet us
everywhere, and their influence extends much farther than we at first
suppose. Naturally the tradition also puts words into Jesus’ mouth that
could only have issued out of the notions of the people, and almost
entirely conceal the depth of his own words. While the revelation of the
true divine sonship of man immediately bestows eternal life on him who
comprehends or believes in it, heals his blindness, and raises him from
spiritual death, Jesus is presented as not purposing to raise the dead
until the last day (John vi. 40). Martha makes the same mistake, when to
the words of Jesus, “Thy brother shall rise again,” she answers, “I know
that he shall rise at the last day” (John xi. 24). Even some of the works
which are ascribed to Jesus are plainly derived from the same source. A
spiritual resurrection is not sufficient, it even passes for less than a
bodily, and this is the very reason for the numerous stories of the
raising of the dead. These are matters from which, even to this day,
devout Christians are loath to part, especially where the details are
given so minutely as in the raising of Lazarus. Now there is absolutely no
objection to this, if we are resolved to cling to the historical reality
of the raising of Lazarus. Only in that case the terms employed should be
exactly defined. If we give the name death to the condition which excludes
any return to life, especially when, as with Lazarus, decay had already
set in, the condition from which Lazarus returned to life cannot be called
death without a contradiction. Jesus even says that his sickness was not
fatal (John xi. 4), and that he is not dead, but merely sleeps (John xi.
11). Was he mistaken? Such words should at least not be entirely
disregarded, even though the other words follow immediately after,
“Lazarus is dead” (John xi. 14). That a highly gifted nature, like that of
Jesus, may have possessed wonderful healing powers, cannot be denied,
however difficult it may be to determine the boundary between what is and
is not possible here. On the other hand, it is firmly established that
when once such an idea as the raising from physical death becomes rooted
in the popular mind, the details, especially such as can serve as
evidence, are provided spontaneously. The nucleus of the story of the
raising of Lazarus lies of course in the words (John xi. 25, 26), “_I am
the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me though he were
dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall
never die._” Here we have the true teaching of Christ, in his own
apparently contradictory language. The saying, “Whoever believes in me
shall never die,” does not necessarily mean that his body will never die;
and so the words, “Though he were dead, yet shall he live,” certainly do
not signify that his dead and decayed body shall receive new life. But the
people wanted something else. For the true miracles, for the spiritual
resurrection, they had no comprehension, they wanted sensuous miracles,
they wanted the resurrection of a body already decayed, and this is
described in the Gospels in detail. Such is the regular privilege of
popular tradition, and it happens without deliberate intention, except
that of bringing vividly before us the common interpretation of the fact.
Popular tradition is not intentional deception, it is only an unavoidable
fusion of facts with conventional ideas, whereby God becomes a laborer
wearied by six days’ work; his seat becomes Olympus or a golden throne in
some corner of the blue sky; the Son of God sinks to the level of a prince
of the house of David, the Saviour to a miracle doctor, and his message of
salvation to a promise of resurrection from physical death. There are many
good men and women fulfilling in their daily walk the commands of Christ,
to whom the true historical conception of the gospel story would be a
terrible disillusion. Well, such Christians are at liberty to remain in
their own views. Our own interpretation of many of the details in the
traditional representation of the Gospels, though details certainly of
very great significance, makes no claim to papal authority. It gladly
concedes the possibility of error, and only claims to give an
interpretation of the evangelic writings, founded on nature and history.
It should answer, and at the same time appease, the very numerous and, at
bottom, honest men, who, like the Horseherd, declare the gospel
narratives, as ordinarily understood, full of falsehood and fraud or even
pure fancy, and who have consequently broken with the Christian revelation
from conscientious scruples. Their number is greater than is generally
supposed, and it must on no account be supposed that they are necessarily
wicked or even immoral men. When they declare the Christian revelation to
be an absurdity, it is because they do not know it in its historical
origin and its divine truth. To assume that every word, every letter,—for
it has been carried even so far,—that every parable, every figure, was
whispered to the authors of the Gospels, is certainly an absurdity, and
rests only on human and often only on priestly authority. But the true
revelation, the real truth, as it was already anticipated by the Greek
philosophers, slowly accepted by Jews like Philo and the contemporaries of
Jesus, taught by men like Clement and Origen in the ancient Greek church,
and, in fine, realised in the life of Jesus and sealed by his death, is no
absurdity; it is for every thinking Christian the eternal life or the
kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus wished to establish, and in part did
establish. To become a citizen of this kingdom is the highest that man can
attain, but it is not attained merely through baptism and confirmation; it
must be gained in earnest spiritual conflict.

In nearly all religions God remains far from man. I say in nearly all
religions; for in Brahmanism the unity, not the union, of the human soul
with Brahman is recognised as the highest aim. This unity with Deity,
together with phenomenal difference, Jesus expressed in part through the
Logos, in part through the Son. There is nothing so closely allied as
thought and word, Father and Son. They can be distinguished, but never
separated, for they exist only through each other. In this manner the
Greek philosophers considered all creation as the thought or the word of
God, and the thought “man” became naturally the highest Logos, realised in
millions of men, and raised to the highest perfection in Jesus. As the
thought exists only through the word, and the word only through the
thought, so also the Father exists only through the Son, and the Son
through the Father, and in this sense Jesus feels and declares himself the
Son of God, and all men who believe in him his brethren. This revelation
or inspiration came to mankind through Jesus. No one knew the Father
except the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, and those to whom the
Son willeth to reveal him. This is the Christian revelation in the true
sense of the word. It has long been attempted to make an essential
difference between Jesus, the only begotten Son, and his brethren, through
an exaggerated feeling of affected reverence. But if this is carried too
far, the temple which Jesus himself erected for mankind is destroyed. It
is true that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, and that
Jesus is the only begotten Son, for he is in the Father and the Father in
him (John xiv. 10), nay, he and the Father are one (John x. 30). The
distinction is therefore there, but the unity as well, for Jesus himself
says that he is in his disciples as the Father is in him, that they all
may be one, as he is one with God, and God with him (John xvii. 21). To
many there may be no sense in this, because their ideas of God and of the
Son of God are altogether materialistic, but to those who have learned to
feel the divine, not only without but also within, these words are the
light of the world. In this sense we need not be ashamed of the gospel of
Christ, and can be prepared to look all the Horseherds of the world in the
face as intellectually free, yet at the same time as true Christians, in
the way Jesus himself would have desired; often in error, like the
disciples of old, but still loyal and honest followers of the Son of God.

The main issue in all these questions is honesty, honesty toward ourselves
even more than toward others. We know how easily we may all be deceived,
how easily we are put off with words, especially when they are words of
ancient use. It was the sincere tone of the Horseherd that prompted me to
public discussion of his doubts, for doubts are generally anticipations of
truth, and to be true to oneself is better than to possess all truth. It
gave me pleasure to learn recently that he is still among the living,
although for an interval he was beyond the range of the usual postal
facilities, so that my letters did not reach him. Whether he thinks me as
honest as himself, we must wait to know. I did not seek either to persuade
or to convince him. Such things depend too much on circumstances and
environment. I merely wished to show him that others, who do not agree
with him, or with whom he does not agree, are honest, and may honestly
hold entirely different views. To learn to understand each other is the
great art of life, and to “agree to differ” is the best lesson of the
comparative science of religion.



CHAPTER VI.


                               Conclusion.


The allusion in the foregoing page is to a very long letter which the
Horseherd wrote to my husband, dated September 10, 1897, eighteen months
after his first letter. This was followed three days later by a short
note, saying that the long letter was not written for publication, and
that it was the Horseherd’s express wish that it should not be printed. In
this note he mentions that he was perfectly well, and that he had been so
successful in his trade, that he no longer sat with an oil lamp by an iron
stove, but was “every inch a gentleman,” as he expressed it. The
_Pferdebürla_ was brought out early in 1899, and my husband sent a copy to
the only address he had,—“Pferdebürla, Post-Office, Pittsburgh,”—with the
following letter:—

“



(Translation.) 7 Norham Gardens, Feb. 10 /99.
Dear far-off Friend:

“You see I have kept my promise, and after many delays the book is ready.
How are you? whether you are sitting by your iron and oil light, or have
become a great and rich man. Well, all that is only external, the great
thing, the Self, remains unchanged. I am growing old—past seventy-five—and
have still so much to do, and am now printing a big book, the _Six Systems
of Indian Philosophy_. That would please you, for those old fellows saw
deeper than our philosophers, though they don’t talk so much about it. Now
write and tell me how it is with you, and whether you are pleased or not
with your and my book. But make haste, for who knows how long it may last.
It is strange how well one can know those whom one has never seen,”

With all good wishes,
                                                            F. Max Müller.



”

The book and letter were returned as unclaimed after three months. But on
September 29, 1899, the Horseherd wrote again, giving his real name, Fritz
Menzel, and the address Monangahela Hotel, Pittsburgh. This letter I have
been unable to find. On October 17, 1899, I wrote by my husband’s desire.

“DEAR SIR: My husband, who is seriously ill, wishes me to send you this
letter from him, written last February and returned late in April, and to
say, as he has now received your letter of September 29, with your real
name and address, he is sending you the copy of his book, _Das
Pferdebürla_, which was also returned to him.”

After a few months both letter and book came back unclaimed, and from that
time nothing more has been heard from the Horseherd. The book bears the
inscription:—

“To the Pferdebürla, with greetings from his Pardner.”

A few words must be said about the translation. In August, 1898, a
translation of the first article on Celsus, made by Mr. O. A. Fechter of
North Yakima, Washington, U.S.A., was sent to my husband by an old friend,
Mrs. Bartlett, wife of the Rev. H. M. Bartlett, rector of the church in
the same place. He liked it and returned it at once, begging that the
other articles, which had appeared in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, though not
yet published as a book, might be translated. For more than two years
nothing was heard from North Yakima, though I wrote more than once during
my husband’s illness, so anxious was he to see the translation carried
out. At length, just before Christmas, 1901, I wrote once more and
registered the letter, which was safely delivered, and I then heard that
my friend had not only written repeatedly, but that the whole finished
translation had been sent, nearly two years before, and that she was
astonished at hearing nothing further. Some fault in the post-office had
caused the long silence on both sides. A rough copy of the translation had
been kept, and was sent over after it had been clearly written out.

I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the Rev. J. Estlin
Carpenter, who has revised the whole work in the most thorough manner,
devoting to it much of his very valuable time.

GEORGINA MAX MÜLLER



FOOTNOTES


    1 The Greek term “logos” was rendered _Geschichte_ in the German
      title.

    2 The word _Pferdebürla_ is apparently a Silesian equivalent for
      _Pferdebursche_, and is represented in this volume by the term
      “horseherd,” after the analogy of cowherd, swineherd, or shepherd.
      The termination _bürla_ is probably a local corruption of the
      diminutive _bürschel_ or _bürschlein_.

    3 “What difference does it make,” he would ask, “whether it was
      written by the son of Zebedee, or some other John, if only it
      reveals to us the Son of God?” (letter from the Vicar of St.
      Giles’s, Oxford, _Life and Letters_, II, Chap. xxxvi.).

    4 See the letters between Max Müller and Dr. G. J. Romanes, _Life and
      Letters_, II, Chap. xxxi.

_    5 Ueber die Wahre Geschichte des Celsus._

_    6 Contra Celsum_, I, 8.

_    7 Contra Celsum_, I, 63.

    8 Luke v. 8.

    9 1 Tim. i. 15.

   10 Tit. iii. 3.

   11 Miss Swanwick’s translation.

   12 κόσμος νοητός, ἀόρατος.

   13 κόσμος ἰδεῶν.

   14 ἰδέα τῶν ἰδεῶν.

   15 παραδεἰγματα.

   16 Philo, vol. I, p. 106.

   17 τιθήνη.

_   18 De Ebriet._, VIII, 1, 361 f.

   19 υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ.

   20 μονογενής.

   21 πρωτόγονος.

   22 σοφία = θεοῦ λόγος.

   23 πρεσβύτερος υἱὸς.

   24 νεώτερος υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ.

   25 δυνάμεις.

   26 M. M., _Theosophy and Psychological Religion_, p. 406.

   27 Lücke, _Commentary on the Gospel of John_.

   28 M. M., _Theosophy and Psychological Religion_, p. 383.

   29 M. M., _Theosophy_, p. 404.

   30 See the _Deutsche Rundschau_, 1895, XXXIII, p. 47.

   31 μονογενής υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ.

   32 Ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγέιετο.

   33 λόγος τῆς ζοῆς.

   34 The original was, however, in German.

_   35 Deutsche Rundschau_, 1895, LXXXII, 409 ff., “The Parliament of
      Religions in Chicago,” by F. Max Müller.

   36 See Prof. Dr. Paul Flechsig, _Neue Untersuchungen über die
      Markbildung in den menschlichen Gehirnlappen_, p. 67.

   37 These pronouns, referring of course to England and the Continent,
      were reversed in the original.

_   38 Academy_, January 2, 1897, p. 12.

_   39 Ascent of Man_, p. 187.

_   40 Origin of Species_, 5th ed., 1869, p. 255.

_   41 Descent of Man_, 1871, Vol. I, p. 36.

_   42 Ascent of Man_, 1894, p. 9.

   43 Vol. XVIII, p. 464.

   44 Lloyd Morgan, _Animal Life and Intelligence_, p. 350.

   45 H. Drummond, _Ascent of Man_, 1894, p. 169.

   46 See _Science of Thought_, p. 405.

   47 See the author’s preface to his English translation (second edition)
      of Kant’s _Critic of Pure Reason_, p. xxviii, to which we now add
      the prophetic words of Shelley, in his _Prometheus Unbound_ (II,
      4):—

      “He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
      Which is the measure of the Universe.”

_   48 Ascent of Man_, 1894, p. 200.

_   49 Science of Language_, 1891, p. 499.

   50 Cf. _Biographies of Words_, by M. M., 1888.

   51 This must of course be understood of authoritative or canonical
      Scripture.—ed. J. E. C.





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