Kitabı oku: «The Silesian Horseherd. Questions of the Hour»

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.

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.

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 place⁴⁰ 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 place⁴¹ 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.

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 (Sruti and Smriti). 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 Sruti, (that which was heard), in distinction from other literature, which was designated as Smriti, 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 Brâhmanas, 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 Brâhmanas 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 Brâhmanas in written form, and included them with the hymns under the names Veda and Sruti; 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 Sruti was nothing more than literature composed in an ancient language (for the Brâhmanas 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 Brâhmanas, 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 Sruti, 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.

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