An examination of the development of philosophy leads to conclusions of considerable import. Our present inquiry can be only an exceedingly rapid one; but anyone wishing to study the subject a little more fully will find it concisely treated in a book called Science and Faith, by Dr. Paul Topinard, late General Secretary of the Anthropological Society of Paris. From Chapter VIII. I cull the following:—

“Animals, in the presence of phenomena which they do not understand, retire confounded. Savage man does the same. But he, at least, hazards the attempt of an explanation by investing the objects or phenomena in question with life and sentiments similar to his own. Later this same savage, discovering or believing to discover in himself a double being, the one corporeal and the other spiritual, transfers the new notions regarding himself to objects without himself, to stones, plants, animals, or stars.... Religions, at first more or less elementary, with their founders and priests, do not appear until later.... For a long time the sorcerer—that is to say, a man less credulous than the rest, and adroit in the sense of knowing how to reap personal advantage from the beliefs of his fellows—stood alone in his class. Sorcerer and medicine man at once, he distributed amulets, drove out spirits from the bodies of the deceased, and caused the rains to fall.... The sacerdotal caste arose, at times recruiting itself from the outside and at times hereditary. More intelligent than the others, more disposed to reflect, the priests were naturally inclined to seek more satisfactory explanations from the phenomena of nature, to distinguish general causes from particular causes, to reduce the number of the spirits, to champion the most important of these, and even to symbolise many of them. The cult of heroes, of personages in the tribe who had rendered it valuable services, and of ancestors, was mingled with the preceding beliefs. Having to speak to simple people, for whom it was necessary to materialise things, they were obliged to recast their ideas and to expound them by the help of fables and myths, which soon essayed to explain in a tangible form the origin of things, the existing phenomena of nature, and often to guide the conduct of men. These were the first attempts of philosophy, already as utilitarian as they were mystical.”

“Religions consecrated a multitude of usages and ceremonies from which the sacerdotal class lived, and which greatly augmented its power; and they also exerted a strong political influence. Again, they led up to genuine moral codes, such as those of Brahma and Buddha in India, and Confucius in China.... The utilitarian idea appears to have dominated among the Phœnician and Canaanite peoples. It gave rise to the doctrine of a personal national God, who had created man and the people whom he had chosen and whose destinies he directed. He exacted from them blind and exclusive worship and obedience to the laws which he promulgated. In return he protected them, reserving his right of terrestrial punishment.... The Egyptians are related to the Hindus by their belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls from animal to animal.... The conception of a judgment after death passed through these peoples [the Egyptians] to the polytheism of Greece and Rome.... Greek philosophy rose audaciously to the loftiest and boldest conceptions, not conceptions crowning an intellectual edifice, but conceptions which dominate it in imaginary realms of space. Aristotle belongs apart. He is at once scientist and philosopher. He observes nature. He is the founder of natural history, of anthropology, of political science, and of political economy. According to Graef, he is also the founder of political philosophy, because he was the first to introduce positive facts into philosophy.... In the general run, they [the Greek philosophers] were dialecticians, sophists, and intellectual gymnasts only. But, such as they were, they founded free inquiry, disintegrated the national polytheistic beliefs, and prepared the way for the revolution which was on the verge of accomplishment.”

“In an unknown [?] corner of Judæa, on the banks of a lake, the glad tidings burst forth of a coming regeneration, and a voice was heard pleading the cause of the feeble, the humble, and the oppressed, and saying: ‘Love ye one another!’ The doctrine, at first local and inculcated by a small number of apostles, soon extended with St. Paul to the Gentiles, and thenceforward its progress was rapid [?]. Philosophy was not indifferent to it.... Christianity, in effect, instead of conquering the pagan world, was conquered by it, as Huxley has remarked.... During the Middle Ages science had disappeared from the West. Philosophy, hemmed in between metaphysics and theology, became scholasticism, which sought to reconcile Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle with the needs of orthodoxy, and split hairs over subtle essences and entities.... Then a concourse of circumstances occurred which, as fifteen centuries before, was to transform the Western world, although differently, and which inaugurated modern times, to wit: The return to the West of the knowledge that had taken refuge among the Arabs; the discovery of printing, which spread everywhere trustworthy texts; the discovery of the New World, which quadrupled the surface of the earth to be observed and studied; the awakening of science, with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Rondelet, Vesalius, Harvey; and, finally, the Reformation.”

“On the downfall of scholasticism the first care of philosophy was not the renouncing of what had been its essence, the search for the absolute by intuition [italics are mine] and reason, but the overhauling of its methods, which it sought to render more precise.... The subsequent divergencies were rooted less in the varying intellectual and logical make-up of each philosopher and in their method of applying their faculties than in their individual ways of feeling and conceiving. Philosophy in effect is simply a struggle between these elements.... Nevertheless, the conquests of science began to make themselves felt. There was now less insistence on God and more on the world, man, morals, and the conditions of social life. The over-hanging metaphysical cloud is still more or less heavy, but at spots it suffers the light to pass through. There are two streams: the one continues Descartes—in France with Pascal, Bossuet, Fénélon, and Malebranche, in Germany with Spinoza and Leibnitz; the other, in England, is represented by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke.... Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the inaugurators of a school which is characterised by its practical spirit, its observation and analysis of psychological facts, and by its disposition to refer the conduct of man to the advantages which he draws therefrom. It led to Adam Smith, who discovers the sanction of morality in the public approbation of what is right; to Bentham, who sees it in interest rationally understood; to Hume and the Scottish school; and finally to the existing school of John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer. Locke, on the other hand, is also the starting-point of the French school of the eighteenth century, which is characterised by a tendency at once anti-clerical, altruistic, and sentimental.”

“We shall say nothing of the philosophy of the nineteenth century of the German school, which represents speculative philosophy, and the English, which is physiological in bent, and of which we have the highest opinion. In France the most notable achievement is the attempt which was made by Auguste Comte. For Comte metaphysics must be entirely eliminated. The day of intuitions, à priori conceptions, entities, innate ideas, is past. If a problem cannot be solved, it is to be let alone. Psychology is only a branch of physiology, and the latter a division of biology. Morals rest not upon any imperative obligation, but upon the altruism which education developes. There are no rights besides those which society confers. Human knowledge has passed through three stages: one of faith or theology, one of conceptions or metaphysics, and one of observation or science. These, in turn, are the basal principles of science, and would be perfect if the positivist school were faithful to them. But in its own bosom even there are refractory spirits who suffer themselves unconsciously to be ruled by their sentiments rather than by observation, and who are constantly lapsing back into the old methods.... For me there is but one method of knowing what is, and of inducing therefrom what has been and what will be—and that is observation; all suggestions which transgress this method are void.”

From his examination of the evolution of philosophy Dr. Topinard draws, by way of résumé, the following conclusions:—

a. Philosophy, like religion, is the outcome of the belief in the supernatural held by man in his more or less primitive state.

b. The philosophic spirit and the spirit which created the arts and letters have as common characters their subjectivity, their need of imagining and of constructing, and their firm belief in the reality of their conceptions.

c. Philosophy is opposed to science. It answers to the impatient need of man to explain at once things which elude his comprehension.

d. At the present day philosophy still lives, but is losing its initial character and sees itself obliged more and more to reckon with science and practice.

e. We are obliged to admit that the group of human faculties which has given birth to philosophy has a less prolonged future than the group which has given rise to science.

f. Philosophy, although on the wane, and apparently in disaccord with the end of the nineteenth century, has nevertheless a beautiful domain to exploit.

These conclusions concerning the past and present of philosophy cannot be disseminated too widely. So many refuse point-blank to inquire into their belief, because they have been led to think that this will entail their wading through a mass of philosophical writings, and because they expect to find these either incomprehensible or unconvincing. Properly speaking, Christians should be the first to admit that apologists who attempt to defend their Faith by abstruse arguments are sadly inconsistent. For it is written, Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Let the humble truth-seeker take heart. Whatever the value or present tendency of philosophy may or may not be, the truth about the Christian religion can be ascertained without a knowledge of metaphysics.

Metaphysics does not, and never will, appeal to the average man. He agrees with the scoffer, who says: “When the man who is speaking no longer knows what he is talking about, and the man who is listening never knew what he was talking about, that is metaphysics!” The obscurity inherent in profound and abstract philosophy may well be objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. “Here, indeed,” exclaims Hume, in his essay on The Different Species of Philosophy, “lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness.” It is accurate and just reasoning like that of Hume, in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which, to quote his words again, “is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.”

It may be urged that the famous Scottish philosopher and historian has been unduly severe in his sceptical views concerning speculative philosophy, or that he would have been less severe upon the later metaphysical thinking which was affected by his criticisms. There still remains, in any case, one feature common to all philosophies: their difficulty. Philosophy is only studied, and, indeed, can only be thoroughly understood, by the few. Take, for example, that intellectual phenomenon, Hegelianism, the spirit and method of which have leavened the whole mass of philosophical thought in Germany. It is confessedly one of the most difficult of all philosophies. One has heard what Hegel himself is supposed to have said: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he couldn’t.” This difficulty of comprehension has an important bearing on the argument for Agnosticism. Granting that there is such a God as Hegel would have us accept, how can anyone suppose for a moment that a Deity wrapping Himself up in such obscurity would be unreasonable enough to expect all mankind to believe in Him? He must not only pardon, but approve of, Agnosticism. A God, whose existence can only be proved, if it can be proved at all, by the abstruse arguments of a Hegel, is not a God anxious to reveal Himself to His creatures.