und resenting the
tendency of ancient freethinkers to discredit and disestablish the Gods
of Olympus, who for the academics themselves, as for everybody else, are
a set of chimeras. Are we to infer that the current academic
philosophies, even where constructive, are no better bottomed than the
popular credences they seek to shelter? Kant's 'critical' philosophy was
by himself soon turned to the account of pulpit religion; Fichte ended
in restating the gospels in terms of his pantheistic personal equation;
Hegel soon attained to the championship of the Prussian State Church;
Lotze has reformulated Christianity to the end of giving it continuance
as a creed for the educated. Nietzsche said with substantial truth that
the vogue of Kant has been that of a philosopher who enabled theological
teachers to put a philosophic face upon a doctrine not otherwise
presentable to their students; and the vogue of Berkeley in England has
been of a similar kind.

In our own day the fortunes of new treatises in popular philosophy turn
upon their adaptability to orthodox sophistics. Our generation has seen
in succession (1) the absurd work of the late Professor Drummond on
'Natural Law in the Spiritual World' welcomed as turning the tables on
'science' by showing that its doctrines are fundamentally at one with
those of the faith; (2) the still more absurd work of Mr. Benjamin Kidd
on 'Social Evolution' hailed as demonstrating by ratiocination that the
reasonable course for society is not to reason; and (3) the incomparably
subtler books of Mr. Balfour acclaimed (whether or not read) as proving
that reason cannot bite on religious opinions, and that we could never
enjoy our music and our dinners as we do if we thought of ourselves
merely as evolved from animal forms, without somewhere inserting Deity
as the sanction and exemplar of our preferences, aesthetic or moral.[14]
Always the acclamation tells of a passion somehow to humiliate
'science,' to put reason in the wrong, to triumph over 'negation,' to
show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of
in any philosophy which does not make play with 'spirit,' worship, and
the supernatural.

The cure, however, is never found to be permanent; and latterly we see
the not very accommodating philosophy of M. Bergson grasped at as
yielding some kind of weapon wherewith to beat back the advance of the
ever-encroaching assailant. Sooth to say, neither the analyses nor the
syn