ich the name of "God" can be given. And this is as
true of the refined speculations of the pantheistic poetic religions, as
of the idea of God in simple piety. The interest of religion as against
the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the
cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated
question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given
prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity
and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its
superiority to nature.

It is, of course, impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of this
problem in a short study like this. The answer to this question would
include the whole range of mental science with all its parts and branches.
Mental science, from logic and epistemology up to and including the moral
and aesthetic sciences, proves by its very existence, and by the fact that
it cannot be reduced to terms of natural science, that spirit can neither
be derived from nor analysed into anything else. And it is only when we
have mastered all this that we can say how far and how strongly knowledge
and known realities corroborate religion and its great conclusions as to
spirit and spiritual existence, how they reinforce it and admit its
validity and freedom. Since this is so, all isolated and particular
endeavours in this direction can only be a prelude or introduction, and a
more or less arbitrary selection from the relevant material of facts and
ideas. And nothing more than this is aimed at in the following pages.

Naturalistic Attacks on the Autonomy of the Spiritual.

The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and
freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one--even from school
days--through books of the type of Buechner's "Kraft und Stoff," and
Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe," and other half or wholly
materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any
detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the
attack made by Plato on himself in the "Phaedo" through Simmias and Kebes.
It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious
through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have
been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and
every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from
them. It is plain that