l idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes,
for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the
historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that
evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than
ready-made existence incapable of independent action.

This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as "world-soul" or
as "will" or as the "unconscious," is frequently, through pantheism and
the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion,
with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only
reaches its full development in ourselves. But that we _can_ worship, and
that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth
of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves
better than anything else that God is above all "World-will." It was more
than allegory when Plato in Timaeus set the "eternal father and creator of
the world" above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke
through when Fichte in his little book, "Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,"
set being before becoming, and God above the creatures struggling towards
self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm
reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence,
conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a
world "evolving itself" out of its potentiality, of a will to existence,
and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop
without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to
"actuality," to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the
beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed
within it the "tendencies," the "rudiments" which realise themselves in
evolution? Invariably "the actual is before the potential" and Being
before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by
an everlasting Being. God planting the world-flower that it might radiate
forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may
well symbolise for religion the relation between God and the world. And
thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the
world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This
frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of
things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined