e
philosophical history, but rather as a suggestive and introductory
treatise on that grandest of all themes, the Progress of the Instinct of
God through Human History. His own definition of his subject is, that
it is a history of the "Consciousness of God in Mankind"; but, as he
unfolds his idea, it is evidently not always the consciousness, but the
unconscious instinct of God, whose progress he is describing.

The first part of the present volume--the Third Book--is occupied with a
brief, but exceedingly instructive investigation of the development of
this instinct in the Aryans of Persia and of India; and in this inquiry
the two prominent historical figures are Zoroaster and Buddha, or, as
our author might have named them, the Moses and the Luther of the
early Aryan religions,--the one the Lawgiver and the Founder of a pure
monotheism in the place of a slavish belief in elementary powers, and
the other the great Reformer of a corrupted faith in behalf of an
oppressed people.

The illustrations which Bunsen gives of these two wonderful expressions
of the instinct of God in the remote past, the religions of Zoroaster
and Buddha, are exceedingly fresh and original. They are contained
mostly in sacrificial and festal hymns and songs which have not hitherto
been much known, even to scholars.

As an introduction to and historical preparation for these two great
forms of belief, he describes also the instinct of Deity as it had
developed itself among the Turanians, the Chinese, and the Egyptians.

The period embraced in the Third Book is about 2500 years, from the
supposed epoch of Zoroaster (3000 B.C.) to that of Buddha (541 B.C.).

The Fourth Book treats of the instinct of God among the Greeks and
Romans, "from the singer of the Iliad (900 B.C.) down to the Baruch of
the Roman world, the prophet of the downfall of the Aryan Ante-Christian
civilization,--Tacitus." This God-consciousness is found first in
the Grecian feeling of the Commonwealth,--the idea of a common good
surpassing a personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which
assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the
grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,--the myths, for
instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next,
the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works
of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which
culminated in Socrates, Plato,