n [personality of God],
make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and
something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between
personality and something higher. Is it not just possible that there is a
mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will, as these
transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to
conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for
questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse.... The Ultimate Cause
cannot in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect
greater than can be conceived."

Thus we find in Lange a fuller and richer conception of the subject of
religion; but this conception is in want of one thing--without which it is
in want of everything--namely, of nothing less than of the objective
reality. Spencer's religiousness has a much more meagre and less varied
character: the acknowledgment and veneration of the indiscernible; but he
nevertheless gives us with this content and object a _real_ object, even an
object of veneration, in which the abundance of all reality is hidden, with
the only conception that the indiscernible {200} does not let us look into
its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by
the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively
perceptible.

It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers
would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion,
the one to a real, the other to a full content.

Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in
our _organization_. Now from our organization originate not only all modes
of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal
impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions,
impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value
which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and
ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about
himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual,
and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the
ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to
estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of
the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being