in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an
inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and
the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth
of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again
by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization
aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite of {201} the
superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom
that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting
contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like
Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground of
historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject
to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if
they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in
this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power
of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and
systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further
development.

In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of
reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion.
The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also
elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all
things is _higher_ than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it
really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the
spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the
highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the
highest being as an _impersonal_ is certainly something else and something
much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point
which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies
in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by
collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find
something common between the highest cause {202} of all things on one side
and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something
will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so
qualified that _it is able_ to bring into existence the world as a whole
and in detail. If such ideas are also