a, related to both in language and origin--where the
Darwinian agitation has taken deepest hold of the mind; and, in restricting
our report to these countries, we are not likely to have omitted any view
essential to the consideration of the present question. It is true that in
the other countries named the Darwinian literature is also rich, and we are
well aware of the incompleteness of our report in that respect. But we
believe that we have not omitted any essential views and evidences, even if
the names of many of their advocates have not been mentioned.

It still remains to us to investigate independently the position of the
Darwinian theories, with their philosophic supplements, in reference to
religion and morality: a task for which we hope to have essentially
prepared the way through the preceding representations and investigations.

* * * * * {249}

BOOK II.

ANALYTICAL.

* * * * *

PRELIMINARY VIEW.

In treating the _religious_ question, we proceed from the supposition that
religion is concerned not only in this subjective truth of religious
impulse and sensation, but also in the objective truth and reality of its
faith, although it attains these in a different way from natural science. A
religion which should have the authorization of its existence only in
psychology, and which was not allowed to ask whether the object of its
faith also has objective reality, would stand on a weak basis, and its end
would only be a question of time; for an impulse which can only be
psychologically established, and to which no real objective necessity could
correspond, must sooner or later either be proven a psychological error or
be eliminated by progressing culture. On the other hand, if we find a
reconcilableness or an irreconcilableness of Darwin's views with the
objective substance of religion, the possible question as to its
reconcilableness or irreconcilableness with subjective religiousness on the
ground of those results wholly answers itself. In no way, not even in the
most indirect, can we approve that method of book-keeping by which
something can be true in regard to religion and false in regard to science,
or vice-versa; on the contrary, we see {250} in all attempts at healing in
such a way the rupture which at present exists in the minds of so many,
only a more emphatic avowal of that rupture.

In treating of the religious question as it affects