lopment of the religions acquired greater
and greater supernatural force, until by a natural process of
abstraction, I might say of distillation, from the many more or less
limited and mutually limiting gods, in the course of spiritual
development, at last the idea of the one all embracing god of the
monotheistic religions took its place in the minds of men.

The question of the relation of thinking to being, of the relation of
the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has
therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and
ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be
understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when
mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. The
question of the relation of thought to existence, a question which had
also played a great role in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the
question what is at the beginning spirit or nature, this question was in
spite of the church now cut down to this: "Has God made the world or is
the world from eternity?"

As this question was answered this way or that the philosophers were
divided into two great camps. The one party which placed the origin of
the spirit before that of nature, and therefore in the last instance
accepted creation, in some form or other--and this creation, is often
according to the philosophers, according to Hegel for example, still
more odd and impossible than in Christianity--made the camp of idealism.
The others, who recognized nature as the source, belong to the various
schools of materialism.

The two expressions signify something different from this. Idealism and
materialism, originally not used in any other sense, are not here
employed in any other sense. We shall see what confusion arises when one
tries to force another signification into them.

The question of the relationship of thinking and being has another
side; in what relation do our thoughts with regard to the world
surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thought in a position
to recognize the real world? Can we, in our ideas and notion of the real
world, produce a correct reflection of the reality? This question is
called in philosophical language the question of the identity of
thinking and being, and is affirmed by the great majority of
philosophers. According to Hegel, for example, its affirmation is
self-evident, for that which we know in the actual world is