has neither heart nor knowledge. The truth is, that though in calling attention to the existence of extreme poverty the most valuable quality may be an emotional appreciation of its horror-an appreciation such as that which dominates Mr. Whiteing's nature the main quality required in devising any general alleviation of it is a power of examining it without any passion whatever, and arriving at an estimate of it in terms not of its quality, but of its quantity. To neglect this side of the inquiry, as Mr. Whiteing neglects it, is not to misconceive the extent of the evil only, but also to misconceive the causes from which it really springs, and to obscure instead of indicating the means by which the evil may be alleviated. Mr. Whiteing and the class of emotional reformers represented by him may render the cause of progress good service with their hearts, but, if this is to be so, the counsel which their hearts offer must be rigorously controlled and modified by quite other people's heads.

ART. III.-Religion in Greek Literature. By LEWIS CAMPBELL, M.A., LL.D. London, New York, and Bombay: 1898.

PROFESSOR CAMPBELL's contribution to the history of Greek

religion appears at an opportune time. It appears at a moment when scholars do not fear to recognise that the Lesser Archæology, as Mr. Hogarth terms it in his preface to Authority and Archæology'-that is to say, the science which deals with the material remains of the human pastis not the whole of archæology; and that there is a Greater Archæology which takes for its domain all documents, whether literary or material. The science of religion during its comparatively brief existence has busied itself much with myth and ritual, the lesser matters, and has somewhat overlooked the existence of the religious spirit. It has added largely to our knowledge of the forms and circumstances of the religious life of the historic and pre-historic past, but of that life itself it has told us little. If that deficiency is to be remedied, if we are to understand what Greek myths and rites meant for the Greeks, it is to Greek literature that we must go, and it is the religious element in Greek literature- the subject of Professor Campbell's work-that we must consult.

From this point of view, it is obvious, the origins of Greek religion have little interest. Whether the gods of Greece were or were not originally personifications of sun or dawn, or storm, it is certain that for the average Greek of the classical period they were not natural phenomena personified, but independent, divine personalities; and if it could be proved that Hermes was originally a wind-god, as Roscher maintains, the fact would throw not the slightest light on the frame of mind in which the god was approached by a worshipper who did not know that Hermes had anything to do with the wind. Questions as to the origin of mythology are also irrelevant; myths in their original form, whatever that was, may have been very different from the guise in which they were presented to the Greek of the fifth century B.C., but it was in their fifth century form that they were known to him and exercised their influence on him personally and on the religious belief and life of the fifth century. Thus Professor Campbell resolutely, and rightly, turns his back upon the period of beggarly elements' and crude beginnings, which, as he says, explain little, and, we may

He prefers to

add, are much the same all the world over. address himself to the period of originality and bloom' in which the higher minds of Hellas dealt with the problems of religion after their own fashion. His object is to discover not what Greek religion evolved out of, but what it evolved or tended to evolve into; not its origins, but its tendencies. He sees in the history of Greek religion a process of evolution, but for that very reason he looks to find in it not merely attenuated survivals of savage myths and barbarous rites and nothing more, but signs of substantial growth, the gradual acquisition of new and higher spiritual truths.

Professor Campbell's attitude in this matter is one of many indications that the scientific conception of evolution, after long dominating the thought of the nineteenth century, is giving way to a more philosophic conception. The physical sciences find the whole explanation of any given event in the antecedent circumstances which produced it; and evolution, for those who approach it from the side of the physical sciences, reduces itself to a perpetually regressive search after causes, the causes of those causes, and their causes again. Thus the only and the whole explanation that can be given of anything consists in an accurate statement of the antecedent circumstances out of which it was evolved. Hence it has been a dictum, long unchallenged, that no explanation of anything can be accepted as satisfactory in the nineteenth century which does not trace the thing back to its origin. This conception of the method of evolution, as an instrument of scientific investigation, has been unhesitatingly accepted from the physical sciences by those students who take man, his words, and thoughts and works for their domain; and it is, accordingly, the origins of civilisation and society, morality and religion, which for a quarter of a century or more have almost exclusively been studied. But now, even before the work in this direction has been fully accomplished, doubts are beginning to be felt whether the only explanation which a study of origins can give is any explanation at all-indeed, whether the origins themselves can be properly understood except in the light of their subsequent evolution and of their highest developement. If we assume, as is generally assumed, that the course of human evolution has on the whole been one of developement, progress, and advance, though in many times and in many places there have been failures, decay, and decline, it is obviously of scientific importance to be able to discriminate those elements in the origins of any institution which are

the seeds of growth from those which contain the germs of decay. But it is only by their fruits that we can know them, it is only from a knowledge of the effect produced that we can learn the nature of the producing cause. There is no a priori method of telling by simply inspecting the origins of a thing what it may develope into; on the contrary, if we do not know the full extent of what we have to explain, if we do not know it in its highest developement, there is considerable danger that we may overlook some of the most important of the antecedent circumstances and may form an incomplete and one-sided view of the origins, or even be mistaken as to what the origins actually were. If we are to pick out from among the innumerable fantastic, incoherent beliefs, customs, and ideas of the savage, those which contain the seeds of religious progress, and, distinguishing them from the element which will hereafter hamper that progress, are to call them the origins of religion, we must have, to start with, some idea of what progress in religion is. It seems at first sight a truism to say that, before we can begin to inquire as to the cause of a thing, we must know what the thing is, and be able to distinguish it from other things. But this trivial truism, when pushed to its logical conclusions, yields an apparent paradox. When we compare the religion of civilised man with the beliefs of savages and barbarians, we feel no doubt that there has been improvement and advance in religion, and we should not have any insuperable difficulty in stating the nature of the progress that has been made. We can define the progress sufficiently well to justify us in proceeding to try to detect its causes, and to arrange the various forms of religion as higher and lower, according as they approximate to our conception of what is highest. But whence do we get this conception of what is highest? We cannot say that existing formswhether of religion, or society, or law, or civilisation-are highest simply because they are the latest in time. It is clear that some forms which have been later in time have been lower than those which preceded them; and not only do we classify some existing forms as lower than others, but no existing form is accepted, even by all its adherents, as thoroughly satisfactory-the most earnest of its adherents are most earnest in their endeavours to bring it somewhat nearer to their ideal of what it should be. It is by their ideal that they measure not only the advance which they hope to make, but the progress which has been made since the beginning of things. If we do not consider the existing

3

state of things-in society or religion as perfectly satisfactory, it is because we have an ideal which the existing state of things does not come up to; and consequently the standard by which we measure the progress that has been made in the course of human evolution is not approximation to things as they are at the end of the nineteenth century, but approximation to our ideal of what they ought to be.

It

Thus starting from the apparently harmless proposition that we cannot discover the causes of a thing if we do not know what the thing is whose causes we are to inquire into, we are landed eventually in idealism, and committed to the doctrine that we cannot tell what is real unless we first know the ideal. This is the philosophic conception of evolution which Professor Campbell prefers to the scientific. interprets the whole course of human evolution as a process of approximation, broken and interrupted at times and in places, but on the whole a continual approximation, to the ideal. It seeks the explanation of the process not in antecedent circumstances and causes producing effects mechanically, but in the ideals for which men have striven, if not always successfully, yet not always in vain. The evolution of religion accordingly consists in man's strivings after the supreme reality, which is the ideal; and Professor Campbell, after quoting the words of St. Paul, that they 'should seek the Lord if haply they might feel after Him and 'find Him,' goes on to say :

'In the wildest aberrations of the religious consciousness there is yet a groping after the supreme, a craving desire to realise what is more and mightier than man, and to find a support whereon his weakness may rely. There would be no progress if there were no shadows to be done away. Our aim should be to bring out from amidst their grosser surroundings those broken lights of higher things which come to us refracted through the thoughts of men.' (P. 2.)

The history of Greek religion, accordingly, is unintelligible except upon the assumption that in it also the moving principle was not mere mechanical causation, but a striving after the ideal, a struggling onwards to the goal:

:

'If in the earliest articulate utterance of the Hellenic spirit we discern a profound conviction that the Power which is supreme sends down inevitable redress of wrong, guards jealously the family bond, protects the suppliant and the stranger, and tempers even justice with deep human pity; if, as history advances, the conviction of the divinity of justice and of the nobleness of self-devotion clears and widens more and more; if a yearning after religious purity springs up unbidden, and suggests a brightening hope of future blessedness;