realm of caprice, in which they imagined demons, spirits and the like.
These were antagonistic to men, as also hostile to God. Then, when with
the advance of reflexion these spirits, and equally their counterparts,
the good genii and angels, had all died, nature became the realm of iron
necessity, of regardless law, of all-destroying force, of cruel and
indifferent fate. From this men took refuge in the thought of a
compassionate God, though they could not withdraw themselves or those
whom they loved from the inexorable laws of nature. They could not see
that God always, or even often, intervened on their behalf. It cannot be
denied that these ideas prevail to some extent in the popular theology
at the present moment. Much of our popular religious language is an
inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed. The religious
intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions.
The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them.
Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether
different scheme of things. The philosophy, however, even of the
learned, would, in the main, have supported the views above described,
from the dawn of reflexion almost to our own time.

It was Kant who first began the resolution of this three-cornered
difficulty. When he pointed out that into the world, as we know it, an
element of spirit goes, that in it an element of the ideal inheres, he
began a movement which has issued in modern monism. He affirmed that
that element from my thought which enters into the world, as I know it,
may be so great that only just a point of matter and a prick of sense
remains. Fichte said: 'Why do we put it all in so perverse a way? Why
reduce the world of matter to just a point? Why is it not taken for what
it is, and yet understood to be all alive with God and we able to think
of it, because we are parts of the great thinker God?' Still Fichte had
busied himself almost wholly with consciousness. Schelling endeavoured