little of his own situation with respect to affairs internal or foreign. Under a government so weak and inefficient industries suffer, and official oppression is generally unrebuked. But, on the other hand, the Turkish emperor leaves to the towns and villages, and to the different sects in religion, a degree of freedom in self-government, in education, and in religion, which has raised the Turkish peasantry far above the Russian. According to the most reliable statistics that can be obtained of the two countries, the proportion of readers in Turkey is double that of Russia. Both countries after the Crimean war liberated their serfs. The Bulgarian serfs in Turkey have risen in civilization and intelligence with unexampled rapidity, while the liberated serfs of Russia remain in the most deplorable barbarism and misery. The one despotism allows freedom of action in certain things of priceless value to man; the other does not allow it.

Commerce and the arts would doubtless flourish under the severe and regular administration of Russia; freedom of thought, intelligence, and religion under Turkish rule. Under the former the missionary work is possible, and in point of fact is progressive; under the latter it is impossible. No missionary foot ever desecrates the "holy soil of Russia." While some scores of Moslems have been baptized in Turkey, and are living there unmolested, no convert from the Russian church has been allowed to profess any evangelic faith, nor is even a Mohammedan or pagan permitted to adopt any form of Christianity but the Russian, with all its picture and saint worship, its auricular confession, priestly absolution, and transubstantiation, with their logical train of

errors.

"The Eastern Question," then, involves not simply the predominance of an ambitious power over the civilized world, but the domination of a spiritual anti-christian despotism over all freedom of thought, over the press, education, and all religious development so far as its influence can reach. It involves the advent of a new papacy, with an army and navy fully competent to make its will obeyed in both

Christian and pagan lands. When it shall possess not only the Black Sea, but the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, and by consequence the Mediterranean, who shall then limit its power? Is this advent consistent with the interests of the civilized world?

ARTICLE IX.

DR. P. ASMUS ON INDO-GERMANIC NATURAL RELIGION.

BY PROF. M. BESSER, KLOSTER U. L. F., MAGDEburg.

WHO will not hail with joy a promise of light and order amid the chaos of special investigations on the field of Indo-Germanic religions? Order; for it is evident, from the very title, that the author means to consider the whole subject from one point of view. He uses the singular - "The IndoGermanic Religion," not "Religions." Light; for the additional title, "A Contribution to the Philosophy of Religion," shows that the author has a philosophical intention in this treatment of a part of the history of religion. How far this is an advantage would appear from a consideration of the principles involved in the philosophical parts of the book, especially of the Introduction. This latter is in two parts-one discussing the Theory of Apprehension, and one the Philosophy of Religion. But a consideration of this kind we must postpone till the second and final part of the work appears; for the author cannot give his decision on the questions on the philosophy of religion until he reaches that part of the work. For it is promised that the second part shall treat of the Absolute Deity, investigating he mode in which he appears as such in the different religions. Further, 't will treat of the spiritualization of the IndoGermanic natural religion; and finally, of the relation of this religion to Christianity.

Of the Introduction ve will say here only that the author seeks a basis for investigations in the philosophy of religion by a refutation of the philosophy and theology whic assert that God cannot be known. He holds firmly, with Hegel, that thught can penetrate the Absolute that the Absolute is comprehensible by us. Reviewer thinks there should be in the Introduction a discussion and definition of the conception "religion," and also that there should be established some standard by which the

1 P. Asmus, Dr., Privatdocen der Philosophie a. d. Universität zu Halle. 1 Band: Indogermanische Natureligion. Halle: Verlag von Pfeffer. gr. 8. S. 287. 1875.

development of the Indo-Germanic religion is to be estimated. In the course of the book the author seems to regard the Christian religion as the absolute standard of comparison; and yet he postpones to the second volume a discussion of the relation of the Indo-Germanic religion to Christianity. The work when complete is meant to exhibit the IndoGermanic religion as seen in its most important representatives. The author expects to point out in these a progress from natural religion to a spiritual religion. The volume before us treats of the first stage — the natural religion of the Indo-Germanic peoples. It contains four sections, in which the most important features of the Natural Religion are discussed as they appear among the chief of these peoples-the peoples of India, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Germanic peoples. The first section seeks to show that the religion of the Indo-Germans was neve: polytheistic, but henotheistic. The author places fetichism as the lovest religious stage. It makes a god of some single one of the many things about the soul which are known through the senses. (According to the most recent discussions of fetichism, especially that of Waitz and Gerland," Anthropology of Uncivilized Peoples," and that of Tylor, "The Beginnings of Civilization," we ought to give up regarding fetichism as ¿ separate religion. It is evidently only a secondary phenomenon in connection with a religion.) When the mind can make abstractions from the separate impressions on the senses, but does not yet rise to a unity of all things, regarding certain classes of things as absolutely separate from one another, and fixedly so, then the advance has been made from fetichism to polytheism. In the region of natural religion, henotheism is the next higher stage of development; but in the region of spiritual religion a polytheistic moral dualism stands higher than the henotheism of natural religion. (The author presupposes an absolute standard in this estimation of higher and lower stages of development which he makes. But he has not clearly defined any such standard).

Again, in the henotheism of natural religion the author makes three divisions of development a fetish henotheism, a polytheistic, and a pure henotheism. Henotheism does not require that on? Deity only, as opposed to many, be consciously placed at the head of all things; for we would call that monotheism. But it requires that, although there be an acknowledged plurality of divine forms, yet the divine unity lies in the background of the religious consciousness. This unity, then, reveals itself in a plurality of persons. (Henotheism, which had been thought of by Schelling, and for which, with its correlate kathenotheism, a name was coined by Max Müller, has with our author the significance of a principle affecting the whole system.) The form of henotheism is the only one under which natural religion can be properly classed. For natural religion knows no qualitative distinction between the divine and the earthly. Therefore polytheism is incongruous with it. Polytheism claims that

there are absolute distinctions in things, in spite of the actual absence of distinctions in its theory of the universe. The idea of God in the IndoGermanic religion is a childlike, unreflecting henotheism, because of two characteristics which it bears. First, the gods shade into one another, without any fixed lines of separation, and they can exchange places. Secondly, the divine and earthly are regarded as the same in essence. Our author proves the presence of these two marks in the Indo-Germanic religion by pointing out the parent-myths of India, of the Persians, the Greeks, and the Germanic peoples. He finds them to be divine deeds, and that the idea of acting persons, deities, grows out of these. The Indian parent-myth, which we must recognize to be the mythical basis among all Indo-Germanic peoples, starts from the idea of a thunder-storm as a battle for the rain which is held captive in the clouds. The chief god of the heavens - the storm-god-conquers the dark cloud-demon, and by this victory gains water and fire-rain and lightning, or, it may be, the sun, which had hitherto been hidden behind the clouds. Our author distinguishes this parent-myth, as the sexless myth of the skies, from the sexual, in which the rain- the precious moisture-taken captive by the cloud-demon, is personified as a female deity. The act in the myth is then not the mere release, but conjugal embrace, from which rain and lightning come as fruit. The third form is the myth of the earth, in which the god of the skies approaches the earth for conjugal embrace. He sends the rain as fructifying seed into the receptive bosom of the earth. The original Indo-Germanic myth is the sexless myth of the skies. In India and among the Persians are found only the beginnings of the other two forms of the myth. Among the Greeks the original form is modified almost entirely into the sexual sky-myth, and this is then changed into the myth of the earth. Among the Germanic peoples all forms are represented, but oftenest a combination of the sky-myth and the earth-myth. Since the individual divine personages have to be developed out of these elementary acts, we can see how easily the gods could shade into one another; and, on the other hand, we can see that the essence of the divine coincided exactly with the essence of the earthly. Thus the parent religious myths show the henotheistic character of the Indo-Germanic religion.

In conformity with this character, each deity is absolute deity, because it has a part in the one divine element. The fact that each is defined and separate does not take from them the character of absolute deity. Our author's second section seeks to show how the individual divine forms came into existence, although this absoluteness existed. The essential quality of each deity consists in the function with which he comes into appearance in the myth. Accordingly, the individual deities are really later things than the myth; since in their individuality they do not originally exist, but they come into existence by a separation from the VOL. XXXIV. No. 133.

22

myth as a whole. For example, the entire individuality of Indra has its ground ultimately in the one predicate of the Rain-getter, the killer of Vritra. The several divine personages which are developed in the IndoGermanic religion do not belong to the highest stage of henotheism, but to polytheistic henotheism. This is a different stage from the fetish henotheism, of which we have also a few traces. It does not, like the latter, identify a single sensuous object with the absolute deity, and yet it shuts God up into a sphere distinct from other spheres of actual existence, without reflecting that, by virtue of his being absolute, he really extends beyond that limited sphere.

If the absolute nature of God could become visible as an absolute appearance, then we would have the highest stage of natural henotheism; but we would then be out of the sphere of religious things, although still within the sphere of nature. For a man cannot have religious feeling towards a pure generality. That feeling demands a definite, concrete God. The plain contradiction here- viz. between absoluteness and single personality cannot be reconciled while we remain in the domain of natural religion. It is not even touched, much less solved, by advance of conception of the divine form of existence from that of one beneath the human to the human, which advance appears in polytheistic henotheism. No matter how exalted be the mode of appearance of any god in the natural religions, yet the god always sinks back again to the condition of some elementary function. And here we have proof that in this stage of religion a mere element is the contents of a deity. This way of viewing nature makes the single divine persons differ merely quantitatively in their relation to the genus, god. Personality as such, with its real value, is not recognized. It remains a mere fluid thing. The gods are unable to raise themselves really above the condition of merely representing elementary principles. While this faulty relation exists between the single divine persons and the absoluteness which these persons are supposed to represent, we can understand how some way will be sought to elevate the divine person to the level of absoluteness belonging to the divine class as a whole.

The third section of our book shows that the atttribute of immortality is the means used to this end in the Indo-Germanic religions. The nature-god was the expression of an element in nature. If, then, a god was to be regarded as a person, this personal individual could not be regarded as a mere copy or specimen, or a mere modification of the general type. Agni is "fire" in general. Considered as a person, he cannot represent merely one fire; but he must, as a single person, embody a representation of the whole class, fire. Here, therefore, it was necessary to have in the system a mode of representation which would relieve the difficulty. In order to take up its position on the high level of representation of the element contained in a whole class, the divine person