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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
tific exposition in these; and yet we must confess to this conviction. We are sorry to have to say that Professor Max Müller's standpoint seems to us to have changed for the worse. He has indeed qualities that fit him in an exceptional degree to be an interpreter of ancient Hindu religion. He is a scholar, with a scholar's general love of truth and special love of his subject. He is a poet too, with the poet's penetrative insight, quick eye for all that is true and beautiful and good, with the poet's fine imaginative sympathy with the men and natures he would interpret, and his ability to represent their mind and meaning in his own and our speech. But behind the scholar and poet stands the thinker, and Professor Max Müller's philosophical standpoint is not what it once was. In his earlier works he was more or less in philosophy a disciple of Schelling, in his last he has fallen under the influence of Noiré. And the influence has, to our mind, been anything but happy. Schelling, especially in his later days, was dreamy, fanciful, even phantastic, but in his ideas of spirit, of reason, of the nature and genesis of religion he was, as seems to us, on the whole essentially right. But Noiré appears to us to represent one of the most reactionary and infertile schools of philosophy in the Germany of to-day. And we can only and deeply regret that a name so influential in connexion with the study which is now called "the science of religion" should have in any degree been open to the influence of such a system.
Each of the volumes now before us may be said to consist of two parts, a philosophic and a scientific, or a theoretical and historical. The philosophical and theoretical is concerned with the questions as to the origin and nature of religion; the scientific and historical with the interpretation of religion in its concrete forms, religious ideas and beliefs as expressed in the language, literature, customs and laws of given peoples. Yet these two parts are most intimately connected. A man always interprets facts of mind or spirit according to his theory of spirit. He studies religion and history by the light of his philosophy, and can see no more in them than his philosophy enables him to see. Hence the significance of Professor Max Müller's theoretical principles for his scientific criticism and historical presentation of religion. On this point we must say a word or two a propos of his Hibbert Lectures; the other work has been too long before the public to need any further notice here. The first lecture, on "the Perception of the Infinite," discusses the philosophical question. It is to us the least satisfactory in the
[JANUARY, 1880.
book. The question is much too large to be treated within so narrow compass, and we believe Professor Max Müller, had he been left to himself, would not have attempted to discuss it under conditions so little equal to its claims. But passing by the cri. tical parts,-which are but a series of brief, though searching, glances at two or three theories as to the nature of religion, with omission of all save the very slightest reference to the most rational and comprehensive theory of all-we come to our author's positive and constructive doctrine. He modifies the doctrine maintained in his earlier course of lectures, that religion is a mental faculty, which "independent of, nay, in spite of sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names and varying disguises." This as a piece of psychology was never very lucid. It is not very easy to understand how any mental faculty "that is independent of reason and can act in spite of" it can be a rational faculty. But as now modified it is still less satisfactory. "Religion, in its subjective sense of faith," is now made "simply a development of sensuous perception." And so he says, in answer to the question, how such a being as the primitive savage, with nothing but his five senses, ever comes to think or speak of anything not finite or infinite P"It is the senses which give him the first impression of infinite things, and supply him in the end with an intimation of the infinite. Everything of which his senses cannot perceive a limit, is to a primitive savage, or to any man in an early stage of intellectual activity, unlimited or infinite. Man sees, he sees to a certain point; and there his eyesight breaks down. But exactly where his eyesight breaks down, there presses upon him, whether he likes it or not, the perception of the unlimited or infinite." Now throughout this statement two entirely distinct notions are confounded, the Indefinite and the Infinite. These are not only distinct, but opposite. The Indefinite is simply the undefined, what is without perceived limits; but the Infinite is the without-bounds, is what is not simply undefined, but cannot be defined. The one includes, the other excludes, the ideas of relation and limitation. The senses suggest the Indefinite because they perceive the definite; but the reason conceives the Infinite. Then in what sense can "the senses" be said "to perceive." They are not rational things; to them as senses reason does not belong; and the perception of any rational thing in history, or any reason or reasonable being in nature, is due to man's quality as a rational, not to his nature as a simply sensuous, being. A conception of "infinite things" is possible; "an im
• Ibid p. 37.
1 This work has been translated into German, French, Italian, and Swedish.-ED.
Science of Religion, p. 17. Hibbert Lectures, pp. 26, 27.
