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LECTURE IV.
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comparative method. I look forward to the same results with respect to philosophical inquiries into the nature of religion, its origin, and its development. I do not mean to say that all former speculations on these subjects will become useless. Plato's Cratylus, even the Hermes of Harris, and Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley have not become useless after the work done by Grimm and Bopp, by Humboldt and Bunsen. But I believe that philosophers who speculate on the origin of religion and on the psychological conditions of faith, will in future write more circumspectly, and with less of that dogmatic assurance which has hitherto distinguished so many speculations on the philosophy of religion, not excepting those of Schelling and Hegel. Before the rise of geology it was easy to speculate on the origin of the earth ; before the rise of glossology, any theories on the revealed, the mimetic, the interjectional, or the conventional origin of language might easily be held and defended. Not so now, when facts have filled the place that was formerly open to theories, and when those who have worked most carefully among the débris of the earth or the strata of languages are most reluctant to approach the great problem of the first beginnings.
So much in order to explain why in this introductory course I have confined myself within narrower limits than some of my hearers seem to have expected. And now, as I have but one hour left, I shall try to make the best use of it I can, by devoting it entirely to a point on which I have not yet touched, viz. on the right spirit in which ancient religions ought to be studied and interpreted.
L 2
