A SURVEY OF HUMAN THOUGHT.*
THIS first instalment of Mr. Crozier's work on intellectual development, which may be regarded as a sequel to his Civilisation and Progress, is one of the most important and • History of Intatectuni Development on the Lines of Modern Evolution, By John Beattie Crozier. Vol. 1. London: Lo3nuians and Co. interesting of recent English speculative studies. We candidly confess that it ought to have been noticed in these pages before now ; but we gladly take the opportunity which a second edition furnishes of acknowledging the powerful impression made upon us by a work of an uncommon order which addresses itself to the profoundest problems which can engage the human mind. It is true that much of what Mr. Crozier says has also been said by others, especially by German thinkers. But we do not know elsewhere in the English tongue such a succinct and brilliant conspectus, in concentrated form and in non-technical language, of the intellectual and spiritual movement of the early world which culminated in the victory of Christianity. Nor do we know of any other work on an equal scale and of the same scope in which the movement of thought is so clearly treated from the point of view of development. This, indeed, is Mr. Crozier's primary intention,—to trace a process of evolution working in human thought. Many of the leading historians of philosophy have done this, it is true, but their object has rather been to show the line of purely abstract thinking, while Mr. Crozier always has in view the wider and more general development of the human spirit in its ethical and spiritual manifestations. He is more interested in the influence of religion and of thought on human society than in the purely philosophic abstractions of the individual mind, or the succession of ideas and influences in the schools. Mr. Crozier admits the value of the work already done in this field by such diverse thinkers as Hegel, Comte, Buckle, and Mr. Spencer, but he finds their work partial and ultimately unsatisfactory. Hegel, e.g., offers us a law of evolution so vague and general that "it enabled him to do little more than to throw ring-fences, as it were, around the various fields through which it was destined to pass." Comte's law of the "three stages" is accepted by Mr. Crozier as the "most practically useful working con- ception of the march of human progress, as a whole, which has yet appeared." But it does not determine "the curve of evolution of the special systems." Buckle was rather a scientific special pleader than a philosophic thinker ; and Mr. Spencer's theory of endless differentiation, though true as a cosmic theory, is barren and useless from the point of view of the study of the growth of the religious idea. Mr. Crozier differs also from the three last thinkers in believing that the coarse of intellectual development " sup- ports the belief in a stupendous and overarching super- naturalism, everywhere enfolding and pervading the world and its affairs, and giving scope and exercise to all that is properly religious in thought and feeling."
Mr. Crozier starts with a survey of the," Evolution of Greek Thought," in which he pictures Greek philosophy as a vessel on a vast stream, the one bank being represented by physical science, the other by religion. Philosophy he regards as being a reaction of men of culture against the absurdities of Polytheism ; but the question for it is whether it shall presume a material or a spiritual basis. The school of Democritus made for the scientific shore, reaching the ultimate conception of atoms, but without spiritual unifying energy. The school which culminated in Socrates, on the other hand, made for the shore of religion ; but both were lost, the one for lack of religion, the other for want of scientific proof. The immortal work of Plato was to build up out of the varied materials of Greek thought a grand temple of philosophy which stood for a thousand years ; and he did this by combining the Good, Ideas, Number, and Matter, out of which the world was made. The barque of philosophy was, under the genius of Plato, steadily approaching the religious shore by reason of his co- ordination ; but the dynamic quality, the principle of evolution, was wanting. This was furnished by Aristotle, who presumes a Supreme Intelligence, a reservoir of Motion, and Matter im- pregnated with Ideas or Form, thus suggesting the division of things into actual and potential, or giving the hint of the philosophic concept of " becoming." From Aristotle to Christianity we get the theory of Emanation, which arose in the Neo-Platonic school of Alexandria, by which, in a suc- cession of breathings forth proceeding ultimately from the Unspeakable One, the world is made. The Eternal pre- cipitates the Logos, from that comes the World-Spirit, from this the world of material existence. Such are the ideas reached when the Christian religion enters the sphere of human life.
Before, however, proceeding to consider the evolution of Christianity, Mr. Crozier turns aside to survey Hindoo thought, for the purpose of differentiating it and the kind of civilisation it produces from the philosophy both of Greece, Palestine, and the Christian world. The three chapters devoted to Hindoo thought are, in many respects, the ablest in the book, the analysis being concise, searching, and lucid within the limits of the space allotted. In a word, Hindoo thought, under each of its forms—spiritual or material, Brahminism, Buddhism, and theosophy—differs from Western thought in acknowledging no principle of intelligence in its Supreme Power. Christianity conceives both the Supreme Being and the personal soul as related in self-conscious intelligence. But Hindoo thought places these in the category of blank abstractions, " essences characterised by the absence of all thought, emotion, and self-consciousness." After a very brief account of the Vedanta, Sankbya, and Vaiseshika systems, none of which could relate itself to actual life, but each of which negates the principle of existence, the author shows what the moral reform was accomplished by Buddhism, which made negation logical by destroying both the individual and the World-Soul, and then turns to rend in pieces the very ably constructed system of theosophy, which, however, rests on a purely baseless hypothesis.
Having made this excursus into Orientalism, Mr. Crozier returns to the main stream of civilised tendency by first comparing the idee mere of Paganism with that of Christianity. While the relation of God and man in Christianity is con- ceived as that of father and child, in Paganism it is that of master and servant. Paganism peopled the world with countless deities, each of whom, so to speak, levied a contribution on his votaries. " They cared as little for the mere love of mortals, provided their dues came punctually in, as a Despot and his Court care for the mere love of the conquered inhabitants of a distant dependency, provided their tribute is punctually paid." Between man and man, as a result of this conception of deity, the relations were legal, the idea of love and pity rarely entering into these. Now, to secure the Christian relation some kind of reciprocal con- nection between deity and humanity is first needed, and to produce this the unity of God must be substituted for Polytheism. The gulf between Paganism and Christianity is thus bridged through Judaism. There is no possibility of the transition being effected from within ; but from an isolated nation which, from its tribal deity, had advanced to the idea of the unity of a universal God, the aid to this transition could be made. Such a nation was Israel. Here several chapters are devoted to the evolution of Jewish religious thought, the standpoint being that of the " higher criticism." The importance of evolving centres or nuclei in religion is insisted upon ; and it is found that these centres are, the Ideal of the World, the Moral Code, and the Conception of God. After the Exile the thoughts of the Jews, instead of being con- centrated on national rewards, were turned inward on them- selves. There was seen to be no compensation to the individual in the old Judaism ; one fate happened alike to just and unjust,—the theme of the Book of Job. From brooding on this problem were evolved the idea of human immortality, and the conception of the Messiah and his Kingdom. Such was the Jewish preparation for Christianity.
In treating of the evolution of Christianity Mr. Crozier bids us understand first the two methods at work in civilisa- tion,—the direct and indirect. He conceives God, or, to use other names, the World-Spirit or the Presiding Genius of the World, as working in ancient times indirectly, in our time by direct means. The object in view is always man's moral per- fection; but, whereas in our time we conceive consciously of a moral end and work directly for it, whether it be the abolition of slavery or the reform of the conditions of labour, in the ancient world the moral end was secured, so to speak, under the guise of a supernatural event, or series of events, apparently having a different object. We confess we find it difficult to follow Mr. Crozier here in totally subordinating Christian transcendental concepts to a kind of moral code which seems to us, as it seemed to Paul, to have been only intended by Christ as the rudiments of his Gospel ; and in conceiving of God as, in a manner, tricking men into a higher morality by appealing to their love of the supernatural. However, this is quite the line taken all through our author's treatment of Christianity, which he views as ideal morality
rather than ideal religion. To this it may be said that the moral teachers of Judaea, of Pagan Stoicism, of China, taught many, if not all, of the moral ideals contained in the Synoptic Gospels; while the Apostles seem to have preached " Jesus and the Resurrection," and it was when Paul, in his discourse at Athens, reached the Resurrection, that his hearers felt something absolutely distinctive in Christianity. Mr. Crozier conceives of the Kingdom of Heaven as an earthly commonwealth, and that to confound this with an inward condition of soul is a dream of the modern mind. A kingdom of absolute righteousness was, therefore, the ideal of Christianity according to our author ; and into this ideal Greek thought, which had run into the channel of religion, and the Jewish belief of Divine Unity blended.
Conditions of space forbid us from adequately stating Mr. Crozier's view as to the way in which orthodox historical Christianity was developed, how it was necessary to lay in- sistence on certain sides of its doctrine and to oppose the various heresies as to the nature of Christ which so soon crept into the Church, and how for this purpose it was essen- tial to form the Canon of the New Testament. The influences actuating the Church were (1) the rule of faith and the simple facts as a clue ; (2) tradition as determining the meaning of texts ; (3) the embodiment in the Canon of each and every stage of Christian doctrine—as the old Jewish Christianity of the Gospel of Matthew, the universalised Christianity of the Pauline writings, the Logos doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, the practical gospel of works by James and Peter—so that it was possible to find passages in support of the varied ideas of a comprehensive Christianity which could not be touched at any point by the decaying Pagan philosophy which, in the main, it was the object, conscious or unconscious, of the various heresies to intrude within the fold. The four great Councils of Nictea, Ephesus, Constantinople, and Chalcedon having defined and placed beyond attack the funda- mental doctrines of Christianity so as to assert the Divinity of Christ and yet maintain the Unity of God, the scheme of salvation which, according to our author, " carried in its bosom the precious freight of Christian Morality " which was the "great end the World-Spirit had at heart," was at length secure. An admirable study of "Pagan Morality" which, after imparting its best to Christianity, ran up into the cul-de- sac of the later and degenerate Neo-Platonism, closes an interesting and most suggestive volume.
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