Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be “believers in God,” were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness was mirroring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words that imparted a colour-wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban country-side, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth-shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically.

Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense. The system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a de-souled world which had been the common characteristic of Gotama Buddha, Mahavira, and the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn had derived from Sankhya atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic itinerants and of Pyrrhonian skepsis. All are manifestations of the superiority of the megalopolitan intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all and despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges mysteries. Gothic men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more awe-inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But to-day even the Catholic has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a successful systematic exposition of the riddle of the universe. The miracle is regarded as a physical occurrence of a higher order, and an English bishop professes his belief in the possibility of electric power and the power of prayer both originating in one homogeneous nature-system.[538] The belief is belief in force and matter, even if the words used be “God” and “world,” “Providence” and “man.”

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it--this is what distinguishes our particular “return to Nature” from all others. That “Knowledge is Virtue” Confucius also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but “Knowledge is Power” is a phrase that possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization. “Return to nature” here means the elimination of all forces that stand between the practical intelligence and nature--everywhere else materialism has contented itself with establishing (by way of contemplation or logic, as the case may be) supposedly simple units whose causal play accounts for everything without any residue of secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of knowledge. But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast _working hypothesis_. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can _use_ it. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German progress-Philistines alike--and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.

Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth, by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward light-heartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely silly. This tendency, which is visible enough, even to us, in the times of Meng-tse (372-289) and in those of the first Buddhist brotherhoods, is present also (and with the same significance) in Hellenism, of which indeed it is a leading characteristic. About 312 poetical scholars of the Callimachus type in Alexandria invented the Serapis-cult and provided it with an elaborate legend. The Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different both from the emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply earnest Isis-religion of Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to public scandal and the closing of the cult-centres.[539] The Chaldean astrology was in those days a _fashion_,[540] very far removed from the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in the might of the hour. It was “relaxation,” a “let’s pretend.” And, over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake prophets who toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites to persuade the half-educated into a renewed interest in religion. Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of to-day the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment. Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

This next phase I call the _Second Religiousness_. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Cæsarism, which is the final _political_ constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti’s time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness--the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in China, India, and Islam--and that of Cæsarism consists in its unchained might of colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself--it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness--only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason--always associated with the type of the megalopolitan--to an equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness, cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it, cognises nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form--itself: namely, nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naïve belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome word-jugglery), and an equally naïve heart-need reverently responding to the myth with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still less chosen--they appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves concerned, we are as yet far distant from them.[541] But already the opinions of Comte and Spencer, the Materialism and the Monism and the Darwinism, which stirred the best minds of the nineteenth century to such passion, have become the world-view proper to country cousins.

The Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 250 B.C. From that time on, “knowledge” was no longer a continually tested and augmented stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of habit, but still able to convince, thanks to an old and well-tried methodology. In the time of Socrates there had been Rationalism as the religion of educated men, with, above it, the scholar-philosophy and, below it, the “superstition” of the masses. Now, philosophy developed towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism towards a tangible, religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and myth-belief and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had much to receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism of the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on allegorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table--one of the most beautiful relics of the Classical Second Religiousness[542]--dates from as early as Cleanthes (d. 232). In Sulla’s time there was an upper-class Stoicism that was religious through and through, and a popular syncretism which combined Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had become almost forgotten--corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha’s enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as the vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.

Contemporary with the “Positivist” Meng-tse (372-289) there suddenly began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism. It has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling--but a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears “simultaneously” in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines--the Stoa, Lao-tse, Buddha--and carries these through with peasant and springtime and exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the Classical Syncretism--which must not be confused with that of the later Magian Pseudomorphosis[543]--raked in motives from Orphism, from Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings as charms, and the Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (_c._ A.D. 200) the troops of the Sen had ceased to be “moral representations” and become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thunder-, and rain-gods came back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that there arose--doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian philosophy--the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea followed a similar line of development.[544]

The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were the outcome of world-weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were wholly unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning of the Indian “Imperial” period (250 B.C.) he himself had already become a seated god-figure; and the Nirvana-theories, comprehensible only to the learned, were giving place more and more to solid and tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salvation, which were probably borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien source--namely, Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka’s time there were eighteen Buddhist sects. The salvation-doctrine of Mahayana found its first great herald in the poet-scholar Asvagosha (_c._ 50 B.C.) and its fulfilment proper in Naganjuna (_c._ A.D. 150). But side by side with such teaching, the whole mass of proto-Indian mythology came back into circulation. The Vishnu- and Shiva-religions were already in 300 B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in syncretic form, so that the Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred to Vishnu. We have the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where Amen of Thebes formed the centre of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian world of the Abbassids, where the folk-religion, with its images of Purgatory, Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos-Mohammed, fairies, saints, and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the background.[545]

There are still in such times a few high intellects like Nero’s tutor Seneca and his antitype Psellus[546] the philosopher, royal tutor and politician of Byzantium’s Cæsarism-phase; like Marcus Aurelius the Stoic and Asoka the Buddhist, who were themselves the Cæsars;[547] like the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton), whose deeply significant experiment was treated as heresy and brought to naught by the powerful Amen-priesthood--a risk that Asoka, too, had, no doubt, to face from the Brahmins.

But Cæsarism itself, in the Chinese as in the Roman Empire, gave birth to an emperor-cult, and thereby concentrated Syncretism. It is an absurd notion that the veneration of the Chinese for the living emperor is a relic of ancient religion. During the whole course of the Chinese Culture there were no emperors at all. The rulers of the States were called Wang (that is, kings), and scarcely a century before the final victory of the Chinese Augustus Meng-tse wrote--in the vein of our nineteenth century--“The people is the most important element in the country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the crops, and least in importance comes the ruler.” The mythology of the pristine emperors was without doubt put together by Confucius and his contemporaries, its constitutional and social-ethical form was dictated by their rationalist aims, and from this myth the first Chinese Cæsar borrowed both title and cult-idea. The elevation of men to divinity is the full-cycle return to the springtime in which gods were converted into heroes--exactly like these very emperors and the figures of Homer--and it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions of this second degree. Confucius himself was deified in A.D. 57, with an official cult, and Buddha had been so long before. Al Ghazali (_c._ 1050), who helped to bring about the “Second Religiousness” of the Islamic world, is now, in the popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint and helper. In the philosophy-schools of the Classical there was a cult of Plato, and of Epicurus, and Alexander’s claim to descent from Heracles and Cæsar’s to descent from Venus lead directly to the cult of the _Divus_, in which immemorial Orphic imaginings and family religions crop up afresh, just as the cult of Hwang-ti contains traits of the most ancient mythology of China.

But with the coming of the emperor-cults there begins at once, in each of the two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed organizations, which, however named--sects, orders, Churches--are always stiff re-constructions of what had been living forms of the Springtime, and bear the same relation to these as “caste” bears to “status.”

There are signs of the tendency even in the Augustan reforms, with their artificial revival of long-dead city-cults, such as the rites of the Fratres Arvales, but it is only with the Hellenistic mystery-religions, or even with Mithraism,[548] that community or Church organization proper begins, and its development is broken off in the ensuing downfall of the Classical. The corresponding feature in Egypt is the theocratic state set up by the priest-kings of Thebes in the eleventh century. The Chinese analogue is the Tao churches of the Han period and especially that founded by Chang-lu, which gave rise to the fearful insurrection of the Yellow Turbans (recalling the religious provincial rebellions of the Roman Empire), which devastated whole regions and brought about the fall of the Han dynasty.[549] And the very counterpart of these ascetic Churches of Taoism, with their rigidity and wild mythology, is to be found in the late Byzantine monk-states such as Studion and the autonomous group of monasteries on Athos, founded in 1100, which are as suggestive of Buddhism as anything could well be.

In the end Second Religiousness issues in the _fellah-religions_. Here the opposition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished again, as completely as that between primitive and higher Culture. What this means, the conception of the fellah people, discussed in an earlier chapter,[550] tells us. Religion becomes entirely historyless; where formerly decades constituted an epoch, now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state. It matters nothing that “Chufucianism” appeared in China (1200) as a variant of the Confucian state-doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not it succeeded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism, long become a polytheistic religion of the people, went down before Neo-Brahmanism (whose great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor is it of importance to know the date at which the latter passed over into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. There always are and always will be a handful of superlatively intellectual, thoughtful, and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins in India, the Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodotus. But the fellah-religion itself is once more primitive through and through--the animal-cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state religion of China; the Islam of the present-day East. The religion of the Aztecs was very likely another case in point, for, as Cortez found it, it seems remote indeed from the intensely intellectualized religion of the Mayas.