agnostics and the mystics; for they, reviving a thesis once dear to the Pseudo-Dionysius and to Erigena, were proclaiming the impossibility of talking about God, of determining his qualities and attributes, or of forming any idea about him whatsoever thus clearing the way for the atheists, who declared triumphantly that there was no reason to believe in the existence of a being of whom nothing could be known and nothing could be said. Berkeley, on the contrary, felt the need of a positive God, a God of whom one could speak, a God who should be in particular a regulator of morals. So, while he rejected the anthropomorphic and metaphysical analogy which sees in God merely an enlargement of man, he turned to what he calls the proper analogy, the analogy, that is, which proceeds from the partial perfections of which there is some trace in man to the absolute perfections which must exist in God. Berkeley's God, then, is neither the wonder-working God of the crowd, nor the abstract God of the metaphysicians. He is the God of wisdom and of goodness, an ethical God, precisely suited to the purposes of the guardians of morality. And here begins the interweaving of morality and religion. We seek the good, but the good we seek is an eternal-not a transitory -good, and we know that the end established by a just and good God must in itself be good. Con

sequently, the best means of attaining eternal felicity is to discover the nature of the divine will as expressed in natural and in moral law, and to obey that will in all respects. We are to believe in God because only thus may we obtain the imperishable good. Religion is useful, therefore it must be true-yet after all the very basis of its utility is its truth.

In the Siris this somewhat narrow religious utilitarianism becomes broader. God is still the wise and good Ruler, and He is still the infinite Spirit who provides finite spirits with their ideas: but, thanks to the influence of Plato, He has become the cosmic principle, the creator of that universal ether which explains the life of the world better than any mechanistic theory. The Master of Morals has become a Demiurge; and beyond him the philosopher, liberated for the moment from the necessities of apologetics, believes that he can perceive the very essence of divinity, the ineffable One of the neo-Platonists.

But though Berkeley rises to great heights in the last pages of the Siris, he is less original there than elsewhere. His importance in the history of English religious thought consists primarily in his reconciliation between the divine will and the human desire for well-being. For Locke, the validity of moral law is derived from the omnipotence of God; for Paley, that validity lies purely

in the goodness and usefulness of its practical consequences. Berkeley, on the other hand, creates a God who is primarily ethical, and tends toward a system of morality which is primarily religious. He appeals to utility to induce men to believe in God; he appeals to divinity to compel them to goodness.

This conception may seem to have been dictated primarily by practical exigencies; but those who have followed the latest developments of Christian apologetics will realize that in this respect also Berkeley was a precursor of the moderns. The religious pragmatism of certain Anglo-Saxon thinkers is to be found in germ in the works of the Bishop of Cloyne; and Le Roy's recent and profound attempt to escape from the scholastic demonstrations of the existence of God and to form a new concept of divinity has led precisely to the identification of God with that instinct for moral progress which is immanent in the human soul.

VI

SPENCER

I

THE doctrine of individualism has had altogether too many devotees. Each of them has given it a new dress, motto, attitude, name, or seal, until the very mass of attributes has come to obscure the true nature of the doctrine. All men boast today of their individualism: conservative philosophers in search of theoretical weapons of defense; liberals and liberators who seek to bring free trade and competition under the banner of the struggle for existence; mild socialists, like Fournière, who see no incompatibility between the ideas of collectivism and individualism, and would enthrone Nietzsche among the prophets of socialism; and anarchists, dreamers or actors, who plunder Max Stirner by way of preparing themselves for the great destruction.

In a history of individualism you would find the soldiers of fortune of the Renaissance beside the disheveled philosophers of the Sturm und

Drang; abstract theorists like Fichte and poets of the imagination like Goethe; supporters of Prussian aristocracy like Hegel and revolutionary radicals like Ibsen; mystics like Carlyle and skeptics like Renan; dialecticians like Stirner and lyrists like Nietzsche. Hippolyte Taine, for all his talk of race and of tradition, is as strong for the individual as is the vagabond Gorky, dreaming in Russian solitudes fantastic dreams of gypsy anarchy. And the weighty evolutionary learning of Spencer joins with the elegant subtleties of Maurice Barrès to form part of the current conception of individualism.

Clearly, then, individualism cannot be a single and unchanging thing: too many spirits have exalted it. We must confess, as honest individualists, that there is no common and accepted type of individualism. And there could be perhaps no better proof of the profound and continual diversity of men than the fact that we give a single name and symbol to this manycolored flowering of forms and of ideals.

But perhaps the variety is not so great as it seems. Is it not possible that we are abusing terms when we class as individualistic certain theories which superficially proclaim the preëminence of the individual?

I can hardly repress this suspicion, for in