One answer to the question before us is that morality is the basal fact--the bottom fact: if we regard the question historically, we shall find that morality came first and religion afterwards; and, even if that were not so, we should find that as a matter of logic and philosophy religion presupposes morality--religion may, for a time, be the lever that moves the world, but it would be powerless if it had not a fulcrum, and that fulcrum is morality. So long and so far as religion operates beneficially on the world, it does so simply because it supports and reënforces morality. But the time is not far distant, and may even now be come, when morality no longer requires any support from religion--and then religion becomes useless, nay! an encumbrance which must either fall off or be lopped off. If, therefore, morality can stand by itself, and all along has not merely stood by itself, but has really upheld religion, in what is morality rooted? The answer is that morality has its roots, not in the command that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul, but in human solidarity, in humanity regarded as a spiritual whole. To {213} this conclusion, it is said, the history of recent philosophy has steadily been moving. If the movement had taken place in only one school of philosophic thought, it might have been a movement running into a side-track. But it is the direction taken by schools so different in their presuppositions and their methods as that of Hegel and that of Comte; and it is the undesigned coincidence of their tendency, which at first could never have been surmised, that carries with it a conviction of its correctness. Human solidarity, humanity regarded as a spiritual whole, may be called, as Hegel calls it, self-conscious spirit; or you may call it, as Comte calls it, the Mind of Humanity--it is but the collective wisdom "of a common humanity with a common aim"; and, that being so, morality is rooted, not in the will and the love of a beneficent and omnipotent Providence, but in the self-realising spirit in man setting up its "common aim" at morality. The very conception of a beneficent and omnipotent God--having now done its work as an aid to morality--must now be put aside, because it stands in the way of our recognising what is the real spiritual whole, besides which there is none other spirit, viz. the self-realising spirit in man. That spirit is only realising; it is not yet {214} realised. It is in process of realisation; and the conception of it, as in process of realisation, enables it to be brought into harmony, or rather reveals its inner harmony, with the notion of evolution. There is nothing outside evolution, no being to whom evolution is presented as a spectacle or by whom, as a process, it is directed. "Being itself," as Höffding says (_Problems of Philosophy_, p. 136), "is to be conceived as in process of becoming, of evolution." The spirit in man, as we have just said,