The method had many advantages, in displacing a low materialism, in stimulating loftiness of conception, and generating an historic study of every subject, by its view of the universe as a development; and also created a largeness of sympathy with differing views, by regarding all things as in transition, relative, true only in reference to their contradictory; and by considering all hypotheses to contain a germ of right, and to be the result of partial views of truth; but it will also be obvious, that the method had its evil effects. For, when applied to any department, it produced a disposition to seize the principle, the idea, of which the concrete is the embodiment; to descend from the type upon the individual. Its method was deductive and idealistic; giving being to abstractions, like the realism of the middle ages. It lost the fact in the principle; it personified the genus. Philosophy became a vast mythology. When applied to Christianity, for example, it did not attempt to find a philosophic ground for it psychologically in the human aspirations, as Schleiermacher had done,(805) but objectively in the dogma. It discovered the ideal truth in religion, and regarded Christianity and Christ as being the manifestation of the effort of the great Spirit of the universe to convert the idea into act; the symbol which expressed the speculative truth of the essential unity of the ideal and the real, of the divine and the human. Like the ancient Gnosticism, it believed in dogmatic Christianity, because it descended upon it from an _á priori_ principle, in which it found the explanation of it. Religion and philosophy were reconciled, because religion was made a phase of philosophy.