With the denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the soul, true _religion_ is abandoned. Of course, there is much said and written about religion in our days: the scientific literature about it has grown to tremendous proportions—to say nothing of newspapers, novels, and plays. One might welcome this as a proof that this world will never entirely satisfy the human heart. But it is also a sign that religion is no longer a secure possession, but has become a problem—that it has been lost. Even on the part of free-thought it is not denied that “only unhappy times will permit the existence of religious problems; and that this problem is the utterance of mental discord.” Yet they do not want to forego religion entirely, for they feel that irreligion is tantamount to degeneration. But what has become of religion? It has been degraded to a vague sentiment and longing, without religious truths and duties, a plaything for pastime. For _Schleiermacher_ religion is a feeling of simple dependence, though no one knows upon whom he is dependent: according to _Wundt_ religion consists in “man serving infinite purposes, together with his finite purposes, the ultimate fulfilment whereof remains hidden to his eye,” which probably means something, but I do not know what. _Haeckel_ calls his materialism the religion of the true, good, and beautiful; _Jodl_ even thinks, “As the realm of science is the real, and the realm of art the possible, so the realm of religion is the impossible.” Religion having been degraded to such a level, it is no longer astonishing that religion is attributed even to animals, and in the words of _E. von Hartmann_, “we cannot help attributing a religious character, as far as the animal is concerned, to the relation between the intelligent domestic animals and their masters.” What, finally, has become of the old standard of _morals_? A modern philosopher may answer the question. _Fouillée_ writes: “In our day, far more so than thirty years ago, morality itself, its reality, its necessity and usefulness, is in the balance.... I have read with much concern how my contemporaries are at fundamental variance in this respect, and how they contradict one another. I have tried to form an opinion of all these different opinions. Shall I say it? I have found in the province of morals a confusion of ideas and sentiments to an extent that it seemed impossible to me to illustrate thoroughly what might be termed contemporaneous sophistry” (Le Moralisme de Kant, etc.).