Another and later form of this vague idealism, that Max Müller and Von Hartmann, and also Strauss, have advocated, is presented in the theory of M. Renan concerning the “religious instinct,” or the “revelation of the ideal.” By religious instinct M. Renan understands something mysterious and mystical, a heavenly voice in one’s bosom, a sudden and almost sacred revelation. “The construction of a religion,” he cries, “is for humanity what the construction of a nest is for a bird. A mysterious instinct awakens in the heart of a being, who heretofore has lived totally unaware of the existence in himself of any such possibilities. The bird which has never itself laid an egg nor seen an egg laid, possesses a secret foreknowledge of the natural function which it is going to perform. It lends itself with a species of pious and devoted joy to an end which it does not understand. The birth of the religious idea in man is something quite analogous. Mankind is moving forward unsuspectingly in its allotted course, and suddenly a little period of silence comes upon it, a lapse of sensation, and it cries to itself: ‘O God, how strange is the destiny of man! Is it indeed true that I exist? What is the world? Am I the sun, and does its heat and light feed upon my heart?... O Father, I see thee beyond the clouds,’ and the noise of the outer world begins again, and the window, open out upon the infinite, closes once more, but, from that moment, a being to all appearance egoistic will perform inexplicable deeds and will experience a need to bow the knee and to adore.” This charming passage, set off by the unction and the ecstasy of Gerson and Fénelon, is a capital instance of the mental attitude of a number of people nowadays who are endeavouring to transmute a reverence for some tottering religion into a reverence for the religious sentiment. Unhappily, M. Renan’s account is purely mythological; primitive man never experienced anything of the kind. M. Renan completely confounds the ideas and sentiments which he, the historian of religion, the refined thinker, might have experienced himself, with those which primitive man was really subject to. This species of supreme doubt on the matter of our own existence and that of the world, this sentiment of the strangeness of our destiny, this communion of the soul with the totality of nature, this outbreak of refined sensibility, excited and tormented by modern life, possesses nothing in common with the sentiment of primitive religion, with its robust and crude faith reposing upon palpable fact and visible miracle. Mysticism, far from explaining the origin of religion, marks rather its period, its decomposition. A mystic is a person, who, feeling vaguely the insufficiency, the void, of a positive and finite religion, endeavours to compensate himself for the narrowness and poverty of established dogma by superabundance of sentiment. Mystics, substituting