To be sure it is no easy matter to free ourselves from the habit of confounding identity and individuality. We must cultivate a much greater familiarity with the forms of thought, and the character of universals, than every-day life requires of us, before the distinction grows facile. The individual, not the species, exists; our own personality, our thinking faculty is what we are most certain of. On it rests the reality of everything, the Unknown as well. But the rejection of a mathematical unity does not at all depreciate the force of such an argument. Individuality regarded as mathematical unity rests on the deeper law of logical identity from which the validity of numbers rises; it is not the least diminished, but intensified, in the conception of a Supreme Intelligence, as the font of truth, though the confinements and limitations of the mathematical unit fall away, and all contrasts disappear. The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror at the self-created plantasm,[TN-9] like the peasant frightened by the spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought, still active, prevented him from conceiving any higher ideal than his better self. “Everywhere the same tendency was observed; the gods, always exaggerations of human power and passions, became more and more personifications of what was most admirable and lovable in human nature, till in Christianity there emerged the avowed ideal man.” What could it end in but anthropomorphism, or pantheism, or, rejecting both, a Religion of Humanity, with a background of an imbecile Unknowable? Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy the enlightened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism,which[TN-10] makes God in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is made in the image of God, belittles divinity to a creature of passions and caprices? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad “good in the making,” and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for religious longing?