conception of nature and the herewith connected amphitheistic conception of God, ... we certainly lose the hypothesis of a personal Creator; but we gain in its place the undoubtedly more worthy and more perfect conception of a divine Spirit which penetrates and fills the universe." Furthermore, the faith in a personal Creator is called a low dualistic conception of God, which corresponds to a low animal stage of development of the human organism. The more highly developed man of the present, he says, is capable of and intended for an infinitely nobler and sublimer monistic idea of God, to which belongs the future, and through which we attain a more sublime conception of the unity of God and nature. According to his Anthropogeny, the belief that the hand of a Creator has arranged all things with wisdom and intelligence is an ancient story and an empty phrase. Sec. 3. _Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek, Albert Lange, Herbert Spencer._ A more friendly position in reference to religion is taken by those who hold, not directly negative, but only decidedly sceptical views of the existence of God; who reduce the relative unsearchableness of God, which every religious standpoint admits, to an absolute unknowability; and who find the nature of religion either in a pious acknowledgment of this unknowability, or in a poetical substitute for the knowledge of God, _i.e._, comprehending the unknowable in a figure. The most prominent {194} advocates of this position are, on the side of exact investigation, Wilhelm Bleek; and on that of philosophy, Albert Lange in Germany and Herbert Spencer in England. Since all three use the Darwinian theories for their systems, they also belong to the ranks of our historico-critical essay.