Art does not claim this, and therefore is not exposed to that danger of deception. Religion satisfies a need of the heart, to have a home of the spirit in the "thing _per se_"; but {196} since the "thing _per se_" is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive criticism as soon as it seeks its quintessence in something else--for instance, in certain doctrines of God, the human soul, creation of the world, etc. Herbert Spencer is in full accord with Lange in regard to the theory of an absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things; but he reaches this result in a somewhat different way, and from his premises infers a different modification of the nature of religion. In his "First Principles" he appears to be a true scholar of the English and Scotch schools of philosophy, from which he takes his start in conscious and express opposition to the German modes of speculation, and begins with an empiric comparison of all actual contrasts existing in the world and in human life. He follows the axiom that a particle of truth lies at the basis of every error, and that each contrast becomes a contrast only by the fact that the two poles of the contrast have something in common. Now, in comparing with one another all contrasts between religion and science, and all forms of religiousness and irreligiousness, from fetishism up to monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, all imaginable cosmogonies, he finds, as the last truth common to all, and therefore {197} alone absolutely certain, the _absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things_. On page 44 he says, that religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas, are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that there is a problem to be solved, that the existence of the world with all it contains is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation; and on page 45, that the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension, is that which remains unquestionable. And on page 46 he concludes: "If Religion and Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts--that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." The acknowledgment of this fact is religiousness; the contrary of it is irreligiousness and anthropomorphistic arrogance, even if it appears in the name of religiousness. "Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious" (p. 110). A comparison of the two philosophers is interesting.