unconscious desire to perform an act of social solidarity, to meet our fellow-men elsewhere than on the field of material interests and distractions, to accept the rendezvous which they offer to us and we to them, that we may draw together and, more than that—­unite and unify’.  In another quarter we may witness a new feeling for humanity resulting from the throwing together of diverse racial elements in the melting-pot of the United States.  Zangwill’s play might be cited as a document of this larger faith, while Jane Addams has sympathetically described its genesis in her Newer Ideals of Peace.  Yet another expression of this instinctive faith may be discovered in the broad human interest of much of our modern literature and art.  For the standard of orthodoxy in this connexion requires not only that we respond to a grand conception of humanity as a whole, but that also in particulars we are loyal to the Terentian tag, ‘Homo sum:  humani nil a me alienum puto.’  The worthier side of modern realism has done full justice to this motto.

The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, and its influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find some modern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion.  In the sociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware of society and its claims constitutes religion itself.  A man is converted when his soul is ‘congregationalized’.  There is even a tendency to find the highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one’s unity with one’s fellows.  Such a feeling of endless sympathy and tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the whole.  For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet.  But a second characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the indiscriminate catholicism of ‘The Open Road’.  This characteristic may be defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality of progress.  We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to be achieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed.  Nietzsche says somewhere, ’if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lack humanity itself?’ We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in the pursuit of a common end.  The search for such a goal, and the effort to achieve it, lend worth to history and to present action.

This faith, often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western and modern.  We do not derive it even from Greece.  It comes to us through Christianity and modern science.  The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East.  Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side.  The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition.  Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not.  As Eucken