“Christianity was originally based on the absolute idea of the divine first Principle, to which one portion of the Semitic race had attained by intellectual evolution, and by the acumen of the great men who brought this idea to perfection.  Either because of their clearer consciousness, or from their environment and the physical circumstances of the race, the Semitic people passed from the primitive ideas of mythology to the conception of the absolute and infinite Being, while other races still adhered to altogether fanciful and anthropomorphic ideas of this Being.  Our race had an Olympus, like the others, and throughout its history this Olympus was always assuming new forms, although a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas.  The Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or less unfruitful.

“The gradual transition from consciousness to conception, from the fact to the idea, from the idol to the law, from the symbol to the thought, from the finite to the infinite, is the characteristic and essential course taken by the human mind.  But, practically, this process is more gradual or more rapid, is retarded or advanced, attains its aim or stops short in its first rudiments, according to the race in which it occurs.  So it was that, as we have just said, the Chinese and Semitic races were the first to reach the final goal of this psychological progress; other peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, savages and partially civilized races, remained in the early stages of this dialectic scale.  Undoubtedly, in our own race, the early religious conceptions which constituted a simple worship of nature in various forms were constantly becoming of purer character, and they were not only exalted in their spiritual quality, but in the Greek and Roman religions they attained to something like scientific precision.  Yet even in these higher aspirations the race did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas.  We can plainly see how far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured the minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all the subsequent philosophers.  In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon freed themselves from their mental bonds in order to rise to the conception of the absolute Being, distinct from the world.  When this idea had been grasped by rude and popular intuition, men of the highest intellectual power perfected the still confused conception, and founded upon it science, civil and political institutions, and national customs.