Note (return) — Chapter II

Secondly, Cousin does not give due importance to the influence of revealed truth as given in the sacred Scriptures, and of the positive institutions of religion, as a divine economy, supernaturally originated in the world. He grants, indeed, that "a primitive revelation throws light upon the cradle of human civilization," and that "all antique traditions refer to an age in which man, at his departure from the hand of God, received from him immediately all lights, and all truths." 76 He also believes that "the Mosaic religion, by its developments, is mingled with the history of all the surrounding people of Egypt, of Assyria, of Persia, and of Greece and Rome." 77 Christianity, however, is regarded as "the summing and crown of the two great religious systems which reigned by turn in the East and in Greece"--the maturity of Ethnicism and Judaism; a development rather than a new creation. The explanation which he offers of the phenomena of inspiration opens the door to religious skepticism. Those who were termed seers, prophets, inspired teachers of ancient times, were simply men who resigned themselves wholly to their intellectual instincts, and thus gazed upon truth in its pure and perfect form. They did not reason, they did not reflect, they made no pretensions to philosophy they received truth spontaneously as it flowed in upon them from heaven. 78 This immediate reception of Divine light was nothing more than the natural play of spontaneous reason nothing more than what has existed to a greater or less degree in every man of great genius; nothing more than may now exist in any mind which resigns itself to its own unreflective apperceptions. Thus revelation, in its proper sense, loses all its peculiar value, and Christianity is robbed of its pre-eminent authority. The extremes of Mysticism and Rationalism here meet on the same ground, and Plotinus and Cousin are at one.