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248 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY De evolutie van he$ godsdienstig bewustzijn. By K. A. H. Hidding. (Utrecht-Antwerpen: Het Spectrum, 1965. Pp. 186. Aula 184) This study by Dr. Hidding, who holds the chair of the History of Religions and the Phenomenology of Religion at the University of Leyden, deals with the evolution of religious consciousness and implicitly with the evolution of basic structures of thought. The author aims at understanding the history of religion as an evolutive process of differentiation and liberation and at interpreting the religious varieties of mankind from an anthropological basis. His concern, consequently, is both historical and philosophical. Within the field of history, the author states two major changes or "mutations" (p. 51) of human consciousness, revealing themselves in characteristic religious expressions and showing different religious structures. A first break is that which takes place in the naturalisticontological structure prevailing, e.g., in Antiquity, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hinduism, and the commonly called primitive religions. This break gives rise to a historical-prophetical structure as it exists in Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and, basically, also Buddhism. The second break takes place in the ontological as well as the prophetical structure and gives rise to a new, "personalized" structure as it exists in Christianity. The ontological structure is essentially oriented toward Being manifesting itself in the cosmos. God is here identical to this Being, and the powers by virtue of which man exists are venerated. In the historical structure, the cosmos is deprived of its divine character and considered as a finite and temporal creation. God is here dissociated from Being and considered as Creator with absolute rights over his creation. A phenomenologieal analysis shows how the two structures are characterized by two different kinds of religious phenomena. In the first case, these are images as major manifestations of the divine Being, myth, cult, magic, mysticism , augury, which are meant to realize or at least to lay bare the divine reality on earth; death is here considered to a large extent as the origin of life. In the second case, on the contrary, death like any other phenomenon has been deprived of any divine character. The image makes place for the word which is conceived as a divine command or name, while book and law replace myth, rite, etc. The notion of linear time comes instead of the circular time concept of the first structure; while here space was more important than time, now time prevails upon space. Man, while considered ~o be part of being in the first structure, becomes in the second structure a subject to whom being is subordinated. The "Ground of Being" manifests itself in the first structure through the image, in the second through the word, in the third through the human person. In each religion a tension between subsequent structures continues to exist, as the author shows in a short analysis of the major religions. The religious structure corresponds with the anthropological structure, which is, incidentally but significantly, treated in the first part of the book. H. tries to relate the structural modification of the religious consciousness, as it appears in history, to a modification of the basic structure of man into two or three mental structures. The author conceives of man, like all reality, as being essentially a polarity. Man's polarity is that of body and mind, external appearance and consciousness; he is thereby a physical as well as spiritual entity and is characterized by basic tensions like those between reality and possibility, space and time, etc. However, though like all reality of a polar structure, man alone develops to a self-consciousness , being able to distinguish himself from the reality which is different from his, and to differentiate within this reality. In short, man constitutes a centre within himself, to which he relates reality. Though part of the given "immanent" world by his body, man is able to transcend this world by his self-conscious mind which allows for language, culture, and religion . Man's very structure of being, a unity of body and mind, allows for his possibilities of change. The forms which this change takes depend on which pole prevails, so as to make the notion of...

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