SOURCE: "The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and Fictional Religion," in The Thomist, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, October, 1969, pp. 737-54.

[In the following excerpt, Campbell explores the limitations of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms when the forms are applied to religion.]

Anyone familiar with the history of philosophy in this century will know that some of the most influential philosophers have been those who have considered that the right knowledge and use of language will solve world problems; in fact, some even believe language to be the only reality, which "creates" the world which we think we see as "given." Even the logical (sometimes called mathematical) positivists may be included in this group, if we consider mathematical symbols as a kind of language: it is their conviction that ordinary language, though very important, is somewhat ambiguous and in need of extended supplementation by the more exact symbols of mathematics. The ontological status of mathematics and the other sciences as well as language has been argued at great length, but an important group of philosophers of this century has decided that such an argument is futile, since the important thing for all such symbols is not their reference to an objective truth (if indeed such exists) but their function. In other words, do they enable us more efficiently and satisfactorily to live our lives? Perhaps the most learned philosopher in this century to emphasize the problem of linguistic and other symbols was Ernst Cassirer, a German refugee who spent the last four years of his life (after two years in England and six in Sweden) lecturing and writing in America until his death in 1945. Cassirer vigorously denounced the positivists, and, though he never mentioned Vaihinger, he would surely have denounced Vaihinger's "idealistic positivism" as it is expressed in the theory of fictions. This failure to mention Vaihinger is a little hard to understand, since both men were important modern professors and philosophers in Germany (their careers to some extent overlapping, though Vaihinger was much older) and since both wrote extensively on Kant. Their views, furthermore, as it shall be the purpose of this essay to demonstrate, were basically very similar, in spite of Cassirer's repeated denial that his system of idealism should be construed as mental fictions.

The discussion of Cassirer's philosophy in this essay will be based on three of his works: Language and Myth, An Essay on Man, and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the first two of these being popular and condensed versions of the last, which is his magnum opus in three volumes. His system is usually called a kind of modified philosophical idealism, but, as I shall demonstrate later, the modification is little more than an occasional brief and unemphatic reference to an objectivity that is soon forgotten in the all-embracing creative activity attributed to the human spirit and expressed through language. Perhaps it might be said that he always recognizes a certain amount of objective reality in the material world, but the noumenal world exists only as the creation (or "objectification") of the human spirit (always expressed through some form of language).

In the beginning one may wonder why he lists language as parallel with myth, art, and science, sometimes adding religion as a fifth "cultural form." It would seem, one might suppose, more logical to subordinate language as the instrument through which most aspects of the other "cultural forms" are expressed. It is soon clear, however, that he wishes to exalt language as a creative force equivalent, as an expression of the human spirit (in modern terms, of course), to the Greek Logos and the Christian Word. Indeed, in some respects, language is supreme among the forms, because myth (which includes religion) and science are types of language, as, from one point of view, is art. Language, furthermore, is the source of what we call reasoning, as Mrs. Susanne Langer, one of Cassirer's most ardent disciples and interpreters in America, explains: "It is the discursive character of language," says Mrs. Langer, interpreting Cassirer, "its inner tendency to grammatical development, which gives rise to logic in the strict sense, i.e., to the procedure we call 'reasoning.'" But in his definition (in Language and Myth, hereafter referred to as LM) of the symbolic forms Cassirer prefers to consider language as parallel with the others:

Myth, art, language, and science appear as symbols; not in the sense of mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own. In these realms the spirit exhibits itself in that inwardly determined dialectic by virtue of which alone there is any reality, any organized and definite Being at all. Thus the special symbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible for us. The question as to what reality is apart from these forms, and what are its independent attributes, becomes irrelevant here. (LM)

Cassirer is here emphasizing what he elsewhere (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, hereafter referred to as PSF) calls "the modern, 'subjective' trend in speculation" which does not worry about reality or truth apart from these forms, "each of which produces and posits a world of its own." In his Introduction to PSF Professor Hendel explains and approves of Cassirer's appeal to Kant as the authority for this kind of idealism. Cassirer, according to Hendel, used the authority of Kant for the idea that "whatever reality we know is precisely such as 'conforms to' our human ways of knowing" (Introduction, PSF) and that, "instead of human knowledge being shaped to reality, it is our human judgment which determines whatever is to have the character of reality for us" (Introduction) or, to put it another way, "the world is 'constituted' in accordance with the forms of man's intuition and understanding" (Introduction). Kant, of course, believed that "the principle of formal purposiveness" is an a priori principle necessary for the knowledge of nature, but it is still only "regulative" for the knowing, and not essentially "constitutive of the known, the appearances, or the phenomena." Cassirer went beyond this, believing, as does Hendel, that he is still faithful to the Kantian orientation and method when he obliterates the distinction between "regulative" and "constitutive" principles and makes all of them constitutive. There is, however, some ambiguity (not mentioned by Hendel) in Cassirer's use of the adjective "constitutive." The question is whether purposive form is "constitutive of" nature in the sense of existing in nature and being discovered by the human mind or whether the human mind (or spirit, for Cassirer a synonymous term) contributes the purposive form which does not exist independently in nature. As a good idealist Cassirer would like to escape from this difficulty by treating the elements of form and matter in what he calls a "functional" as distinguished from a "substantive" manner, and yet he cannot deny that in the realm of biology any organism reveals substantive form. Hendel can see no contradiction in Cassirer's system here or anything contradicting Kant in Cassirer's belief that "the character of 'whole-forming' or 'system-forming' pertains to the world itself of living nature" (Introduction). In other words, as Cassirer says elsewhere, "Developing organisms are, in substance, self-contained complexes of activities that are determining and productive of form" (Introduction, quoting Cassirer's Problem of Knowledge). But this kind of objective reality is hardly compatible with the prevailing emphasis on the creative activity of the human spirit, "by virtue of which alone there is any reality, any organized and definite Being at all." And in neither of these contradictory views is Cassirer being, as Hendel believes he is, "faithful to the Kantian orientation and method." Kant certainly did not believe that the human spirit created all the cultural forms, including religion and metaphysics in general. The phenomenal world may be "constituted" in accordance with the forms of man's intuition and understanding, but, in Kant's opinion, this was not true of the noumenal realm, which Kant said (again and again, even in the Critique of Pure Reason) man cannot cognize, but in the objective reality of which he had faith to believe. Nor did Kant believe in the other (contradictory) view that nature itself was the source of purposive form in organisms. Again, though this point could not be settled cognitively for what Kant called the "determinant judgment," certainly for the "reflective judgment" behind any organized being there must be a design with its "root origin" in a supreme Being: "It is absolutely impossible for us," says Kant, "to obtain any explanation at the hand of nature itself to account for any synthesis displaying finality," by which he means complexity of organization. The proximate source lies in what Kant calls the "supersensible substrate of nature," and the ultimate source in a transcendent God.

In explaining the development of this wonderful creative power which he attributes to the human spirit, Cassirer begins with the primitive belief in the "physico-magical power of the Word," meaning language, and traces the history of it until its "spiritual power" was finally recognized. This "spiritual power" is the ability to create all the cultural forms, including religion, concerning the nature of which the unenlightened man is in error, for with him, "as in the case of tools and instruments, all creativity is felt as being, and every product of subjectivity as so much substantiality" (LM). This naive interpretation, however, says Cassirer, is necessary before the correct one can develop: "The Word has to be conceived in the mythic mode, as a substantive being and power, before it can be comprehended as an ideal instrument… in the construction and development of spiritual reality" (LM). And when Cassirer refers to the Word he means language, the great creative or "spiritual" power of which he proclaims in no uncertain terms as a "form-creating power, which at the same time has to be really a form-breaking, form-destroying one." But Cassirer forgets that for orthodox theology the Word is still conceived as a substantial being, identified in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel and in later writings with Jesus Christ, not in the sense of attributing physico-magical power to language, but, as Webster's puts it, as "the actively expressed, creative, and revelatory thought and will of God, at once distinguished from and identified with him." For both Cassirer and for the believer in a transcendent God the physico-magical use of language is superseded gradually in the development of the human race by its use to refer to a higher spiritual reality, but for Cassirer this spiritual reality is the human mind or "spirit" and for the believer in a transcendent God this spiritual reality is that God.

Cassirer, like so many other moderns, has served the metaphysical part of the Great Chain of Being and believes that the truncated remainder will stand on its own. This truncation, though without reference to Cassirer, has been well explained by Professor William York Tindall in his book entitled The Literary Symbol. Most of us in the modern world, says Tindall,

do not use allegory, for on the whole, lacking certainty, we prefer indefinite analogies. Definite analogies, such as the allegory and metaphor of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were designed to present not abstractions alone but the nature of things. If we are to distinguish these limited instruments more plainly from the romantic symbol which we prefer, we must consider two worlds. The first, organic, lasted from the time of Pythagoras to the late seventeenth century. The second, which replaced it, is mechanical in one of its aspects and developmental in another. What we call the romantic movement is the endeavor to make the world organic again … to recover the upper half of the broken chain … The upper half of this restoration, however, acquired new meanings. Not only the place of spirit, it came to mean the imaginative, the subjective, the unconscious, or sensibility, separated by that famous dissociation from fact and reason, which continued to occupy the lower half of the chain.… The French symbolists… mark the second stage of the romantic movement. These poets used symbol not so much to unite worlds as to create them.… [Baudelaire called] "The visible universe … a kind of fodder that the imagination must digest and transform." In the second place, moving beyond existing analogies, the queenly faculty the imagination [or what Cassirer would call the human "spirit"] has power to create new ones, "la plus haute fiction," or what Stevens called a "supreme fiction." As seer Baudelaire belongs with the earlier transcendentalists and as artist with those who, finding aesthetic construction a substitute for cosmic reconstruction, made something like autonomous worlds.

Not all of this description, of course, would apply to Cassirer, who does not make much of the unconscious. However, he is trying to make the world organic again, trying to recover the upper half of the broken chain in the manner of the French symbolists, only by "using symbol not so much to unite worlds as to create them." But the French symbolists, and Wallace Stevens following them, were more aware than Cassirer of the limitation of their creation since they called it "la plus haute fiction" or a "supreme fiction," which, of course, takes us back where (philosophically) all of this belongs, to Vaihinger's As-If theory of fictions. Cassirer always evaded this point by talking about meaning rather than truth, or about function rather than substance. He did, however, in one memorable passage at the end of PSF and in another at the end of LM, praise the "aesthetically liberated life," in which "language becomes an avenue of artistic expression." The statement in PSF is more eloquent and more revealing:

In the image myth sees a fragment of substantial reality, a part of the material world itself, endowed with equal or higher powers than this world. From this first magical view religion strives toward a progressively purer spiritualization. And yet, again and again, it is carried back to a point at which the question of its truth and meaning content shifts into the question of the reality of its objects, at which it faces the problem of "existence" in all its harshness. It is only the aesthetic consciousness that leaves this problem truly behind it. Since from the outset it gives itself to pure "contemplation," developing the form of vision in contrast to all forms of action, the images fashioned in this frame of consciousness gain for the first time a truly immanent significance. They confess themselves to be illusion as opposed to the empirical reality of things; but this illusion has its own truth because it possesses its own law. In the return to this law there arises a new freedom of consciousness: the image no longer reacts upon the spirit as an independent material thing but becomes for the spirit a pure expression of its own creative power.

Cassirer does not realize that he has here given an excellent description of what (in spite of his great devotion to learning) is implied by his whole philosophy when he faces the unvarnished truth: like the French Symbolists and the English decadents of the "Yellow Nineties," he is really an aesthete (a kind of epicurean of the intellect, substituting philosophy for belles lettres) who rests in the supremacy of the aesthetic consciousness with its images which "confess themselves to be illusion as opposed to the empirical reality of things," and which thus avoid "the problem of 'existence' in all its harshness." We can see behind the mask here, and what we see is a world-weary thinker who, like Santayana, recognizes that he cannot change the "harshness" (and it is to be noted that he does not put "harshness" in quotation marks) of reality with all its disappointments and therefore leaves it for the realm of art, where, as Santayana says, "what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is at least not treacherous." Cassirer still refers to this kind of illusion as one that "becomes for the spirit a pure expression of its own creative power," but the term "creation" has far less force when, instead of transforming or transcending existence, it "confesses" itself to be only illusion and "leaves behind…the problem of 'existence' in all its harshness." What, then, becomes of Hendel's claim that for Cassirer, as for Goethe and Hegel, "the Ideal is Actual and the Actual is Ideal" (Introduction, PSF)?

Of course, even in the above passage on the aesthetic consciousness, Cassirer puts "existence" in quotation marks and thus leaves some room for his idealism, though the power of this idealism is definitely threatened when he "confesses" that it is only illusion. Most of the time, however, Cassirer does sound like Hegel in maintaining the identity of "idea" and "phenomenon." But Hendel, after contending for this similarity between Hegel and Cassirer in the passage quoted above, reverses himself and argues that the two are unlike in this respect. "Hegel," says Hendel, "advances from the engagement of spirit with life to the ultimate resolution of the dialectic where Spirit has 'absolute knowledge' of itself. But Cassirer keeps the twain ever twain, spirit and its other.… There is always the added phrase 'and reality,' the reality of the phenomenal world" (Introduction). In the unguarded "illusion" passages quoted and discussed above this is true, but very seldom is he this frank or (one might add) perceptive in analyzing the realistic implications of his philosophy. His whole philosophy, on the contrary, is based on the grandiose claims which he makes for the creation by the human spirit of the "cultural forms," including "the highest objective truth." Cassirer says:

The highest truth that is accessible to the spirit is ultimately the form of its own activity.… The illusion of an original division between the intelligible and the sensuous, between "idea" and "phenomenon," vanishes … each new "symbolic form"—not only the conceptual world of scientific cognition but also the intuitive world of art, myth, and language—constitutes, as Goethe said, a revelation sent outward from within, a "synthesis of world and spirit," which truly assures us that the two are originally one. (PSF)

This certainly does not seem as if Hendel is correct in saying that Cassirer "keeps the twain ever twain, spirit and its other." The "and reality," which Hendel quotes out of context to prove that Cassirer keeps spirit separate from the reality of the phenomenal world, is taken from this very paragraph arguing the oneness of world and spirit. Here is the sentence: "In the totality of its [the spirit's] own achievements, in the knowledge of the specific rule by which each of them is determined and in the consciousness of context which reunites all these special rules into one problem and one solution: in all this, the human spirit perceives itself and reality." It is clear here that "reality" is perceived in, and owes its existence to, the totality of the spirit's "own achievements."

Elsewhere [in Substance and Function] Cassirer elaborates on the advantage of this idealism:

The "thing" is thus no longer something unknown, lying before us as a bare material, but is an expression of the form and manner of conceiving. What metaphysics ascribes as a property to things in themselves now proves to be a necessary element in the process of objectification [the process, that is, by which the spirit "achieves" what he calls "reality"]. While in metaphysics the permanence and continuous existence of objects is spoken of as distinguishing them from the changeableness and discontinuity of sense perceptions, here identity and continuity appear as postulates, which serve as general lines of direction for the progressive unification of laws. They signify not so much the known properties of things, but rather the logical instrument, by which we know.

Reality, then, being an "achievement" of the human spirit, must also be spiritual, in Cassirer's sense of this word.…

Professor Fritz Kauffman has well expressed the existential inadequacy of Cassirer's system:

… Cassirer's pre-occupation with the boundless objectifying process almost blinds him to the essential limitations of human life. This applies, above all, to the life of the individual. Cassirer's main concern is, like Kant's, with the "intelligible substrate of humanity," not with human existence. The problems of individual birth and death—personal problems rather than merely creatural ones—are scarcely handled at all (death only in a negative way) … he recognized in man's knowledge of his finiteness the very dawn of the infinite.…

Cassirer did not and could not proceed the way Kierkegaard, Jaspers and, within their sphere, the great tragedians and also such novelists as Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka did: he could not "define" man with a view to the extreme situations (Grenzsituationen) in which man's true being, his greatness and weakness come out—most eloquently in the very moments of his growing silent and succumbing to destiny. (Personal "destiny" is not a category that fits into a dialectical schema of the objective mind.)

Professor Kauffman goes on to say that Cassirer's philosophy "neglects man's inability to express certain experiences in an adequate way as well as his unique capacity for going into hiding by the very means of communication." Indeed, Cassirer has essentially gone into hiding by overemphasizing the creative power of language in calling it "a form-creating power, which at the same time has to be really a form-breaking, form-destroying one." Here language, usually one of the "cultural forms" created by the human spirit, seems to usurp the place of its creator, but this is no doubt a kind of synecdoche, as is doubtless his idea in his derivation of reason from language, explained thus by Mrs. Langer: "It is the discursive character of language, its inner tendency to grammatical development, which gives rise to logic in the strict sense, i.e., to the procedure we call 'reasoning.'" For Cassirer, says Mrs. Langer approvingly (and she does not call it synecdoche), language "embodies not only self-contained, complex meanings, but a principle of concatenation whereby the complexes are unravelled and articulated."

But, even if we assume that the above exaltation of language is really, by synecdoche, to be construed as referring to the human spirit (of which language in Cassirer's system is in one way a part and in another a product), there is still in Cassirer's central argument a logical inadequacy quite as serious as the existential defect referred to by Professor Kauffman. Cassirer is attempting to supply an explanation of the origin of reason and knowledge that avoids the faulty logic of both materialism and traditional religious revelation. In Cassirer's opinion, it would be highly illogical to consider the human spirit as derived either from matter or from a spirit higher than itself. Apparently Cassirer would agree with Poe, who said, "I cannot imagine any being in or outside the universe superior to myself." But is there not even more difficulty in imagining the human spirit to be self-originating? Such an assumption would involve what M. F. Ashley Montagu, in explaining Cassirer's system (which he accepts), calls "a primordial directive of the spirit, an intrinsic way of forming knowledge." Presumably this "primordial directive" was contained in the primordial protoplasm that first evolved in the ocean slime, or if it was later added, how was it added—and by what or by whom? The only answer that Cassirer gives to this question is that "the spirit (Geist) forges the conditions necessary to itself." The human spirit, according to Cassirer, created, as part of its religious "cultural form," the myth of a transcendent God who created the world and all that dwell therein. Was the human spirit, then, self-creating? Of course, Cassirer would say that to consider such a question as this would be to consider the human spirit "substantively" rather than, as he prefers, "functionally." But is he not speaking "substantively" when he says that the human spirit "created" the culture forms? And can he really avoid the question of the origin of the human vessel in which this spirit is "contained," or in which it "functions"? Mrs. Langer has worked out her "new key" to philosophy in the spirit of her master, Cassirer, when she simply "rejects" such a question as this by saying, "If we have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions" (Philosophy in a New Key, hereafter referred to as PNK). But both she and Cassirer are really often giving old answers to old questions. When Mrs. Langer says that the answer to the question "How did the world become as it is?" is "It has not 'become' at all" (PNK), she is not, as she says she is, "repudiating the very framework" (PNK) of traditional logic. She is simply, by implication, giving to this very old question one very old answer, namely, that the world, in some form or other, has always existed. She does this more openly in another instance when she says, "If we ask how physical objects, chemically analyzable, can be conscious, how ideas can occur to them, we are talking ambiguously; for the conception of 'physical object' is a conception of chemical substance not biologically organized" (PNK). But presumably it would not be ambiguous to ask how a biological organism can be conscious or have ideas, nor would it be ambiguous to consider how the biological organism became organized. She is referring to the human organism and how it evolved out of "physical objects," as her next sentence shows: "What causes this tremendous organization of substances, is one of the things the tremendous organisms do not know; but with their organization, suffering and impulse and awareness arise" (PNK). Again she is giving another very old answer to another very old question when she says in the next sentence: "It is really no harder to imagine that a chemically active body wills, knows, thinks, and feels, than that an invisible, intangible, something does so, 'animates' the body without physical agency, and 'inhabits' without being in any place" (PNK). The old answer is that what Cassirer would call the human spirit, "creator" of all the "culture forms" (including, under the heading of myth, the account of its own origin), simply "arises" when the "organization of substances" becomes sufficiently "tremendous." In Mrs. Langer's and Cassirer's opinion, it is naive to imagine that a transcendent God creates the human spirit, as well as the world in which it functions, but it is sophisticated to assume that it simply, at the appropriate time in evolution,,, arises."

Nor is Cassirer's "synthesis" of all the various culture forms a new one. It is certainly as old as Protagoras's attempt to make "man the measure of all things." Protagoras indeed would not have objected to the essential meaning of the following statement by Cassirer:

The various products of culture—language, scientific knowledge, myth, art, religion—become parts of a single great problem-complex: they become multiple efforts, all directed toward the one goal of transforming the passive world of mere impressions, in which the spirit seems at first imprisoned, into a world that is pure expression of the human spirit. (PSF)

But such a synthesis is by the very nature of what would be its parts unattainable when traditional religion, at least, claims to be derived from a source which cannot be defined as "pure expression of the human spirit," but which transcends, and is the ultimate Creator of, the world and all (including the human spirit) that dwells therein. Cassirer admits that the different cultural forms are often in conflict with one another, but, in his opinion, philosophical thought can "find a standpoint situated above all these forms and yet not merely outside them" and can understand "particular aspects of cultured life and the concrete totality of its forms" (PSF). But Cassirer's position is not "above all these forms"; he is simply adopting as his own one aspect of one of these forms, the interpretation (in the romantic tradition) of religion as man-made. The nineteenth century "higher critic" Feuerbach expressed this view as follows: "We have reduced the supermundane, supernatural, and superhuman nature of God to the elements of human nature as its fundamental elements.… The beginning, middle, and end of Religion is Man." Many poets could be cited with the same view: for example, Swinburne, who said:

Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.…

There is no God, 0 son,
If thou be none.

Professor Wilbur M. Urban … wonders why Cassirer never discusses the language of metaphysics except in his brief refutation of Bergson's purely intuitive metaphysics which seeks to dispense with symbols.

… if it is true, as we are told by Cassirer, that science as symbolic form has no exclusive value, but is only one way of constructing reality, and has value only from the standpoint of science, then it would appear that a metaphysics, to be adequate, must be a metaphysics of art and religion also and must have a language and symbolic form which includes these forms also—in which case it could no longer be a symbolism of relations merely, but must be a symbolism of things also.

Of course, by "things" Professor Urban does not mean either "material" or "anthropomorphic" existence, but rather, for example, a transcendent Being superior to the human spirit, the latter being really Cassirer's God. Professor Urban answers his own question, though he is not sure—one wonders why—that his answer is correct. "It may be, after all," he says, "that it is merely a phenomenology and not a metaphysics with which Cassirer presents us." This is most certainly the answer. The ultimate for Cassirer is the human spirit, beyond which for him there is no metaphysical reality (Cf. PSF, quoted shortly above). Of course, it might be argued that Cassirer's belief in "spirit," even though only the human spirit, would take him out of the realm of phenomenology, "the science dealing with phenomena as distinct from the science of being," into that of metaphysics, but this objection would be quibbling, for it is clear enough that for Cassirer the problem of the human spirit is no more than a phenomenological one to be explained in such terms as "expression," "function," and "meaning." A good illustration of Cassirer's avoidance of the metaphysical is his chapter entitled "The Expressive Function and the Problem of Body and Soul" in PSF. The nexus between body and soul, says Cassirer, is not a causal one, but is one of those "basic forms of combination, which can only be understood if we resist the temptation to dissolve them into causal relations, if we leave them as they are and consider them as structures sui generis" (PSF). He thinks it unfortunate that this "phenomenological question" has too often been "transformed into an ontological question.… The history of metaphysics shows us clearly that every attempt to describe the body-soul relationship by transforming it into a relation of the conditioning and the conditioned, cause and effect, has culminated in inextricable difficulties" (PSF).

One may well wonder whether the combination of body and soul is really "understood" by considering it as a "structure sui generis" or as an "authentically original phenomenon," and one may also wonder whether Cassirer's whole system, at least in the realm of religion (which for him is actually no different from myth when it believes in the reality or truth of its object), does not find itself in a self-imposed dilemma. "The problem," says Cassirer, "is not the material content of mythology [and for him when religion believes in the reality or truth of its object it is synonymous with mythology], but the intensity with which it is experienced, with which it is believed—as only something endowed with objective reality can be believed." This intensity of belief in the reality of its object is what gives myth "the incomparable force it has demonstrated over and over again in the history of the human spirit." If this force depends on belief, then the force must be lost when the sophisticated approach of Cassirer's "religion" is substituted for the belief in the reality or truth of its object. This was the same dilemma in which Vaihinger found himself with his "law of ideational shifts" in the history of religion, the shift being from dogma to hypothesis to fiction. He says:

At first all religion consists of general dogmas.… Then doubt appears and the idea becomes an hypothesis. As doubt grows stronger, there are some who reject the idea entirely, while others maintain it either as a public or a private fiction. This last condition is typical of every religion so far known when it has reached a certain age. It can be seen to great advantage in Greek religion, where the Greek folk-deities were at first general dogmas … Subsequently they became fictions for the educated classes, who adhered tenaciously to the worship of God, or rather of the gods, although convinced that the ideas represented nothing real.

Vaihinger considered that the approach through a consideration of religion as fiction would bring mighty spiritual benefits, but at the same time he associated the "law of ideational shifts" with the "decline and break-up" of religion. Cassirer, of course, would deny that his "spiritual" approach would make of religion a fiction, but it is really no different. The dogma stage for him would be myth, which would become truly "spiritual" when it ceased to believe in the reality or truth of its object, and then what the spirit "created" in the metaphysical realm would really be a fiction. (A fiction, etymologically a variant of the past participle of facere, to make, is something "made.") This is no different from Cassirer's "created." Vaihinger starts with what he calls the human psyche, Cassirer with what he calls the human spirit. Vaihinger says that the psyche uses fictional hypotheses, including religion, to produce spiritual benefits; Cassirer says that all the culture forms, including religion, are "function" of the human spirit. The idea of God is a fiction of the human psyche, says, Vaihinger; the idea of God is a "creation" of the human spirit, says Cassirer. There is absolutely no difference. Both originate in the human mind and deny any kind of metaphysical reality superior to the human mind. To be sure, Cassirer constantly uses the word "spirit," as if to give his philosophy some lofty connotation, while Vaihinger, more frankly, calls himself basically a materialist and at times an "idealistic positivist." Urban argues that Cassirer is superior to the positivists because he insists upon "the autonomy of the speech notion" and the great gap between animal expressions and human speech. For Cassirer, says Urban, "Language is not limited to the 'practical' functions for which it was primarily made, but in its development has achieved a freedom which makes it, in the words of Von Humboldt, 'a vehicle for traversing the manifold and the highest and deepest of the entire world'." But Vaihinger claims that his fictions, too, accomplish all these wonders: "Thus, before our very eyes does a small psychical artifice not only develop into a mighty source of the whole theoretical explanation of the world—for all categories arise from it—but it also becomes the origin of all the idealistic belief and behaviour of mankind."

One can only conclude that neither of these learned philosophers has solved what Cassirer, in an unguarded moment calls, in reference to the combination of body and soul, "the mystery of efficacy" (PSF). If he had grasped the full import of this unguarded admission, he might have been led, by a logic at least as convincing as his, to the conclusion that there may be, existentially and metaphysically in very truth, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his "journey round the world, the globus intellectualis."