BK 123 Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L 1 m f5A^ This book is DUE on the last date stamped below AUG 4 1W7 OCT 2 4 1^^7 NOV 1 1 1927 OCT 1 ly^iij OCT 3 19« MOV 2 3 1928> pel ^ <^^^' JAN 19 1931 iUL 2 9 1937 4EP 23 I9<3r JAM 2 5 19(30 OCT 17 I9jr OCT 24 1935 Form L-9-15m-8,'26 ■' 'k STUDIES IN RELIGION BEING THE DESTINY OF MAN ; THE IDEA OF GOD; THROUGH NATURE TO GOD J LIFE EVERLASTING BY JOHN FISKE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 83927 COPYRIGHT 1884, 1885, AND 1 899 BY JOHN FISKB COPYRIGHT 1 90 1 BY ABBY M. FISKE, EXECUTRIX COPYRIGHT 1902 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED \ CONTENTS THE DESTINY OF MAN VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF HIS ORIGIN Preface ....•••! I. Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the Co- pernican Theory .... 3 II. Man's Place in Nature, as affected by Darwinism 9 IIL On the Earth there will never be a Higher Crea- ture than Man . . . . .15 IV. The Origin of Infancy . . . . 22 V. The Dawning of Consciousness . . .27 VI. Lengthening of Infancy, and Concomitant In- crease of Brain-Surface ... 34 VII. Change in the Direction of the Working of Natural Selection . . . . •39 VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life 42 IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality . 45 X. Improvableness of Man ... * 49 XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men . . 53 XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilization . . . . . .56 XIII. Methods of Political Development, and Elimina- tion of Warfare .... 59 XIV. End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance 67 XV. The Message of Christianity . . •73 XVI. The Question as to a Future life . . 76 Vll CONTENTS THE IDEA OF GOD AS AFFECTED BY MODERN KNOWLEDGE Preface ....... 89 I. Difficulty of expressing the Idea of God so that it can be readily understood . . . 1 1 1 II. The Rapid Growth of Modern Knowledge . 119 III. Sources of the Theistic Idea . . . 131 IV. Development of Monotheism . . . 138 , V. The Idea of God as Immanent in the World 1451/ VI. The Idea of God as remote from the World I 50 ^ VII. Conflict between the two Ideas, commonly mis- understood as a Conflict between Religion and Science . . . . . l58^ VIII. Anthropomorphic Conceptions of God . .169 IX. The Argument from Design . . . 175 X. Simile of the Watch replaced by Simile of the Flower . . . . . .182 XI. The Craving for a Final Cause . . 186 XII. Symbolic Concepdons . . . .191 XIII. The Eternal Source of Phenomena . . 194 XIV. The Power that makes for Righteousness . 204 THROUGH NATURE TO GOD Preface . . . . . , 215 The Mystery of Evil I. The Serpent's Promise to the Woman . , 225 II. The Pilgrim's Burden . . . . 229 III. Manichaeism and Calvinism . , . 234 , IV. The Dramatic Unity of Nature . . 240 V. What Conscious Life is made of . . . 244 VI. Without the Element of Antagonism there could be no Consciousness, and therefore no World 249 VII. A Word of Caudon . . . . 253 VIII. The Hermit and the Angel . . .256 Vlll CONTENTS IX. Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood 260 X. The Relativity of Evil . . . . ' 265 The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice I. The Summer Field, and what it tells us . 271 II. Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 276 III. Caliban's Philosophy . . . . 281 IV. Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no Rela- tion to Moral Ends? . . . .283 V. First Stages in the Genesis of Man . . 287 VI. The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man . 29 1 VII. The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened Infancy 293 VIII. Some of its Effects . . . , 299 IX. Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments . .304 X. The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake of Moral Ends ..... 309 XI. Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism . 315 XII. The Omnipresent Ethical Trend . . 322 The Everlasting Reality of Religion I. ** Deo erexit Voltaire " .... 327 ll. The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God 337 III. Weakness of Materialism . . . 341 IV. Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Human God 349 V. Religion's Second Postulate : the Undying Hu- man Soul . . . . . 353 VI. Religion's Third Postulate : the Ethical Signifi- cance of the Unseen World . . .356 VII. Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an Eternal Reality ? . . , . 358 VIII. The Fundamental Aspect of Life . . .360 IX. How the Evolution of Senses expands the World 364 X. Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting Reality of Religion , . , , 367 IX CONTENTS LIFE EVERLASTING Life Everlasting , . . • . • "ill Notes . . . . . . . * 417 Index . . . • . . . .421 THE DESTINY OF MAN VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF HIS ORIGIN TO MY CHILDREN, MAUD. HAROLD, CLARENCE, RALPH, ETHEL, AND HERBERT, IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED H PREFACE AVING been invited to give an address before the Concord School of Philoso- phy this summer, upon some subject relating to the question of immortality there under discussion, it seemed a proper occasion for putting together the following thoughts on the origin of Man and his place in the universe. In dealing with the unknown, it is well to take one's start a long way within the limits of the known. The question of a future life is gener- ally regarded as lying outside the range of legit- imate scientific discussion. Yet while fully ad- mitting this, one does not necessarily admit that the subject is one with regard to which we are forever debarred from entertaining an opin- ion. Now our opinions on such transcendental questions must necessarily be affected by the total mass of our opinions on the questions which lie within the scope of scientific inquiry ; and from this point of view it becomes of sur- passing interest to trace the career of Humanity within that segment of the universe which is accessible to us. The teachings of the doctrine PREFACE TO THE DESTINY OF MAN of evolution as to the origin and destiny of Man have, moreover, a very great speculative and practical value of their own, quite apart from their bearings upon any ultimate questions. The body of this essay is accordingly devoted to setting forth these teachings in what I con- ceive to be their true light ; while their tran- scendental implications are reserved for the sequel. As the essay contains an epitome of my own original contributions to the doctrine of evo- lution, I have added at the end a short list of references to other works of mine, where the points here briefly mentioned are more fully argued and illustrated.^ The views regarding the progress of human society, and the elimi- nation of warfare, are set forth at greater length in a little book now in the press, and soon to appear, entitled " American Political Ideas." Petersham, September 6, 1884. ^ [In the present edition these references are at the foot of the page. J THE DESTINY OF MAN I MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, AS AF- FECTED BY THE COPERNICAN THEORY WHEN we study the Divine Comedy of Dante — that wonderful book wherein all the knowledge and spec- ulation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse — we are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of reasoning about the facts of nature which seem strange to us to-day, but from the influ- ence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall be, wholly freed. A cosmology gro- tesque enough in the light of later knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the phy- sical theories of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of hu- 3 STUDIES IN RELIGION man culture which found In him its clearest and sweetest voice, this earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe wherein all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land, — all for the blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among God's creatures, Man. Upon some such con- ception as this, indeed, all theology would seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone Humanity, regard it as a mere local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes, and you arrive at a doctrine which, under whatever spe- cious name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphy- sical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness ; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly con- demned by modern science.^ But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part iii. ch. iv, 4 THE DESTINY OF MAN recognition of it as philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we reject the cor- puscular theory of light or Sir G. C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hiero- glyphics. We are wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing. Our moral sense revolts against it no less than our intelligence ; and this is because, on its prac- tical side. Atheism would remove Humanity from its peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its lot with the grass that withers and the beasts that perish ; and thus the rich and varied life of the universe, in all the ages of its wondrous duration, becomes deprived of any such element of purpose as can make it intelligible to us or appeal to our moral sym- pathies and religious aspirations. And yet the first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable truths of mod- ern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended, has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate and trivial position ; and it is because of this mistaken view of their import that the Church has so often and so bitterly opposed the teaching of such truths. With the advent of the Copernican astronomy the funnel- shaped Inferno, the steep mountain of Purga- 5 STUDIES IN RELIGION tory crowned with its terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres of Heaven wherein beatified saints held weird and subtle converse, all went their way to the limbo prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, whither Hades and Valhalla had gone before them. In our day it is hard to realize the startling effect of the discovery that Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flam- ing suns that make up our galaxy. To the contemporaries of Copernicus the new theory seemed to strike at the very foundations of Christian theology. In a universe where so much had been made without discernible re- ference to Man, what became of that elaborate scheme of salvation which seemed to rest upon the assumption that the career of Humanity was the sole object of God's creative forethought and fostering care ? When we bear this in mind, we see how natural and inevitable it was that the Church should persecute such men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same time it is in- structive to observe that, while the Copernican astronomy has become firmly established in spite of priestly opposition, the foundations of Christian theology have not been shaken there- by. It is not that the question which once so THE DESTINY OF MAN sorely puzzled men has ever been settled, but that it has been outgrown. The speculative necessity for man's occupying the largest and most central spot in the universe is no longer felt. It is recognized as a primitive and childish notion. With our larger knowledge we see that these vast and fiery suns are after all but the Titan-like servants of the little planets which they bear with them in their flight through the abysses of space. Out from the awful gaseous turmoil of the central mass dart those ceaseless waves of gentle radiance that, when caught upon the surface of whirling worlds like ours, bring forth the endlessly varied forms and the end- lessly complex movements that make up what we can see of life. And as when God revealed himself to his ancient prophet He came not in the earthquake or the tempest, but in a voice that was still and small, so that divine spark the Soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of the sixteenth century may well smile at STUDIES IN RELIGION the quaint conceit that man cannot be the ob- ject of God's care unless he occupies an im- movable position in the centre of the stellar universe. II MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, AS AFFECTED BY DARWINISM WHEN the Copernican astronomy was finally established through the dis- coveries of Kepler and Newton, it might well have been pronounced the greatest scientific achievement of the human mind ; but it was still more than that. It was the greatest revolution that had ever been effected in Man's views of his relations to the universe in which he lives, and of which he is — at least during the present life — a part. During the nineteenth century, however, a still greater revolution has been effected. Not only has Lyell enlarged our mental horizon in time as much as Newton en- larged it in space, but it appears that through- out these vast stretches of time and space with which we have been made acquainted there are sundry well-marked changes going on. Certain definite paths of development are being pur- sued ; and around us on every side we behold worlds, organisms, and societies in divers stages of progress or decline. Still more, as we exam- ine the records of past life upon our globe, and 9 STUDIES IN RELIGION study the mutual relations of the living things that still remain, it appears that the higher forms of life — including Man himself — are the modified descendants of lower forms. Zoologi- cally speaking, Man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do ; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes — different genera of the cat family — are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyaenas, bears, and seals ; so the various genera of platyr- rhine and catarrhine apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels. Such is the conclusion to which the scientific world has come within a quarter of a century from the publi- cation of Mr. Darwin's " Origin of Species ; " and there is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and the concentric lO THE DESTINY OF MAN spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men. It is not strange that this theory of man's origin, which we associate mainly with the name of Mr. Darwin, should be to many people very unwelcome. It is fast bringing about a still greater revolution in thought than that which was heralded by Copernicus ; and it naturally takes some time for the various portions of one's theory of things to become adjusted, one after another, to so vast and sweeping a change. From many quarters the cry goes up, — If this be true, then Man is at length cast down from his high position in the world. " I will not be called a mammal, or the son of a mammal ! " once exclaimed an acquaintance of mine who perhaps had been brought up by hand. Such expressions of feeling are crude, but the feeling is not unjustifiable. It is urged that if man is physically akin to a baboon, as pigs are akin to horses, and cows to deer, then Humanity can in nowise be regarded as occupying a peculiar place in the universe ; it becomes a mere inci- dent in an endless series of changes, and how can we say that the same process of evolution that has produced mankind may not by and by produce something far more perfect ? There was a time when huge birdlike reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been " sealed II STUDIES IN RELIGION within the iron hills " there came successive dy- nasties of mammals ; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mas- todon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever? In such case, why should we regard Man as in any higher sense the object of Divine care than a pig ? Still stronger does the case appear when we remem- ber that those countless adaptations of means to ends in nature, which since the time of Vol- taire and Paley we have been accustomed to cite as evidences of creative design, have received at / the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different in- terpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance. That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is analogous to the ingenuity of human art. The infinite and eternal Power which is thus revealed in the physical life of the universe seems in nowise akin to the human souL. The idea of beneficent purpose seems for the moment to be excluded from nature, and a blind process, known as Natural Selection, is the deity that slumbers 12 THE DESTINY OF MAN not nor sleeps. Reckless of good and evil, it brings forth at once the mother's tender love for her infant and the horrible teeth of the rav- ening shark, and to its creative indifference the one is as good as the other. In spite of these appalling arguments the man of science, urged by the single-hearted purpose to ascertain the truth, be the conse- quences what they may, goes quietly on and finds that the terrible theory must be adopted ; the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts must be admitted. In reaching this con- clusion, the man of science reasons upon the physical facts within his reach, applying to them the same principles of common-sense whereby our every-day lives are successfully guided ; and he is very apt to smile at the methods of those people who, taking hold of the question at the wrong end, begin by arguing about all manner of fancied consequences. For his knowledge of the history of human think- ing assures him that such methods have through all past time proved barren of aught save strife, while his own bold yet humble method is the only one through which truth has ever been elicited. To pursue unflinchingly the methods of science requires dauntless courage and a faith that nothing can shake. Such courage and such loyalty to nature brings its own reward. For when once the formidable theory is really under- 13 STUDIES IN RELIGION stood, when once its implications are properly unfolded, it is seen to have no such logical con- sequences as were at first ascribed to it. As with the Copernican astronomy, so with the Dar- winian biology, we rise to a higher view of the workings of God and of the nature of Man than was ever attainable before. So far from degrading Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the Darwin- ian theory shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is \/ the goal toward which Nature's work has all the while been tending. It enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, places it upon even a loftier eminence than poets or prophets have imagined, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of that creative activity which is manifested in the physical universe. H Ill ON THE EARTH THERE WILL NEVER BE A HIGHER CREATURE THAN MAN IN elucidating these points, we may fitly be- gin by considering the question as to the possibility of the evolution of any higher creature than Man, to whom the dominion over this earth shall pass. The question will best be answered by turning back and observing one of the most remarkable features connected with the origin of Man and with his superiority over other animals. And let it be borne in mind that we are not now about to wander through the regions of unconditional possibility. We are not dealing with vague general notions of de- velopment, but with the scientific Darwinian theory, which alleges development only as the result of certain rigorously defined agencies. The chief among these agencies is Natural Se- lection. It has again and again been illustrated how by the cumulative selection and inheritance of slight physical variations generic differences, like those between the tiger and the leopard, or the cow and the antelope, at length arise; 15 STUDIES IN RELIGION and the guiding principle in the accumulation of slight physical differences has been the wel- fare of the species. The variant forms on either side have survived while the constant forms have perished, so that the lines of demarcation be- tween allied species have grown more and more distinct, and it is usually only by going back to fossil ages that we can supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle for ex- istence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance ; and the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life illustrate the seeming capricious- ness of its workings. Psychical variations have never been unimportant since the appearance of the first faint pigment-spot which by and by was to translate touch into vision, as it devel- oped into the lenses and humours of the eye.^ Special organs of sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were slowly developed ♦■hrough countless ages, in company with purely physical variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of stomach, or thickness of hide. At length there came a wonderful mo- ment — silent and unnoticed, as are the begin- nings of all great revolutions. Silent and unno- ticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that won- * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xiv. j6 THE DESTINY OF MAN derful moment at which psychical changes be- gan to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of Man. Through fur- ther ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable va- riations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until by and by the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousand-fold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.^ Along with this growth of the brain, the complete as- sumption of the upright posture, enabling the hands to be devoted entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooperated in producing that peculiar con- tour of head and face which is the chief distin- guishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes derive their importance en- tirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been pro- duced ; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor's first appearance. No fact in nature is fraught with ^ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xxi. ; Dar- toinism, and Other Essays, iii. 17 STUDIES IN RELIGION deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psy- chical divergence between Man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. It shows that when Humanity began to be evolved an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this direction at least, the process of zoological change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth along this supreme line of generation there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the accumula- tion of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected and raised to a totally different plane from that on which all life had hitherto existed. Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be not the genesis of species, but the progress of Civ- ilization. As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of all this, we see that upon the Darwinian theory it is impossible that any creature zoologically dis- tinct from Man and superior to him should ever at any future time exist upon the earth. In the regions of unconditional possibility it is open to i8 THE DESTINY OF MAN any one to argue, if he chooses, that such a crea- ture may come to exist ; but the Darwinian the- ory is utterly opposed to any such conclusion. According to Darwinism, the creation of Man is still the goal toward which Nature tended from the beginning. Not the production of any higher creature, but the perfecting of Hu- manity, is to be the glorious consummation of Nature's long and tedious work. Thus we sud- denly arrive at the conclusion that Man seems now, much more clearly than ever, the chief among God's creatures. On the primitive bar- baric theory, which Mr. Darwin has swept away, Man was suddenly flung into the world by the miraculous act of some unseen and incalculable Power acting from without ; and whatever the- ology might suppose, no scientific reason could be alleged why the same incalculable Power might not at some future moment, by a similar miracle, thrust upon the scene some mightier creature in whose presence Man would become like a sorry beast of burden. But he who has mastered the Darwinian theory, he who recog- nizes the slow and subtle process of evolution as the way in which God makes things come to pass, must take a far higher view. He sees that in the deadly struggle for existence which has raged throughout countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing 19 STUDIES IN RELIGION together in order to bring forth that last con- summate specimen of God's handiwork, the Human Soul. To the creature thus produced through a change in the direction in which natural selection has worked, the earth and most of its living things have become gradually subordinated. In all the classes of the animal and vegetal worlds many ancient species have become extinct, and many modern species have come into being, through the unchecked working of natural se- lection, since Man became distinctively human. But in this respect a change has long been com- ing over the face of nature. The destinies of all other living things are more and more depend- ent upon the will of Man. It rests with him to determine, to a great degree, what plants and animals shall remain upon the earth and what shall be swept from its surface. By uncon- sciously imitating the selective processes of Na- ture, he long ago wrought many wild species into forms subservient to his needs. He has created new varieties of fruit and flower and ce- real grass, and has reared new breeds of animals to aid him in the work of civilization ; until at length he is beginning to acquire a mastery over mechanical and molecular and chemical forces which is doubtless destined in the future to achieve marvellous results whereof to-day we little dream. Natural selection itself will by and 20 THE DESTINY OF MAN by occupy a subordinate place in comparison with selection by Man, whose appearance on the earth is thus seen more clearly than ever to have opened an entirely new chapter in the mysterious history of creation. 21 IV THE ORIGIN OF INFANCY BUT before we can fully understand the exalted position which the Darwinian theory assigns to Man, another point demands consideration. The natural selection of psychical peculiarities does not alone account for the origin of Man, or explain his most sig- nal difference from all other animals. That difference is unquestionably a difference in kind, but in saying this one must guard against mis- understanding. Not only in the world of or- ganic life, but throughout the known universe, the doctrine of evolution regards differences in kind as due to the gradual accumulation of differences in degree. To cite a very simple case, what differences of kind can be more striking than the differences between a nebula, a sun, a planet like the earth, and a planet like our moon ? Yet these things are simply examples of cos- mical matter at four different stages of cooling. The physical differences between steam, water, and ice afford a more familiar example. In the organic world the perpetual modification of structures that has been effected through natural 11 THE DESTINY OF MAN selection exhibits countless instances of differ- ences in kind which have risen from the accu- mulation of differences in degree. No one would hesitate to call a horse's hoof different in kind from a cat's paw ; and yet the horse's lower leg and hoof are undoubtedly developed from a five-toed paw. The most signal differences in kind are wont to arise when organs originally developed for a certain purpose come to be ap- plied to a very different purpose, as that change of the fish's air-bladder into a lung which ac- companied the first development of land verte- brates. But still greater becomes the revolution when a certain process goes on until it sets going a number of other processes, unlocking series after series of causal agencies until a vast and complicated result is reached, such as could by no possibility have been foreseen. The creation of Man was one of these vast and complicated results due to the unlocking of various series of causal agencies ; and it was the beginning of a deeper and mightier difference in kind than any that slowly-evolving Nature had yet witnessed. I have indicated, as the moment at which the creation of mankind began, the moment when psychical variations became of so much more use to our ancestors than physical variations that they were seized and enhanced by natural selection, to the comparative neglect of the latter. Increase of intellectual capacity, in con- 23 STUDIES IN RELIGION nection with the developing brain of a single race of creatures, now became the chief work of natural selection in originating Man ; and this, I say, was the opening of a new chapter, the last and most wonderful chapter, in the history of creation. But the increasing intelligence and enlarged experience of half-human man now set in motion a new series of changes which greatly complicated the matter. In order to understand these changes, we must consider for a moment one very important characteristic of developing intelligence. The simplest actions in which the nervous system is concerned are what we call reflex ac- tions. All the visceral actions which keep us alive from moment to moment, the movements of the heart and lungs, the contractions of arte- ries, the secretions of glands, the digestive opera- tions of the stomach and liver, belong to the class of reflex actions. Throughout the animal world these acts are repeated, with little or no variation, from birth until death, and the tend- ency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. Every ani- mal breathes and digests as well at the begin- ning of his life as he ever does. Contact with air and food is all that is needed, and there is nothing to be learned. These actions, though they are performed by the nervous system, we do not class as psychical, because they are nearly 24 THE DESTINY OF MAN or quite unattended by consciousness. The psy- chical Hfe of the lowest animals consists of a few simple acts directed toward the securing of food and the avoidance of danger, and these acts we are in the habit of classing as instinctive. They are so simple, so few, and so often repeated, that the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is everything, and his individual experience is next to nothing. As we ascend the animal scale till we come to the higher birds and mammals, we find a very interesting and remarkable change beginning. The general increase of intelligence involves an increasing variety and complication of experi- ences. The acts which the animal performs in the course of its life become far more numer- ous, far more various, and far more complex. They are therefore severally repeated with less frequency in the lifetime of each individual. Consequently the tendency to perform them is not completely organized in the nervous system of the offspring before birth. The short period of antenatal existence does not afford time enough for the organization of so many and such complex habitudes and capacities. The 25 STUDIES IN RELIGION process which in the lower animals is completed before birth is in the higher animals left to be completed after birth. When the creature begins its Hfe it is not completely organized. Instead of the power of doing all the things which its parents did, it starts with the power of doing only some few of them ; for the rest it has only latent capacities which need to be brought out by its individual experience after birth. In other words, it begins its separate Hfe not as a matured creature, but as an infant which needs for a time to be watched and helped. 26 THE DAWNING OF CONSCIOUS- NESS HERE we arrive at one of the most won- derful moments in the history of crea- tion, — the moment of the first faint dawning of consciousness, the foreshadowing of the true hfe of the soul. Whence came the soul we no more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin of conscious- ness is hidden in the depths of the bygone eter- nity. That it cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.^ The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual sub- stance, an effluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions becomes incarnated in perish- able forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our know- ledge. Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul, we have learned something with re- gard to the conditions under which it has become ^ The Unseen World, and other Essays, i. ; Darwinism, and other Essays, v. ; Excursions of an Evolutionist, x., xiii. 27 STUDIES IN RELIGION incarnated in material forms. Modern psycho- logy has something to say about the dawning of conscious life in the animal world. Reflex action is unaccompanied by consciousness. The ner- vous actions which regulate the movements of the viscera go on without our knowledge ; we learn of their existence only by study, as we learn of facts in outward nature. If you tickle the foot of a person asleep, and the foot is with- drawn by simple reflex action, the sleeper is un- conscious alike of the irritation and of the movement, even as the decapitated frog is un- conscious when a drop of nitric acid falls on his back and he lifts up a leg and rubs the place. In like manner the reflex movements which make up the life of the lowest animals are doubt- less quite unconscious, even when in their gen- eral character they simulate conscious actions, as they often do. In the case of such creatures, the famous hypothesis of Descartes, that animals are automata, is doubtless mainly correct. In the case of instincts also, where the instinctive actions are completely organized before birth, and are repeated without variation during the whole lifetime of the individual, there is proba- bly little if any consciousness. It is an essential prerequisite of consciousness that there should be a period of delay or tension between the re- ceipt of an impression and the determination of the consequent movement. Diminish this period 28 THE DESTINY OF MAN of delay and you diminish the vividness of con- sciousness. A famiUar example will make this clear. When you are learning to play a new piece of music on the piano, especially if you do not read music rapidly, you are intensely conscious of each group of notes on the page, and of each group of keys that you strike, and of the relations of the one to the other. But when you have learned the piece by heart, you think nothing of either notes or keys, but play automatically while your attention is concen- trated upon the artistic character of the music. If somebody thoughtlessly interrupts you with a question about Egyptian politics, you go on playing while you answer him politely. That is, where you had at first to make a conscious act of volition for each movement, the whole group of movements has now become automatic, and volition is only concerned in setting the process going. As the delay involved in the perception and the movement disappears, so does the con- sciousness of the perception and the movement tend to disappear. Consciousness implies per- petual discrimination, or the recognition of like- nesses and differences, and this is impossible unless impressions persist long enough to be compared with one another. The physical organs in connection with whose activity con- sciousness is manifested are the upper and outer parts of the brain, — the cerebrum and cerebel- 29 STUDIES IN RELIGION lum. These organs never receive impressions directly from the outside world, but only from lower nerve-centres, such as the spinal cord, the medulla, the optic lobes, and other special cen- tres of sensation. The impressions received by the cerebrum and cerebellum are waves of mole- cular disturbance sent up along centripetal nerves from the lower centres, and presently drafted off along centrifugal nerves back to the lower cen- tres, thus causing the myriad movements which make up our active life. Now there is no con- sciousness except when molecular disturbance is generated in the cerebrum and cerebellum faster than it can be drafted off to the lower centres.* It is the surplus of molecular disturbance re- maining in the cerebrum and cerebellum, and reflected back and forth among the cells and fibres of which these highest centres are com- posed, that affords the physical condition for the manifestation of consciousness. Memory, emotion, reason, and volition begin with this retention of a surplus of molecular motion in the highest centres. As we survey the vertebrate sub-kingdom of animals, we find that as this surplus increases, the surface of the highest cen- tres increases in area. In the lowest vertebrate animal, the amphioxus, the cerebrum and cere- bellum do not exist at all. In fishes we begin to find them, but they are much smaller than * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xvi. 30 THE DESTINY OF MAN the optic lobes. In such a highly organized fish as the halibut, which weighs about as much as an average-sized man, the cerebrum is smaller than a melon seed. Continuing to grow by- adding concentric layers at the surface, the cere- brum and cerebellum become much larger in birds and lower mammals, gradually covering up the optic lobes. As we pass to higher mam- malian forms, the growth of the cerebrum be- comes most conspicuous, until it extends back- wards so far as to cover up the cerebellum, whose functions are limited to the conscious adjustment of muscular movements. In the higher apes the cerebrum begins to extend itself forwards, and this goes on in the human race. The cranial capacity of the European exceeds that of the Australian by forty cubic inches, or nearly four times as much as that by which the Australian exceeds the gorilla ; and the expansion is almost entirely in the upper and anterior portions. But the increase of the cerebral surface is shown not only in the general size of the organ, but to a still greater extent in the irregular creasing and furrowing of the surface. This creasing and furrowing begins to occur in the higher mam- mals, and in civilized man it is carried to an astonishing extent. The amount of intelligence is correlated with the number, the depth, and the irregularity of the furrows. A cat's brain has a few symmetrical creases. In an ape the 3* STUDIES IN RELIGION creases are deepened into slight furrows, and they run irregularly, somewhat like the lines in the palm of your hand. With age and expe- rience the furrows grow deeper and more sinuous, and new ones appear ; and in man these phe- nomena come to have great significance. The cerebral surface of a human infant is like that of an ape. In an adult savage, or in a European peasant, the furrowing is somewhat marked and complicated. In the brain of a great scholar, the furrows are very deep and crooked, and hundreds of creases appear which are not found at all in the brains of ordinary men. In other words, the cerebral surface of such a man, the seat of conscious mental life, has become enor- mously enlarged in area ; and we must further observe that it goes on enlarging in some cases into extreme old age.^ Putting all these facts together, it becomes plain that in the lowest animals, whose lives consist of sundry reflex actions monotonously repeated from generation to generation, there can be nothing, or next to nothing, of what we know as consciousness. It is only when the life becomes more complicated and various, so that reflex action can no longer determine all its movements and the higher nerve centres begin to be evolved, that the dawning of conscious- ness is reached. But with the growth of the * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xvi. 32 THE DESTINY OF MAN higher centres the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direc- tion is not given to them until after birth. The creature begins life as an infant, with its partially- developed cerebrum representing capabilities which it is left for its individual experience to bring forth and modify. 33 VI LENGTHENING OF INFANCY, AND CONCOMITANT INCREASE OF BRAIN-SURFACE THE first appearance of infancy in the animal world thus heralded the new era which was to be crowned by the development of Man. With the beginnings of infancy there came the first dawning of a con- scious life similar in nature to the conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, and for the same reason. All birds and mammals which take care of their young are teachable, though in very various degrees, and all in like manner show individ- ual peculiarities of disposition, though in most cases these are slight and inconspicuous. In dogs, horses, and apes there is marked teach- 34 THE DESTINY OF MAN ableness, and there are also marked differences in individual character. But in the non-human animal world all these phenomena are but slightly developed. They are but the dim adumbrations of what was by and by to bloom forth in the human race. They can scarcely be said to have served as a pro- phecy of the revolution that was to come. One generation of dumb beasts is after all very like another, and from studying the careers of the mastodon, the hipparion, the sabre-toothed lion, or even the dryopithecus, an observer in the Miocene age could never have foreseen the possibility of a creature endowed with such a boundless capacity of progress as the modern Man. Nevertheless, however dimly suggestive was this group of phenomena, it contained the germ of all that is preeminent in humanity. In the direct line of our ancestry it only needed that the period of infancy should be sufficiently prolonged, in order that a creature should at length appear, endowed with the teachableness, the individuality, and the capacity for progress which are the peculiar prerogatives of fully de- veloped Man.^ In this direct line the manlike apes of Africa and the Indian Archipelago have advanced far beyond the mammalian world in general. Along with a cerebral surface, and an * Darwinism, and other Essays, iii.; Excursions of an Evo- lutionist, xii. 35 STUDIES IN RELIGION accompanying intelligence, far greater than that of other mammals, these tailless apes begin life as helpless babies, and are unable to walk, to feed themselves, or to grasp objects with pre- cision until they are two or three months old. These apes have thus advanced a little way upon the peculiar road which our half-human fore- fathers began to travel as soon as psychical va- riations came to be of more use to the species than variations in bodily structure. The gulf by which the lowest known man is separated from the highest known ape consists in the great increase of his cerebral surface, with the accompanying intelligence, and in the very long duration of his infancy. These two things have gone hand in hand. The increase of cerebral surface, due to the working of natural selection in this direction alone, has entailed a vast in- crease in the amount of cerebral organization that must be left to be completed after birth, and thus has prolonged the period of infancy. And conversely the prolonging of the plastic period of infancy, entailing a vast increase in teachableness and versatility, has contributed to the further enlargement of the cerebral surface. The mutual reaction of these two groups of facts must have gone on for an enormous length of time since man began thus diverging from his simian brethren. It is not likely that less than a million years have elapsed since the first page 36 THE DESTINY OF MAN of this new chapter in the history of creation was opened : it is probable that the time has been much longer. In comparison with such a period, the whole recorded duration of human history shrinks into nothingness. The pyramids of Egypt seem like things of yesterday when we think of the Cave-Men of western Europe in the glacial period, who scratched pictures of mammoths on pieces of reindeer antler with a bit of pointed flint. Yet during an entire geo- logic aeon before these Cave-Men appeared on the scene, " a being erect upon two legs," if we may quote from Serjeant Buzfuz, " and wearing the outward semblance of a man and not of a monster," wandered hither and thither over the face of the earth, setting his mark upon it as no other creature yet had done, leaving behind him innumerable telltale remnants of his fierce and squalid existence, yet too scantily endowed with wit to make any written disclosure of his thoughts and deeds. If the physiological annals of that long and weary time could now be un- rolled before us, the principal fact which we should discern, dominating all other facts in interest and significance, would be that mutual reaction between increase of cerebral surface and lengthening of babyhood which I have here described. Thus through the simple continuance and interaction of processes that began far back in 37 83927 STUDIES IN RELIGION the world of warm-blooded animals, we get at last a creature essentially different from all others. Through the complication of effects the heaping up of minute differences in degree has ended in bringing forth a difference in kind. In the human organism physical variation has well-nigh stopped, or is confined to insignificant features, save in the gray surface of the cere- brum. The work of cerebral organization is chiefly completed after birth, as we see by con- trasting the smooth apelike brain-surface of the new-born child with the deeply-furrowed and myriad-seamed surface of the adult civil- ized brain. The plastic period of adolescence, lengthened in civilized man until it has come to cover more than one third of his lifetime, is thus the guaranty of his boundless progressive- ness. Inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of character ; but individ- ual experience has come to count as an enor- mous factor in modifying the career of mankind from generation to generation. It is not too much to say that the difference between man and all other hving creatures, in respect of teachableness, progressiveness, and individuality of character, surpasses all other differences of kind that are known to exist in the universe. 38 VII CHANGE IN THE DIRECTION OF THE WORKING OF NATURAL SELECTION IN the fresh light which these considerations throw upon the problem of man's origin, we can now see more clearly than ever how great a revolution was inaugurated when natural selection began to confine its operations to the surface of the cerebrum. Among the older incidents in the evolution of organic life, the changes were very wonderful which out of the pectoral fin of a fish developed the jointed fore-limb of the mammal with its five-toed paw, and thence through much slighter variation brought forth the human arm with its delicate and crafty hand. More wondrous still were the phases of change through which the rudimentary pigment-spot of the worm, by the development and differentiation of successive layers, gave place to the variously-constructed eyes of in- sects, mollusks, and vertebrates. The day for creative work of this sort has probably gone by, as the day for the evolution of annulose segments and vertebrate skeletons has gone by, 39 STUDIES IN RELIGION — on our planet, at least. In the line of our own development, all work of this kind stopped long ago, to be replaced by different methods. As an optical instrument, the eye had well- nigh reached extreme perfection in many a bird and mammal ages before man's beginnings ; and the essential features of the human hand existed already in the hands of Miocene apes. But dif- ferent methods came in when human intelli- gence appeared upon the scene. Mr. Spencer has somewhere reminded us that the crowbar is but an extra lever added to the levers of which the arm is already composed, and the telescope but adds a new set of lenses to those which already exist in the eye. This beautiful illustration goes to the kernel of the change that was wrought when natural selection began to confine itself to the psychical modification of our ancestors. In a very deep sense all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand.^ Vision and manipulation, — these, in their countless indirect and transfigured forms, are the two cooperating factors in all intellec- tual progress. It is not merely that with the telescope we see extinct volcanoes on the moon, or resolve spots of nebulous cloud into clusters of blazing suns ; it is that in every scientific theory we frame by indirect methods visual im- . 1 Outlines of Comic Philosophy^ part ii. ch. xxi. 40 THE DESTINY OF MAN ages of things not present to sense. With our mind's eye we see atmospheric convulsions on the surfaces of distant worlds, watch the giant ichthyosaurs splashing in Jurassic oceans, fol- low the varied figures of the rhythmic dance of molecules as chemical elements unite and separate, or examine, with the aid of long-for- gotten vocabularies now magically restored, the manners and morals, the laws and superstitions, of peoples that have ceased to be.* And so in art the wonderful printing-press, and the en- gine that moves it, are the lineal descendants through countless stages of complication, of the simple levers of primitive man and the rude stylus wherewith he engraved strange hiero- glyphs on the bark of trees. In such ways, since the human phase of evolution began, has the direct action of muscle and sense been sup- plemented and superseded by the indirect work of the inquisitive and inventive mind. * Excursions of an Evolutionist, iv. 41 VIII GROWING PREDOMINANCE OF THE PSYCHICAL LIFE LET us note one further aspect of this mighty revolution. In its lowly beginnings the -• psychical life was merely an appendage to the life of the body. The avoidance of ene- mies, the securing of food, the perpetuation of the species, make up the whole of the lives of lower animals, and the rudiments of memory, reason, emotion, and volition were at first con- cerned solely with the achievement of these ends in an increasingly indirect, complex, and effec- tive way. Though the life of a large portion of the human race is still confined to the pursuit of these same ends, yet so vast has been the increase of psychical life that the simple char- acter of the ends is liable to be lost sight of amid the variety, the indirectness, and the com- plexity of the means. But in civilized society other ends, purely immaterial in their nature, have come to add themselves to these, and in some instances to take their place. It is long since we were told that Man does not live by bread alone. During many generations we have 42 THE DESTINY OF MAN seen thousands of men, actuated by the noblest impulse of which humanity is capable, though misled by the teachings of a crude philosophy, despising and maltreating their bodies as clogs and incumbrances to the life of the indwelling soul. Countless martyrs we have seen throwing away the physical earthly life as so much worth- less dross, and all for the sake of purely spiritual truths. As with religion, so with the scientific spirit and the artistic spirit, — the unquenchable craving to know the secrets of nature, and the yearning to create the beautiful in form and colour and sound. In the highest human beings such ends as these have come to be uppermost in consciousness, and with the progress of ma- terial civilization this will be more and more the case. If we can imagine a future time when war- fare and crime shall have been done away with forever, when disease shall have been for the most part curbed, and when every human being by moderate labour can secure ample food and shelter, we can also see that in such a state of things the work of civilization would be by no means completed. In ministering to human happiness in countless ways, through the pur- suit of purely spiritual ends, in enriching and diversifying life to the utmost, there would still be almost limitless work to be done. I believe that such a time will come for weary and suffer- ing mankind. Such a faith is inspiring. It sus- 43 STUDIES IN RELIGION tains one in the work of life, when one would otherwise lose heart. But it is a faith that rests upon induction. The process of evolution is excessively slow, and its ends are achieved at the cost of enormous waste of life, but for in- numerable ages its direction has been toward the goal here pointed out ; and the case may be fitly summed up in the statement that whereas in its rude beginnings the psychical life was but an appendage to the body, in fully-developed Humanity the body is but the vehicle for the i>oul. 44 IX THE ORIGINS OF SOCIETY AND OF MORALITY ONE further point must be considered I before this outline sketch of the man- ner of man's origin can be called com- plete. The psychical development of Human- ity, since its earlier stages, has been largely due to the reaction of individuals upon one another in those various relations which we characterize as social/ In considering the origin of Man, the origin of human society cannot be passed over. Foreshadowings of social relations occur in the animal world, not only in the line of our own vertebrate ancestry, but in certain orders of insects which stand quite remote from that line. Many of the higher mammals are gregarious, and this is especially true of that whole order of primates to which we belong. Rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders, and in all but the lowest members of our own order. But in respect of definiteness and permanence the relations between individ- * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xxi. 45 STUDIES IN RELIGION uals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rud- est human society. The primordial unit of hu- man society is the family, and it was by the establishment of definite and permanent family relationships that the step was taken which raised Man socially above the level of gregari- ous apehood. This great point was attained through that lengthening of the period of help- less childhood which accompanied the gradu- ally increasing intelligence of our half-human ancestors. When childhood had come to ex- tend over a period of ten or a dozen years — a period which would be doubled, or more than doubled, where several children were born in succession to the same parents — the relation- ships between father and mother, brethren and sisters, must have become firmly knit ; and thus the family, the unit of human society, gradually came into existence.^ The rudimentary growth of moral sentiment must now have received a definite direction. As already observed, with the beginnings of infancy in the animal world there came the genesis in the parents of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. Rudimentary sympathies, with rudimentary capacity for self- devotion, are witnessed now and then among higher mammals, such as the dog, and not un- commonly among apes. But as the human * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xxii. 46 THE DESTINY OF MAN family, with its definite relationships, came into being, there must necessarily have grown up be- tween its various members reciprocal necessities of behaviour. The conduct of the individual could no longer be shaped with sole reference to his own selfish desires, but must be to a great extent subordinated to the general welfare of the family. And in judging of the character of his own conduct, the individual must now begin to refer it to some law of things outside of himself; and hence the germs of conscience and of the idea of duty. Such were no doubt the crude beginnings of human morality. With this genesis of the family, the Creation of Man may be said, in a certain sense, to have been completed. The great extent of cerebral surface, the lengthened period of infancy, the consequent capacity for progress, the definite constitution of the family, and the judgment of actions as good or bad according to some other standard than that of selfish desire, — these are the attributes which essentially distinguish Man from other creatures. All these, we see, are di- rect or indirect results of the revolution which began when natural selection came to confine itself to psychical variations, to the neglect of physical variations. The immediate result was the increase of cerebrum. This prolonged the infancy, thus giving rise to- the capacity for progress ; and infancy, in turn, originated the 47 STUDIES IN RELIGION family and thus opened the way for the growth of sympathies and of ethical feelings. All these results have perpetually reacted upon one an- other until a creature different in kind from all other creatures has been evolved. The creature thus evolved long since became dominant over the earth in a sense in which none of his prede- cessors ever became dominant ; and henceforth the work of evolution, so far as our planet is concerned, is chiefly devoted to the perfecting of this last and most wonderful product of creative energy. 4« X IMPROVABLENESS OF MAN FOR the creation of Man was by no means the creation of a perfect being. The most essential feature of Man is his improva- bleness, and since his first appearance on the earth the changes that have gone on in him have been enormous, though they have con- tinued to run along in the lines of development that were then marked out. The changes have been so great that in many respects the interval between the highest and the lowest men far sur- passes quantitatively the interval between the lowest men and the highest apes. If we take into account the creasing of the cerebral surface, the difference between the brain of a Shakespeare and that of an Australian savage would doubtless be fifty times greater than the difference between the Australian's brain and that of an orang- outang. In mathematical capacity the Austra- lian, who cannot tell the number of fingers on his two hands, is much nearer to a lion or wolf than to Sir Rowan Hamilton, who invented the method of quaternions. In moral development this same Australian, whose language contains 49 STUDIES IN RELIGION no words for justice and benevolence, is less re- mote from dogs and baboons than from a How- ard or a Garrison. In progressiveness, too, the difference between the lowest and the highest races of men is no less conspicuous. The Aus- tralian is more teachable than the ape, but his limit is nevertheless very quickly reached. All the distinctive attributes of Man, in short, have been developed to an enormous extent through long ages of social evolution. This psychical development of Man is des- tined to go on in the future as it has gone on in the past. The creative energy which has been at work through the bygone eternity is not going to become quiescent to-morrow. We have learned something of its methods of work- ing, and from the careful observation of the past we can foresee the future in some of its most general outlines. From what has already gone on during the historic period of man's existence, we can safely predict a change that will by and by distinguish him from all other creatures even more widely and more fundamentally than he is distinguished to-day. Whenever in the course of organic evolution we see any function begin- ning as incidental to the performance of other functions, and continuing for many ages to in- crease in importance until it becomes an indispen- sable strand in the web of life, we may be sure that by a continuance of the same process its SO THE DESTINY OF MAN influence is destined to increase still more in the future. Such has been the case with the function of sympathy, and with the ethical feelings which have grown up along with sympathy and de- pend largely upon it for their vitality. Like everything else which especially distinguishes Man, the altruistic feelings were first called into existence through the first beginnings of infancy in the animal world. Their rudimentary form was that of the transient affection of a female bird or mammal for its young. First given a definite direction through the genesis of the primitive human family, the development of altruism has formed an important part of the progress of civilization, but as yet it has scarcely kept pace with the general development of in- telligence. There can be little doubt that in respect of justice and kindness the advance of civilized man has been less marked than in re- spect of quick-wittedness. Now this is because the advancement of civilized man has been largely effected through fighting, through the continuance of that deadly struggle and com- petition which has been going on ever since organic life first appeared on the earth. It is through such fierce and perpetual struggle that the higher forms of life have been gradually evolved by natural selection. But we have al- ready seen how in many respects the evolution of Man was the opening of an entirely new 51 STUDIES IN RELIGION chapter in the history of the universe. In no respect was it more so than in the genesis of the altruistic emotions. For when natural se- lection, through the lengthening of childhood, had secured a determinate development for this class of human feelings, it had at last originated a power which could thrive only through the elimination of strife. And the later history of mankind, during the past thirty centuries, has been characterized by the gradual eliminating of strife, though the process has gone on with the extreme slowness that marks all the work of evolution. It is only at the present day that, by surveying human history from the widest possible outlook, and with the aid of the habits of thought which the study of evolution fosters, we are enabled distinctly to observe this ten- dency. As this is the most wonderful of all the phases of that stupendous revolution in nature which was inaugurated in the Creation of Man, it deserves especial attention here ; and we shall find it leading us quite directly to our conclu- sion. From the Origin of Man, when thor- oughly comprehended in its general outlines, we shall at length be able to catch some glimpses of his Destiny. 52 XI UNIVERSAL WARFARE OF PRIME- VAL MEN IN speaking of the higher altruistic feelings as being antagonistic to the continuance of warfare, I did not mean to imply that war- fare can ever be directly put down by our hor- ror of cruelty or our moral disapproval of strife. The actual process is much more indirect and complex than this. In respect of belligerency the earliest men were doubtless no better than brutes. They were simply the most crafty and formidable among brutes. To get food was the prime necessity of life, and as long as food was obtainable only by hunting and fishing, or other- wise seizing upon edible objects already in ex- istence, chronic and universal quarrel was in- evitable. The conditions of the struggle for existence were not yet visibly changed from what they had been from the outset in the ani- mal world. That struggle meant everlasting slaughter, and the fiercest races of fighters would be just the ones to survive and perpetuate their kind. Those most successful primitive men, from whom civilized peoples are descended, must S3 STUDIES IN RELIGION have excelled in treachery and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and strength of will. That moral sense which makes it seem wicked to steal and murder was scarcely more developed in them than in tigers or wolves. But to all this there was one exception. The family supplied motives for peaceful cooperation.* Within the family limits fidelity and forbearance had their uses, for events could not have been long in showing that the most coherent famihes would prevail over their less coherent rivals. Observation of the most savage races agrees with the compar- ative study of the institutions of civilized peo- ples, in proving that the only bond of political union recognized among primitive men, or con- ceivable by them, was the physical fact of blood- relationship. Illustrations of this are found in plenty far within the historic period. The very township, which under one name or another has formed the unit of political society among all civilized peoples, was originally the stockaded dwelling-place of a clan which traced its blood to a common ancestor. In such a condition of things the nearest approach ever made to peace was a state of armed truce ; and while the simple rules of morality were recognized, they were only regarded as binding within the limits of the clan. There was no recognition of the wickedness of robbery and murder in general. 1 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xviii. 54 THE DESTINY OF MAN This state of things, as above hinted, could not come to an end as long as men obtained food by seizing upon edible objects already in existence. The supply of fish, game, or fruit being strictly limited, men must ordinarily fight under penalty of starvation. If we could put a moral interpretation upon events which antedated morality as we understand it, we should say it was their duty to fight ; and the reverence ac- corded to the chieftain who murdered most suc- cessfully in behalf of his clansmen was well deserved. It is worthy of note that, in isolated parts of the earth where the natural supply of food is abundant, as in sundry tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, men have ceased from warfare and become gentle and docile without rising above the intellectual level of savagery. Compared with other savages, they are like the chimpanzee as contrasted with the gorilla. Such exceptional instances well illustrate the general truth that, so long as the method of obtaining food was the same as that employed by brute animals, men must continue to fight like dogs over a bone. 55 XII FIRST CHECKED BY THE BEGIN- NINGS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILI- ZATION BUT presently man's superior intelligence came into play in such wise that other and better methods of getting food were devised. When in intervals of peace men learned to rear flocks and herds, and to till the ground, and when they had further learned to exchange with one another the products of their labour, a new step, of most profound significance, was taken. Tribes which had once learned how to do these things were not long in overcoming their neighbours, and flourishing at their ex- pense, for agriculture allows a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways it favours social compactness. An immense series of social changes was now begun. Whereas the only conceivable bond of political combination had heretofore been blood-relation- ship, a new basis was now furnished by terri- torial contiguity and by community of occupa- tion. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by J6 THE DESTINY OF MAN peaceful industry ; and moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not at once recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become univer- sally recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man's success meant another's starvation. Our robber tariffs — mis- called " protective " — are survivals of the bar- barous mode of thinking which fitted the ages before industrial civilization began. But al- though the pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is not the less true that the beginnings of agriculture and com- merce marked the beginnings of the greatest social revolution in the whole career of man- kind. Henceforth the conditions for the main- tenance of physical life became different from what they had been throughout the past history of the animal world. It was no longer necessary for men to quarrel for their food like dogs over a bone; for they could now obtain it far more effectively by applying their intelligence to the task of utilizing the forces of inanimate nature ; and the due execution of such a task was in no wise assisted by wrath and contention, but from the outset was rather hindered by such things. 57 STUDIES IN RELIGION Such were the beginnings of industrial civ- ilization. Out of its exigencies, continually in- creasing in complexity, have proceeded, directly or indirectly, the arts and sciences which have given to modern life so much of its interest and value. But more important still has been the work of industrial civilization in the ethical field. By furnishing a wider basis for political union than mere blood-relationship, it greatly extended the area within which moral obligations were recognized as binding. At first confined to the clan, the idea of duty came at length to extend throughout a state in which many clans were combined and fused, and as it thus increased in generality and abstractness, the idea became immeasurably strengthened and ennobled. At last, with the rise of empires, in which many states were brought together in pacific industrial relations, the recognized sphere of moral obli- gation became enlarged until it comprehended all mankind. 58 XIII METHODS OF POLITICAL DEVEL- OPMENT, AND ELIMINATION OF WARFARE THIS rise of empires, this coalescence of small groups of men into larger and larger political aggregates, has been the chief work of civilization, when looked at on its political side.^ Like all the work of evolution, this process has gone on irregularly and inter- mittently, and its ultimate tendency has only gradually become apparent. This process of coalescence has from the outset been brought about by the needs of industrial civilization, and the chief obstacle which it has had to encounter has been the universal hostility and warfare be- queathed from primeval times. The history of mankind has been largely made up of fighting, but in the careers of the most progressive races this fighting has been far from meaningless, like the battles of kites and crows. In the stream of history which, beginning on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, has widened until in our day it covers both sides of the Atlantic and * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xviii. 59 STUDIES IN RELIGION is fast extending over the remotest parts of the earth, — in this main stream of history the war- fare which has gone on has had a clearly dis- cernible purpose and meaning. Broadly con- sidered, this warfare has been chiefly the struggle of the higher industrial civilization in defending itself against the attacks of neighbours who had not advanced beyond that early stage of human- ity in which warfare was chronic and normal. During the historic period, the wars of Europe have been either contests between the industrial and the predatory types of society, or contests incident upon the imperfect formation of large political aggregates. There have been three ways in which great political bodies have arisen. The earliest and lowest method was that o^ con- quest without incorporation. A single powerful tribe conquered and annexed its neighbours with- out admitting them to a share in the govern- ment. It appropriated their military strength, robbed them of most of the fruits of their la- bour, and thus virtually enslaved them. Such was the origin of the great despotic empires of Oriental type. Such states degenerate rapidly in military strength. Their slavish populations, accustomed to be starved and beaten or mas- sacred by the tax-gatherer, become unable to fight, so that great armies of them will flee be- fore a handful of freemen, as in the case of the ancient Persians and the modern Egyptians. 60 THE DESTINY OF MAN To strike down the executive head of such an assemblage of enslaved tribes is to effect the conquest or the dissolution of the whole mass, and hence the history of Eastern peoples has been characterized by sudden and gigantic revolutions. The second method of forming great politi- cal bodies was that of conquest with incorpora- tion. The conquering tribe, while annexing its neighbours, gradually admitted them to a share in the government. In this way arose the Ro- man empire, the largest, the most stable, and in its best days the most pacific political aggre- gate the world had as yet seen. Throughout the best part of Europe, its conquests succeeded in transforming the ancient predatory type of society into the modern industrial type. It ef- fectually broke up the primeval clan-system, with its narrow ethical ideas, and arrived at the broad conception of rights and duties coexten- sive with Humanity. But in the method upon which Rome proceeded there was an essential element of weakness. The simple device of re- presentation, by which political power is equally retained in all parts of the community while its exercise is delegated to a central body, was en- tirely unknown to the Romans. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the terrible mili- tary pressure to which the frontier was perpetu- ally exposed, the Roman government became a 6i STUDIES IN RELIGION despotism which gradually took on many of the vices of the Oriental type. The political weak- ness which resulted from this allowed Europe to be overrun by peoples organized in clans and tribes, and for some time there was a partial retrogression toward the disorder characteristic of primitive ages. The retrogression was but partial and temporary, however ; the exposed frontier has been steadily pushed eastward into the heart of Asia ; the industrial type of society is no longer menaced by the predatory type ; the primeval clan-system has entirely disap- peared as a social force ; and warfare, once ubiquitous and chronic, has become local and occasional. The third and highest method of forming great political bodies is that oi federation. The element of fighting was essential in the two lower methods, but in this it is not essential. Here there is no conquest, but a voluntary union of small political groups into a great po- litical group. Each little group preserves its local independence intact, while forming part of an indissoluble whole. Obviously this method of political union requires both high intelligence and high ethical development. In early times it was impracticable. It was first attempted, with brilliant though ephemeral success, by the Greeks, but it failed for want of the device of representation. In later times it was put into 62 THE DESTINY OF MAN operation, with permanent success, on a small scale by the Swiss, and on a great scale by our forefathers in England. The coalescence of shires into the kingdom of England, effected as it was by means of a representative assembly, and accompanied by the general retention of local self-government, afforded a distinct pre- cedent for such a gigantic federal union as men of English race have since constructed in America. The principle of federation was there, though not the name. And here we hit upon the fundamental contrast between the history of England and that of France. The method by which the modern French nation has been built up has been the Roman method of con- quest with incorporation. As the ruler of Paris gradually overcame his vassals, one after an- other, by warfare or diplomacy, he annexed their counties to his royal domain, and gov- erned them by lieutenants sent from Paris. Self-orovernment was thus crushed out in France, while it was preserved in England. And just as Rome achieved its unprecedented dominion by adopting a political method more effective than any that had been hitherto employed, so Eng- land, employing for the first time a still higher and more effective method, has come to play a part in the world compared with which even the part played by Rome seems insignificant. The test of the relative strength of the English and 63 STUDIES IN RELIGION Roman methods came when England and France contended for the possession of North America. The people which preserved its self-government could send forth self-supporting colonies ; the people which had lost the very tradition of self- government could not. Hence the dominion of the sea, with that of all the outlying parts of the earth, fell into the hands of men of Eng- lish race; and hence the federative method of political union — the method which contains every element of permanence, and which is pa- cific in its very conception — is already assum- ing a sway which is unquestionably destined to become universal. Bearing all this in mind, we cannot fail to recognize the truth of the statement that the great wars of the historic period have been either contests between the industrial and the predatory types of society or contests incident upon the imperfect formation of great political aggregates. Throughout the turmoil of the his- toric period — which on a superficial view seems such a chaos — we see certain definite tendencies at work ; the tendency toward the formation of larger and larger political aggregates, and toward the more perfect maintenance of local self- government and individual freedom among the parts of the aggregate. This two-sided process began with the beginnings of industrial civili- zation ; it has aided the progress of industry 64 THE DESTINY OF MAN and been aided by it ; and the result has been to diminish the quantity of warfare, and to les- sen the number of points at which it touches the ordinary course of civilized life. With the further continuance of this process, but one ultimate result is possible. It must go on until warfare becomes obsolete. The nineteenth cen- tury, which has witnessed an unprecedented development of industrial civilization, with its attendant arts and sciences, has also witnessed an unprecedented diminution in the strength of the primeval spirit of militancy. It is not that we have got rid of great wars, but that the re- lative proportion of human strength which has been employed in warfare has been remarkably less than in any previous age. In our own his- tory, of the two really great wars which have permeated our whole social existence, — the Revolutionary War and the War of Secession, — the first was fought in behalf of the pacific principle of equal representation ; the second was fought in behalf of the pacific principle of federalism. In each case, the victory helped to hasten the day when warfare shall become un- necessary. In the few great wars of Europe since the overthrow of Napoleon, we may see the same principle at work. In almost every case the result has been to strengthen the pacific tendencies of modern society. Whereas warfare was once dominant over the face of the earth, 65 STUDIES IN RELIGION and came home in all its horrid details to every- body's door, and threatened the very existence of industrial civilization ; it has now become narrowly confined in time and space, it no longer comes home to everybody's door, and, in so far as it is still tolerated, for want of a bet- ter method of settling grave international ques- tions, it has become quite ancillary to the para- mount needs of industrial civilization. When we can see so much as this lying before us on the pages of history, we cannot fail to see that the final extinction of warfare is only a question of time. Sooner or later it must come to an end, and the pacific principle of federalism, whereby questions between states are settled, like questions between individuals, by du^ pro- cess of law, must reign supreme over a I the earth. (>(y XIV END OF THE WORKING OF NAT- URAL SELECTION UPON MAN. THROWING OFF THE BRUTE- INHERITANCE AS regards the significance of Man's posi- tion in the universe, this gradual elimi- ^ nation of strife is a fact of utterly un- paralleled grandeur. Words cannot do justice to such a fact. It means that the wholesale destruction of life, which has heretofore char- acterized evolution ever since life began, and through which the higher forms of organic ex- istence have been produced, must presently come to an end in the case of the chief of God's creatures. It means that the universal struggle for existence, having succeeded in bringing forth that consummate product of creative energy, the Human Soul, has done its work and will presently cease. In the lower regions of organic life it must go on, but as a determining factor in the highest work of evolution it will disap- pear. The action of natural selection upon Man has long since been essentially diminished 67 STUDIES IN RELIGION through the operation of social conditions. For in all grades of civilization above the lowest, " there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstand- ing accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot by itself rectify any particular unfitness." In a race of inferior animals any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection, because, owing to the universal slaughter, the highest completeness of life pos- sible to a given grade of organization is required for the mere maintenance of life. But under the conditions surrounding human development it is otherwise.^ There is a wide interval be- tween the highest and lowest degrees of com- pleteness of living that are compatible with maintenance of life. Hence the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because man- kind has so many other qualities, beside the bad ones, which enable it to subsist and achieve pro- gress in spite of them, that natural selection — which always works through death — cannot come into play. The improvement of civilized man goes on mainly through processes of direct adaptation. The principle in accordance with which the gloved hand of the dandy becomes white and soft while the hand of the labouring man grows brown and tough is the main prin- ciple at work in the improvement of Humanity. ^ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xxii. 68 THE DESTINY OF MAN Our intellectual faculties, our passions and pre- judices, our tastes and habits, become strength- ened by use and weakened by disuse, just as the blacksmith's arm grows strong and the horse turned out to pasture becomes unfit for work. This law of use and disuse has been of immense importance throughout the whole evolution of organic life. With Man it has come to be para- mount. If now we contrast the civilized man intel- lectually and morally with the savage, we find that, along with his vast increase of cerebral surface, he has an immensely greater power of representing in imagination objects and relations not present to the senses. This is the funda- mental intellectual difference between civilized men and savages.^ The power of imagination, or ideal representation, underlies the whole of science and art, and it is closely connected with the ability to work hard and submit to present discomfort for the sake of a distant reward. It is also closely connected with the development of the sympathetic feelings. The better we can imagine objects and relations not present to sense, the more readily we can sympathize with other people. Half the cruelty in the world is the direct result of stupid incapacity to put one's self in the other man's place. So closely inter- related are our intellectual and moral natures * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii. ch. xxi. 69 STUDIES IN RELIGION that the development of sympathy is very con- siderably determined by increasing width and variety of experience. From the simplest form of sympathy, such as the painful thrill felt on seeing some one in a dangerous position, up to the elaborate complication of altruistic feelings involved in the notion of abstract justice, the development is very largely a development of the representative faculty. The very same causes, therefore, deeply grounded in the nature of industrial civilization, which have developed science and art, have also had a distinct tendency to encourage the growth of the sympathetic emotions. But, as already observed, these emotions are still too feebly developed, even in the highest races of men. We have made more progress in intelligence than in kindness. For thousands of generations, and until very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to plunder, bruise, and kill one another. The selfish and ugly passions which are primordial — which have the incalculable strength of in- heritance from the time when animal conscious- ness began — have had but little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been allowed to grow strong from exercise. And the whims and prejudices of the primeval militant barbarism 70 THE DESTINY OF MAN are slow in dying out from the midst of peace- ful industrial civilization. The coarser forms of cruelty are disappearing, and the butchery of men has greatly diminished. But most people apply to industrial pursuits a notion of antago- nism derived from ages of warfare, and seek in all manner of ways to cheat or overreach one another. And as in more barbarous times the hero was he who had slain his tens of thousands, so now the man who has made wealth by over- reaching his neighbours is not uncommonly spoken of in terms which imply approval. Though gentlemen, moreover, no longer assail one another with knives and clubs, they still inflict wounds with cruel words and sneers. Though the free-thinker is no longer chained to a stake and burned, people still tell lies about him, and do their best to starve him by hurting his reputation. The virtues of forbearance and self-control are still in a very rudimentary state, and of mutual helpfulness there is far too little among men. Nevertheless in all these respects some im- provement has been made, along with the dim- inution of warfare, and by the time warfare has not merely ceased from the earth but has come to be the dimly remembered phantom of a remote past, the development of the sympa- thetic side of human nature will doubtless be- come prodigious. The manifestation of selfish 71 STUDIES IN RELIGION and hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their exercise is enlarged. And thus at length we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute-inher- itance, — gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless. Man is slowly passing from a primi' tive social state in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will be- come extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation. Fresh value is thus added to human Hfe. The modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, therefore, early and late, to prepare its coming. 72 XV THE MESSAGE OF CHRISTIANITlf NOW what is this message of the mod- ern prophet but pure Christianity ? — not the mass of theological doctrine in- geniously piled up by Justin Martyr and Ter- tullian and Clement and Athanasius and Augus- tine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul ! When did St. Paul's conception of the two men within him that warred against each other, the appetites of our brute nature and the God-given yearning for a higher life, — when did this grand concep- tion ever have so much significance as now ? When have we ever before held such a clue to the meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount ? " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." In the cruel strife of centu- ries has it not often seemed as if the earth were to be rather the prize of the hardest heart and the strongest fist ? To many men these words of Christ have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too 73 STUDIES IN RELIGION good for this world. In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ's methods. In the saintlike career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in the character of the hard- ened outlaw Jean Valjean, we have a most pow- erful commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. By some critics who could express their views freely about " Les Miserables " while hesitating to impugn directly the authority of the New Testament, Monseigneur Bienvenu was unspar- ingly ridiculed as a man of impossible goodness, and as a milksop and fool withal. But I think Victor Hugo understood the capabilities of human nature, and its real dignity, much better than these scoffers. In a low stage of civiliza- tion Monseigneur Bienvenu would have had small chance of reaching middle life. Christ himself, we remember, was crucified between two thieves. It is none the less true that when once the degree of civilization is such as to allow this highest type of character, distinguished by its meekness and kindness, to take root and thrive, its methods are incomparable in their potency. The Master knew full well that the time was not yet ripe, — that he brought not peace, but a sword. But he preached neverthe- less that gospel of great joy which is by and by 74 THE DESTINY OF MAN to be realized by toiling Humanity, and he an- nounced ethical principles fit for the time that is coming. The great originality of his teaching, and the feature that has chiefly given it power in the world, lay in the distinctness with which he conceived a state of society from which every vestige of strife, and the modes of behaviour adapted to ages of strife, shall be utterly and forever swept away. Through misery that has seemed unendurable and turmoil that has seemed endless, men have thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of peace on earth and good will to men. I believe that the promise with which I started has now been amply redeemed. I believe it has been fully shown that so far from degrading Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the doctrine of evolu- tion shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has been tending from the first. We can now see clearly that our new knowledge enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of Divine care, the consummate fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe. 75 XVI THE QUESTION AS TO A FUTURE LIFE UPON the question whether Humanity is, after all, to cast in its lot with the grass that withers and the beasts that perish, the whole foregoing argument has a bear- ing that is by no means remote or far-fetched. It is not Hkely that we shall ever succeed in making the immortality of the soul a matter of scientific demonstration, for we lack the requi- site data. It must ever remain an affair of reli- gion rather than of science. In other words, it must remain one of that class of questions upon which I may not expect to convince my neigh- bour, while at the same time I may entertain a reasonable conviction of my own upon the sub- ject.* In the domain of cerebral physiology the question might be debated forever without a re- sult. The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular physics, is against the materialist, so far as it goes. It tells us that, during the present life, 1 The Unseen World, and other Essays, i. ; Excursions of un Evolutionist, x. 76 THE DESTINY OF MAN although thought and feehng are always man ifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular move- ments, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear, but cerebral physiology says nothing about an- other life. Indeed, why should it? The last place in the world to which I should go for information about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum would be cerebral physiology ! The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of phi- losophy. No evidence for it can be alleged be- yond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disem- bodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct 77 STUDIES IN RELIGION evidence for the belief in the soul's survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the na- ture of things, proof is inaccessible.* With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the ma- terialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view. But when we desist from the futile attempt to introduce scientific demonstration into a region which confessedly transcends human experience, and when we consider the question upon broad grounds of moral probability, I have no doubt that men will continue in the future, as in the past, to cherish the faith in a life beyond the grave. In past times the disbelief in the soul's immortality has always accompanied that kind of philosophy which, under whatever name, has regarded Humanity as merely a local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes. As a general rule, people who have come to take such a view of the position of Man in the universe have ceased to believe in a future life. On the other hand, he who regards Man as the consummate fruition of creative energy, and the chief object of Divine care, is almost ^ The Unseen World, and other Essays, i. j Darwinism , ani ether Essays, v. 78 THE DESTINY OF MAN irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the present life upon the earth. Difficulties on theory he will naturally expect to meet in many quarters ; but these will not weaken his faith, especially when he remembers that upon the alternative view the difficulties are at least as great. We live in a world of mystery, at all events, and there is not a problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. A broad common- sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical analysis has confessed itself baffled. Now we have here seen that the doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of Man. It is true that modern astronomy shows us giant balls of va- pour condensing into fiery suns, cooling down into planets fit for the support of life, and at last growing cold and rigid in death, like the moon. And there are indications of a time when systems of dead planets shall fall in upon their central ember that was once a sun, and the whole lifeless mass, thus regaining heat, shall expand into a nebulous cloud like that with which we started, that the work of condensation and evo- lution may begin over again. These Titanic events must doubtless seem to our limited vision 79 STUDIES IN RELIGION like an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes. They disclose no signs of purpose, or even of dramatic tendency ; ^ they seem like the weary work of Sisyphos. But on the face of our own planet, where alone we are able to survey the process of evolution in its higher and more complex details, we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency, though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. The Dar- winian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology ^ as it destroys. From the first dawning of life we see all things working to- gether toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which characterize Humanity. The body is cast aside and returns to the dust of which it was made. The earth, so marvellously wrought to man's uses, will also be cast aside. The day is to come, no doubt, when the heavens shall vanish as a scroll, and the elements be melted with fervent heat. So small is the value which Nature sets upon the perishable forms of matter ! The question, then, is reduced to this : Are Man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest ? Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades ? Are we * Darwinism, and other Essays, vi. " Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part iii. ch. ii. 80 THE DESTINY OF MAN to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down ? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any- such thing. On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. Why, then, are we any more called upon to throw away our belief in the permanence of the spiritual element in Man than we are called upon to throw away our belief in the constancy of Nature ? When questioned as to the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill's answer was that it is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our experience ; Mr. Spencer's answer was that it is a postulate which we make in every act of experience ; ^ but the authors of the " Unseen Universe," slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme act of faith, — the expression of a trust in God, that He will not "put us to permanent intel- lectual confusion." Now the more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element ^ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part i. ch. iii. ; part ii. ch. i. , xvi. ; The Unseen World, and other Essays, i. j Daf' winism, and other Essays, vi. 8i STUDIES IN RELIGION in Man is to rob the whole process of its mean- ing. It goes far toward putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any- one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative. For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of sci- ence, but as a supreme act of faith in the rea- sonableness of God's work. Such a belief, re- lating to regions quite inaccessible to experience, cannot of course be clothed in terms of definite and tangible meaning. For the experience which alone can give us such terms we must await that solemn day which is to overtake us all. , The belief can be most quickly defined by its nega- tion, as the refusal to believe that this world is all. The materialist holds that when you have described the whole universe of phenomena of which we can become cognizant under the con- ditions of the present life, then the whole story is told. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole story is not thus told. I feel the omni- presence of mystery in such wise as to make it far easier for me to adopt the view of Euripides, that what we call death may be but the dawning of true knowledge and of true life. The great- est philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process 82 THE DESTINY OF MAN of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a collo- cation of material particles, but is in the deep- est sense a divine effluence. According to Mr. Spencer, the divine energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe is the same energy that wells up in us as consciousness. Speaking for myself, I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of Humanity this divine spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beau^ tiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages. Only on some such view can the reasonable- ness of the universe, which still remains far above our finite power of comprehension, main- tain its ground. There are some minds inac- cessible to the class of considerations here al- leged, and perhaps there always will be. But on such grounds, if on no other, the faith in im- mortality is likely to be shared by all who look upon the genesis of the highest spiritual quali- ties in Man as the goal of Nature's creative work. This view has survived the Copernican revolution in science, and it has survived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if the foregoing exposition be sound, it is Darwinism which has 83 STUDIES IN RELIGION placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the ra- diant colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priest and prophet, the inspiration of the great musician, is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge ; and as we gird ourselves up for the work of life, we may look forward to the time when in the truest sense the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever, king of kings and lord of lords. THE IDEA OF GOD AS AFFECTED BY MODERN KNOWLEDGE To MY WIFE W REMEMBRANCE OF THE SWEET SUNDAY MORNING UNDER THE APPLE-TREE ON THE HILLSIDE, WREN WE TWO SAT LOOKING DOWN INTO FAIRY WOODLAND FATHfi, AND TALKED OF THE THINGS SINCE WRITTEN IN THIS LITTLE BOOX, 31 now bebicate it. MOi* o Si cx"*! i^vTo (Toi SC&miu. PREFACE WHEN asked to give a second address before the Concord School of Phi- losophy, I gladly accepted the invi- tation, as affording a proper occasion for saying certain things which I had for some time wished to say about theism. My address was designed to introduce the discussion of the question whether pantheism is the legitimate outcome of modern science. It seemed to me that the object might best be attained by passing in re- view the various modifications which the idea of God has undergone in the past, and pointing out the shape in which it is likely to survive the rapid growth of modern knowledge, and espe- cially the establishment of that great doctrine of evolution which is fast obliging us to revise our opinions upon all subjects whatsoever. Having thus in the text outlined the idea of God most likely to be conceived by minds trained in the doctrine of evolution, I left it for further dis- cussion to decide whether the term " pantheism " can properly be applied to such a conception. While much enlightenment may be got from 89 STUDIES IN RELIGION carefully describing the substance of a philo- sophic cfoctrine, very little can be gained by merely affixing to it a label ; and I could not but feel that my argument would be simply en- cumbered by the introduction of any question of nomenclature involving such a vague and uninstructive epithet as "pantheism." Such epithets are often regarded with favour and freely used, as seeming to obviate the necessity for that kind of labour to which most people are most averse, — the labour of sustained and accurate thinking. People are too apt to make such general terms do duty in place of a careful ex- amination of facts, and are thus sometimes led to strange conclusions. When, for example, they have heard somebody called an " agnos- tic," they at once think they know all about him ; whereas they have very likely learned no- thing that is of the slightest value in character- izing his opinions or his mental attitude. A term that can be applied at once to a Comte, a Mansel, and a Huxley is obviously of little use in the matter of definition. But, it may be asked, in spite of their world-wide differences, do not these three thinkers agree in holding that nothing can be known about the nature of God ? Perhaps so, — one cannot answer even this plain question with an unqualified yes ; but, granting 90 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD that they fully agree in this assertion of igno- rance, nevertheless, in their philosophic attitudes with regard to this ignorance, in the use they severally make of the assertion, in the way it determines their inferences about all manner of other things, the differences are so vast that nothing but mental confusion can come from a terminology which would content itself by ap- plying to all three the common epithet "agnos- tic." The case is similar with such a word as " pantheism," which has been familiarly applied to so many utterly diverse systems of thought that it is very hard to tell just what it means. It has been equally applied to the doctrine of " the Hindu philosophers of the orthodox Brah- manical schools," who " hold that all finite ex- istence is an illusion, and life mere vexation and mistake, a blunder or sorry jest of the Abso- lute ; " and to the doctrine of the Stoics, who " went to the other extreme, and held that the universe was the product of perfect reason and in an absolute sense good." (Pollock's " Spi- noza," p. 356.) In recent times it has been commonly used as a vituperative epithet, and hurled indiscriminately at such unpopular opin- ions as do not seem to call for so heavy a mis- sile as the more cruel term " atheism." The writer who sets forth in plain scientific language 91 STUDIES IN RELIGION a physical theory of the universe is liable to be scowled at and called an atheist ; but, when the very same ideas are presented in the form of oracular apophthegm or poetic rhapsody, the author is more gently described as " tinctured tvith pantheism." But out of the chaos of vagueness in which this unhappy word has been immersed it is per- haps still possible to extract something like a definite meaning. In the broadest sense there are three possible ways in which we may con- template the universe. First, we may regard the world of phenomena as sufficient unto itself, and deny that it needs to be referred to any underlying and all-com- prehensive unity. Nothing has an ultimate ori- gin or destiny ; there is no dramatic tendency in the succession of events, nor any ultimate law to which everything must be referred ; there is no reasonableness in the universe save that with which human fancy unwarrantably endows it ; the events of the world have no orderly progres- sion like the scenes of a well-constructed plot, but in the manner of their coming and going they constitute simply what Chauncey Wright so aptly called " cosmical weather ; " they drift and eddy about in an utterly blind and irrational manner, though now and then evolving, as if by 92 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD accident, temporary combinations which have to us a rational appearance. This is Atheism, pure and unquaHfied. It recognizes no Omnipresent Energy. Secondly^ we may hold that the world of phe- nomena is utterly unintelligible unless referred to an underlying and all-comprehensive unity. All things are manifestations of an Omnipre- sent Energy which cannot be in any imaginable sense personal or anthropomorphic ; out from this eternal sourceof phenomena all individuali- ties proceed, and into it they must all ultimately return and be absorbed ; the events of the world have an orderly progression, but not toward any goal recognizable by us ; in the process of evo- lution there is nothing that from any point of view can be called teleological ; the beginning and end of things — that which is Alpha and Omega — is merely an inscrutable essence, a formless void. Such a view as this may properly be called Pantheism. It recognizes an Omni- present Energy, but virtually identifies it with the totality of things. Thirdly^ we may hold that the world of phe- nomena is intelligible only when regarded as the multiform manifestation of an Omnipresent Energy that is in some way — albeit in a way quite above our finite comprehension — anthro- 9Z STUDIES IN RELIGION pomorphic or quasi-personal. There is a true objective reasonableness in the universe ; its events have an orderly progression, and, so far as those events are brought sufficiently within our ken for us to generalize them exhaustively, their progression is toward a goal that is recog- nizable by human intelligence ; " the process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudiments " (" Cos- mic Philosophy," part iii. ch. ii.) ; it is indeed but imperfectly that we can describe the dramatic tendency in the succession of events, but we can see enough to assure us of the fundamental fact that there is such a tendency ; and this ten- dency is the objective aspect of that which, when regarded on its subjective side, we call Purpose. Such a theory of things is Theism. It recog- nizes an Omnipresent Energy, which is none other than the living God. It is this theistic doctrine which I hold my- self, and which in the present essay I have sought to exhibit as the legitimate outcome of modern scientific thought. I was glad to have such an excellent occasion for returning to the subject as the invitation from Concord gave me, because in a former attempt to expound the same doctrine I do not seem to have succeeded 94 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD in making myself understood. In my " Out- lines of Cosmic Philosophy," published in 1874, I endeavoured to set forth a theory of theism identical with that which is set forth in the pre- sent essay. But an acute and learned friend, writing under the pseudonym of " Physicus," in his " Candid Examination of Theism " (Lon- don, 1878), thus criticises my theory: In it, he says, " while I am able to discern the elements which I think may properly be regarded as common to Theism and to Atheism, I am not able to discern any single element that is spe- cifically distinctive of Theism " (p. 145). The reason for the inability of" Physicus " to discern any such specifically distinctive element is that he misunderstands me as proposing to divest the theistic idea of every shred of anthropomor- phism, while still calling it a theistic idea. This, he thinks, would be an utterly illegitimate pro- ceeding, and I quite agree with him. In similar wise my friend Mr. Frederick Pollock, in his admirable work on Spinoza (London, 1880), observes that " Mr. Fiske's doctrine excludes the belief in a so-called Personal God, and the particular forms of religious emotion dependent on it " (p. 3S^). If the first part of this sen- tence stood alone, I might pause to inquire how much latitude of meaning may be conveyed in 95 STUDIES IN RELIGION the expression " so-called ;" is it meant that I exclude the belief in a Personal God as it was held by Augustine and Paley, or as it was held by Clement and Schleiermacher, or both ? But the second clause of the sentence seems to fur- nish the answer ; it seems to imply that I would practically do away with Theism altogether. Such a serious misstatement of my position, made in perfect good faith by two thinkers so conspicuous for ability and candour, shows that, in spite of all the elaborate care with which the case was stated in " Cosmic Philosophy," some further explanation is needed. It is true that there are expressions in that work which, taken singly and by themselves, might seem to imply a total rejection of theism. Such expressions occur chiefly in the chapter entitled " Anthro- pomorphic Theism," where great pains are taken to show the inadequacy of the Paley argu- ment from design, and to point out the insuper- able difficulties in which we are entangled by the conception of a Personal God as it is held by the great majority of modern theologians who have derived it from Plato and Augustine. In the succeeding chapters, however, it is expressly argued that the total elimination of anthropo- morphism from the idea of God is impossible. There are some who, recognizing that the ideas 96 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD of Personality and Infinity are unthinkable in combination, seek to escape the difficulty by speaking of God as the " Infinite Power ; " that is, Instead of a symbol derived from our notion of human consciousness, they employ a sym- bol derived from our notion of force In general. For many philosophic purposes the device Is eminently useful ; but It should not be forgot- ten that, while the form of our experience of Personality does not allow us to conceive It as Infinite, It is equally true that the form of our experience of Force does not allow us to con- ceive It as infinite, since we know force only as antagonized by other force. Since, moreover, our notion of force Is purely a generalization from our subjective sensations of effort over- coming resistance, there is scarcely less anthro- pomorphism lurking In the phrase " Infinite Power" than In the phrase "Infinite Person." Now In " Cosmic Philosophy " I argue that the presence of God Is the one all-pervading fact of life, from which there Is no escape ; that while in the deepest sense the nature of Deity is un- knowable by finite Man, nevertheless the exi- gencies of our thinking oblige us to symbolize that nature in some form that has a real mean- ing for us ; and that we cannot symbolize that nature as in any wise physical, but are bound 97 STUDIES IN RELIGION to symbolize it as in some way psychical. I do not here repeat the arguments, but simply state the conclusions. The final conclusion (part iii. eh. iv.) is that we must not say that " God is Force," since such a phrase inevitably calls up those pantheistic notions of bhnd necessity, which it is my express desire to avoid ; but, always bearing in mind the symbolic character of the words, we may say that " God is Spirit." How my belief in the personality of God could be more strongly expressed without entirely de- serting the language of modern philosophy and taking refuge in pure mythology, I am unable to see. There are two points in the present essay which I hope will serve to define more com- pletely the kind of theism which I have tried to present as compatible with the doctrine of evo- lution. One is the historic contrast between anthropomorphic and cosmic theism regarded in their modes of genesis, and especially as ex- emplified within the Christian church in the very different methods and results of Augustine on the one hand and Athanasius on the other. The view which I have ventured to designate as " cosmic theism " is no invention of mine ; in its most essential features it has been enter- tained by some of the profoundest thinkers of 98 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD Christendom in ancient and modern times, from Clement of Alexandria to Lessing and Goethe and Schleiermacher. The other point is the teleological inference drawn from the argument of my first Concord address on " The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origin." When that address was published, a year ago, I was surprised to find it quite commonly re- garded as indicating some radical change of at- titude on my part, — a " conversion," perhaps, from one set of opinions to another. Inasmuch as the argument in the " Destiny of Man " was based in every one of its parts upon arguments already published in " Cosmic Philosophy " (1874), and in the " Unseen World" (1876), I naturally could not understand why the later book should impress people so differently from the earlier ones. It presently appeared, how- ever, that none of my friends who had studied the earlier books had detected any such change of attitude; it was only people who knew little or nothing about me, or else the newspapers. Whence the inference seemed obvious that many readers of the " Destiny of Man " must have contrasted it, not with my earlier books which they had not read, but with some vague and distorted notion about my views which had grown up (Heaven knows how or why !) through STUDIES IN RELIGION the medium of " the press ; " and thus there might have been produced the impression that those views had undergone a radical change. It would be little to my credit, however, had my views of the doctrine of evolution and its implications undergone no development or en- largement since the publication of " Cosmic Philosophy." To carry such a subject about in one's mind for ten years, without having any new thoughts about it, would hardly be a proof of fitness for philosophizing. I have for some time been aware of a shortcoming in the earlier work, which it is the purpose of these two Con- cord addresses in some measure to remedy. That shortcoming was an imperfect appreciation of the goal toward which the process of evolu- tion is tending, and a consequent failure to state adequately how the doctrine of evolution must aiffect our estimate of Man's place in Nature. Nothing of fundamental importance in " Cosmic Philosophy " needed changing, but a new chap- ter needed to be written, in order to show how the doctrine of evolution, by exhibiting the de- velopment of the highest spiritual human quali- ties as the goal toward which God's creative work has from the outset been tending, replaces Man in his old position of headship in the uni- verse, even as in the days of Dante and Aquinas. lOO PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD That which the pre-Copernican astronomy naively thought to do by placing the home of Man in the centre of the physical universe, the Darwinian biology profoundly accomplishes by exhibiting Man as the terminal fact in that stu- pendous process of evolution whereby things have come to be what they are. In the deepest sense it is as true as it ever was held to be, that the world was made for Man, and that the bring- ing forth in him of those qualities which we call highest and holiest is the final cause of creation. The arguments upon which this conclusion rests, as they are set forth in the " Destiny of Man " and epitomized in the concluding section of the present essay, may all be found in " Cosmic Philosophy ; " but I failed to sum them up there and indicate the conclusion, almost within reach, which I had not quite clearly seized. When, after long hovering in the background of consciousness, it suddenly flashed upon me two years ago, it came with such vividness as to seem like a revelation. This conclusion as to the implications of the doctrine of evolution concerning Man's place in Nature supplies the element wanting in the theistic theory set forth in " Cosmic Philoso- phy," — the teleological element. It is pro- foundly true that a theory of things may seem lOI STUDIES IN RELIGION theistic or atheistic in virtue of what it says of Man, no less than in virtue of what it says of God. The craving for a final cause is so deeply rooted in human nature that no doctrine of theism which fails to satisfy it can seem other than lame and ineffective. In writing " Cosmic Philosophy " I fully realized this when, in the midst of the argument against Paley's form of theism, I said that " the process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudiments." Nevertheless, while the whole momentum of my thought carried me to the conviction that it must be so, I was not yet able to indicate how it is so, and I accord- ingly left the subject with this brief and inade- quate hint. Could the point have been worked out then and there, I think it would have left no doubt in the minds of" Physicus " and Mr. Pollock as to the true character of Cosmic Theism. But hold, cries the scientific inquirer, what in the world are you doing ? Are we again to re- suscitate the phantom Teleology, which we had supposed at last safely buried between cross- roads and pinned down with a stake ? Was not Bacon right in characterizing " final causes " as vestal virgins, so barren has their study proved ? I02 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD And has not Huxley, with yet keener sarcasm, designated them the hetaira of philosophy, so often have they led men astray ? Very true. I do not wish to take back a single word of all that I have said in my chapter on " Anthro- pomorphic Theism " in condemnation of the teleological method and the peculiar theistic doctrines upon which it rests. As a means of investigation it is absolutely worthless. Nay, it is worse than worthless ; it is treacherous, it is debauching to the intellect. But that is no rea- son why when a distinct dramatic tendency in the events of the universe appears as the result of purely scientific investigation, we should refuse to recognize it. It is the object of the " Destiny of Man " to prove that there is such a dramatic tendency ; and while such a tendency cannot be regarded as indicative of purpose in the limited anthropomorphic sense, it is still, as I said be- fore, the objective aspect of that which, when regarded on its subjective side, we call Purpose. There is a reasonableness in the universe such as to indicate that the Infinite Power of which it is the multiform manifestation is psychical, though it is impossible to ascribe to Him any of the limited psychical attributes which we know, or to argue from the ways of Man to the ways of God. For, as St. Paul reminds us, 103 STUDIES IN RELIGION " who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor ? " It is in this sense that I accept Mr. Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable. How far my in- terpretation agrees with his own I do not under- take to say. On such an abstruse matter it is best that one should simply speak for one's self. But in his recent essay on " Retrogressive Re- ligion " he uses expressions which imply a doc- trine of theism essentially similar to that here maintained. The " infinite and eternal Energy from which all things proceed," and which is the same power that " in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness," is certainly the power which is here recognized as God. The term " Unknowable " I have carefully refrained from using ; it does not occur in the text of this essay. It describes only one aspect of Deity, but it has been seized upon by shallow writers of every school, treated as if fully synonymous with Deity, and made the theme of the most dismal twaddle that the world has been deluged with since the days of mediaeval scholasticism. The latest instance is the wretched positivist rubbish which Mr. Frederic Harrison has mis- taken for criticism, and to which it is almost a pity that Mr. Spencer should have felt called upon to waste his valuable time in replying. 104 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD That which Mr. Spencer throughout all his works regards as the All-Being, the Power of which " our lives, alike physical and mental, in common with all the activities, organic and in- organic, amid which we live, are but the work- ings," — this omnipresent Power it pleases Mr. Harrison to call the " All-Nothingness," to de- scribe it as " a logical formula begotten in con- troversy, dwelling apart from man and the world " (whatever all that may mean), and to imagine its worshippers as thus addressing it in prayer, " O ;c°, love us, help us, make us one with thee ! " If Mr. Harrison's aim were to understand, rather than to misrepresent, the re- ligious attitude which goes with such a concep- tion of Deity as Mr. Spencer's, he could no- where find it more happily expressed than in these wonderful lines of Goethe : — *' Weltseele, komm, uns zu durchdringen ! Dann mit dem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen Wird unsrer Krafte Hochberuf. Theilnehmend fiihren gute Geister, Gelinde leitend, hochste Meister, Zu dem der alles schaiFt und schuf.** Mr. Harrison is enabled to perform his antics simply because he happens to have such a word as " Unknowable " to play with. Yet the word which has been put to such unseemly uses is, 105 STUDIES IN RELIGION when properly understood, of the highest value in theistic philosophy. That Deity per se is not only unknown but unknowable is a truth which Mr. Spencer has illustrated with all the resources of that psychologic analysis of which he is in- comparably the greatest master the world has ever seen ; but it is not a truth which originated with him, or the demonstration of which is tanta- mount, as Mr. Harrison would have us believe, to the destruction of all religion. Among all the Christian theologians that have lived, there are few higher names than Athanasius, who also regarded Deity per se as unknowable, being re- vealed to mankind only through incarnation in Christ. It is not as failing to recognize its value that I have refrained in this essay from using the term " Unknowable ; " it is because so many false and stupid inferences have been drawn from Mr. Spencer's use of the word that it seemed worth while to show how a doctrine essentially similar to his might be expounded without in- troducing it. For further elucidation I will sim- ply repeat in this connection what I wrote long ago : " It is enough to remind the reader that Deity is unknowable just in so far as it is not manifested to consciousness through the phe- nomenal world, — knowable just in so far as it is thus manifested : unknowable in so far as in- io6 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD finite and absolute, — knowable in the order of its phenomenal manifestations ; knowable, in a symbolic way, as the Power which is disclosed in every throb of the mighty rhythmic life of the universe ; knowable as the eternal Source of a Moral Law which is implicated with each action of our lives, and in obedience to which lies our only guaranty of the happiness which is incorruptible, and which neither inevitable misfortune nor unmerited obloquy can take away. Thus, though we may not by searching find out God, though we may not compass in- finitude or attain to absolute knowledge, we may at least know all that it concerns us to know, as intelligent and responsible beings. They who seek to know more than this, to transcend the conditions under which alone is knowledge possible, are, in Goethe's profound language, as wise as little children who, when they have looked into a mirror, turn it around to see what is behind it." (" Cosmic Philoso- phy," part iii. ch. v.) The present essay must be regarded as a se- quel to the " Destiny of Man," — so much so that the force of the argument in the concluding section can hardly be appreciated without refer- ence to the other book. The two books, taken 107 STUDIES IN RELIGION together, contain the bare outlines of a theory of religion which I earnestly hope at some future time to state elaborately in a work on the true na- ture of Christianity. Some such scheme had be- gun vaguely to dawn upon my mind when I was fourteen years old, and thought in the language of the rigid Calvinistic orthodoxy then prevalent in New England. After many and extensive changes of opinion, the idea assumed definite shape in the autumn of 1869, when 1 conceived the plan of a book to be entitled " Jesus of Nazareth and the Founding of Christianity," — a work intended to deal on the one hand with the natural genesis of the complex aggregate of beliefs and aspirations known as Christianity, and on the other hand with the metamorphoses which are being wrought in this aggregate by modern knowledge and modern theories of the universe. Such a book, involving a treatment both historical and philosophical, requires long and varied preparation ; and I have always re- garded my other books, published from time to time, as simply wayside studies preliminary to the undertaking of this complicated and difficult task. While thus habitually shaping my work with reference to this cherished idea, I have written some things which are in a special sense related to it. The rude outlines of a very small 108 PREFACE TO THE IDEA OF GOD portion of the historical treatment are contained in the essays on "The Jesus of History," and " The Christ of Dogma," published in the vol- ume entitled " The Unseen World, and other Essays." The outlines of the philosophical treatment are partially set forth in the " Destiny of Man " and in the present work. It amused me to see that almost every re- view of the " Destiny of Man " took pains to state that it was my Concord address " rewritten and expanded." Such trifles help one to un- derstand the helter-skelter way in which more important things get said and believed. The " Destiny of Man " was printed exactly as it was delivered at Concord, without the addition, or subtraction, or alteration of a single word. The case is the same with the present work. Petersham, September 6, 1885, THE IDEA OF GOD I DIFFICULTY OF EXPRESSING THE IDEA OF GOD SO THAT IT CAN BE READILY UNDERSTOOD IN Goethe's great poem, while Faust is walk- ing with Margaret at eventide in the gar- den, she asks him questions about his religion. It is long since he has been shriven or attended mass ; does he, then, believe in God ? — a question easy to answer with a simple yes, were it not for the form in which it is put. The great scholar and subtle thinker, who has delved in the deepest mines of philosophy and come forth weary and heavy-laden with their boasted treasures, has framed a very different conception of God from that entertained by the priest at the confessional or the altar, and how is he to make this intelligible to the simple-minded girl that walks by his side? Who will make bold to declare that he can grasp an idea of such overwhelming vastness as the idea of God, yet who that hath the feelings of a man can bring III STUDIES IN RELIGION himself to cast away a belief that is indispensa> ble to the rational and healthful workings of the mind ? So long as the tranquil dome of heaven is raised above our heads and the firm- set earth is spread forth beneath our feet, while the everlasting stars course in their mighty or- bits and the lover gazes with ineffable tenderness into the eyes of her that loves him, so long, says Faust, must our hearts go out toward Him that upholds and comprises all. Name or describe as we may the Sustainer of the world, the eternal fact remains there, far above our comprehension, yet clearest and most real of all facts. To name and describe it, to bring it within the formulas of theory oV creed, is but to veil its glory as when the brightness of heaven is enshrouded in mist and smoke. This has a pleasant sound to Margaret's ears. It reminds her of what the parson sometimes says, though couched in very different phrases ; and yet she remains uneasy and unsatisfied. Her mind is benumbed by the presence of an idea confessedly too great to be grasped. She feels the need of some concrete symbol that can be readily apprehended ; and she hopes that her lover has not been learning bad lessons from Mephistopheles. The difSculty which here besets Margaret must doubtless have been felt by every one when confronted with the thoughts by which the highest human minds have endeavoured to 112 THE IDEA OF GOD disclose the hidden life of the universe and inter- pret its meaning. It is a difficulty which baffles many, and they who surmount It are few Indeed. Most people content themselves through life with a set of concrete formulas concerning Deity, and vituperate as atheistic all conceptions which refuse to be compressed within the narrow limits of their creed. For the great mass of men the idea of God is quite overlaid and obscured by innumerable symbolic rites and doctrines that have grown up in the course of the long historic development of religion. All such rites and doctrines had a meaning once, beautiful and inspiring or terrible and forbidding, and many of them still retain it. But whether meaning- less or fraught with significance, men have wildly clung to them as shipwrecked mariners cling to the drifting spars that alone give promise of rescue from threatening death. Such concrete symbols have in all ages been argued and fought for until they have come to seem the essentials of religion ; and new moons and sabbaths, de- crees of councils and articles of faith, have usurped the place of the living God. In every age the theory or discovery — however pro- foundly thelstic in its real Import — which has thrown discredit upon such symbols has been stigmatized as subversive of religion, and its adherents have been reviled and persecuted. It is, of course, inevitable that this should be so. "3 STUDIES IN RELIGION To the half-educated mind a theory of divine action couched in the form of a legend, in which God is depicted as entertaining human purposes and swayed by human passions, is not only in- telligible, but impressive. It awakens emotion, it speaks to the heart, it threatens the sinner with wrath to come or heals the wounded spirit with sweet whispers of consolation. However mythical the form in which it is presented, however literally false the statements of which it is composed, it seems profoundly real and substantial. Just in so far as it is crudely con- crete, just in so far as Its terms can be vividly realized by the ordinary mind, does such a theological theory seem weighty and true. On the other hand, a theory of divine action which, discarding as far as possible the aid of concrete symbols, attempts to include within its range the endlessly complex operations that are for- ever going on throughout the length and breadth of the knowable universe, — such a theory is to the ordinary mind unintelligible. It awakens no emotion because it is not under- stood. Though it may be the nearest approxi- mation to the truth of which the human intel- lect is at the present moment capable, though the statements of which it is composed may be firmly based upon demonstrated facts in nature, it will nevertheless seem eminently unreal and uninteresting. The dullest peasant can under- 114 THE IDEA OF GOD stand you when you tell him that honey is sweet, while a statement that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter may be expressed by the formula 7r=3.i4i 59 will sound as gibberish in his ears ; yet the truth embodied in the latter statement is far more closely impli- cated with every act of the peasant's life, if he only knew it, than the truth expressed in the former. So the merest child may know enough to marvel at the Hebrew legend of the burning bush, but only the ripest scholar can begin to understand the character of the mighty problems with which Spinoza was grappling when he had so much to say about natura naturans and natura naturata. For these reasons all attempts to study God as revealed in the workings of the visible uni- verse, and to characterize the divine activity in terms derived from such study, have met with discouragement, if not with obloquy. As sub- stituting a less easily comprehensible formula for one that is more easily comprehensible, they seem to be frittering away the idea of God, and reducing it to an empty abstraction. There is a further reason for the dread with which such studies are commonly regarded. The theories of divine action accepted as orthodox by the men of any age have been bequeathed to them by their forefathers of an earlier age. They were originally framed with reference to assumed "5 STUDIES IN RELIGION facts of nature which advancing knowledge is continually discrediting and throwing aside. Each forward step in physical science obliges us to contemplate the universe from a some- what altered point of view, so that the mutual relations of its parts keep changing as in an ever-shifting landscape. The notions of the world and its Maker with which we started by and by prove meagre and unsatisfying ; they no longer fit in with the general scheme of our knowledge. Hence the men who are wedded to the old notions are quick to sound the alarm. They would fain deter us from taking the for- ward step which carries us to a new standpoint. Beware of science, they cry, lest with its daz- zling discoveries and adventurous speculations it rob us of our soul's comfort and leave us in a godless world. Such in every age has been the cry of the more timid and halting spirits ; and their fears have found apparent confirma- tion in the behaviour of a very different class of thinkers. As there are those who live in perpetual dread of the time when science shall banish God from the world, so, on the other hand, there are those who look forward with longing to such a time, and in their impatience are continually starting up and proclaiming that at last it has come. There are those who have indeed learned a lesson from Mephistopheles, the " spirit that forever denies." These are ii6 THE IDEA OF GOD they that say in their hearts, " There is no God," and " congratulate themselves that they are going to die like the beasts." Rushing into the holiest arcana of philosophy, even where angels fear to tread, they lay hold of each new discovery in science that modifies our view of the universe, and herald it as a crowning victory for the materialists, — a victory which is usher- ing in the happy day when atheism is to be the creed of all men. It is in view of such philo- sophizers that the astronomer, the chemist, or the anatomist, whose aim is the dispassionate examination of evidence and the unbiassed study of phenomena, may fitly utter the prayer, " Lord, save me from my friends ! " Thus through age after age has it fared with men's discoveries in science, and with their thoughts about God and the soul. It was so in the days of Galileo and Newton, and we have found it to be so in the days of Darwin and Spencer. The theologian exclaims. If planets are held in place by gravitation and tangential momentum, and if the highest forms of life have been developed by natural selection and direct adaptation, then the universe is swayed by blind forces, and nothing is left for God to do : how impious and terrible the thought ! Even so, echoes the favourite atheist, the La- mettrie or Biichner of the day ; the universe, it seems, has always got on without a God, and 117 STUDIES IN RELIGION accordingly there is none : how noble and cheer- ing the thought ! And as thus age after age they wrangle, with their eyes turned away from the light, the world goes on to larger and larger knowledge in spite of them, and does not lose its faith, for all these darkeners of counsel may say. As in the roaring loom of Time the end- less web of events is woven, each strand shall make more and more clearly visible the living garment of God. Ii8 II THE RAPID GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE ik T no time since men have dwelt upon /-\ the earth have their notions about the •^ -^ universe undergone so great a change as in the century of which we are now approach- ing the end. Never before has knowledge in- creased so rapidly ; never before has philosoph- ical speculation been so actively conducted, or its results so widely diffused. It is a charac- teristic of organic evolution that numerous progressive tendencies, for a long time incon- spicuous, now and then unite to bring about a striking and apparently sudden change ; or a set of forces, quietly accumulating in one direc- tion, at length unlock some new reservoir of force and abruptly inaugurate a new series of phenomena, as when water rises in a tank until its overflow sets whirling a system of toothed wheels. It may be that Nature makes no leaps, but in this way she now and then makes very long strides. It is in this way that the course of organic development is marked here and there by memorable epochs, which seem to open new 119 STUDIES IN RELIGION chapters in the history of the universe. There was such an epoch when the common ancestor of ascidian and amphioxus first showed rudimentary- traces of a vertebral column. There was such an epoch when the air-bladder of early amphibians began to do duty as a lung. Greatest of all, since the epoch, still hidden from our ken, when or- ganic life began upon the surface of the globe, was the birth of that new era when, through a won- drous change in the direction of the working of natural selection, Humanity appeared upon the scene. In the career of the human race we can likewise point to periods in which it has become apparent that an immense stride was taken. Such a period marks the dawning of human history, when after countless ages of desultory tribal warfare men succeeded in uniting into compar- atively stable political societies, and through the medium of written language began handing down to posterity the record of their thoughts and deeds. Since that morning twilight of his- tory there has been no era so strongly marked, no change so swift or so far-reaching in the con- ditions of human life, as that which began with the great maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century and is approaching its culmination to- day. In its earlier stages this modern era was signalized by sporadic achievements of the hu- man intellect, great in themselves and leading to such stupendous results as the boldest dared 1 20 THE IDEA OF GOD not dream of. Such achievements were the In- vention of printing, the telescope and micro- scope, the geometry of Descartes, the astronomy of Newton, the physics of Huyghens, the physi- ology of Harvey. Man's senses were thus indefi- nitely enlarged as his means of registration were perfected ; he became capable of extending phy- sical inferences from the earth to the heavens ; and he made his first acquaintance with that luminiferous ether which was by and by to re- veal the intimate structure of matter in regions far beyond the power of the microscope to pen- etrate. It is only within the present century that the vastness of the changes thus beginning to be wrought has become apparent. The scientific achievements of the human intellect no longer occur sporadically : they follow one upon an- other, like the organized and systematic con- quests of a resistless army. Each new discovery becomes at once a powerful implement in the hands of innumerable workers, and each year wins over fresh regions of the universe from the unknown to the known. Our own genera- tion has become so wonted to this unresting march of discovery that we already take it as quite a matter of course. Our minds become easily deadened to its real import, and the ex- amples we cite in illustration of it have an air of triteness. We scarcely need to be reminded 121 STUDIES IN RELIGION that all the advances made in locomotion, from the days of Nebuchadnezzar to those of An- drew Jackson, were as nothing compared to the change that has been wrought within a few years by the introduction of railroads. In these times, when Puck has fulfilled his boast and put a girdle about the earth in forty minutes, we are not yet perhaps in danger of forgetting that a century has not elapsed since he who caught the lightning upon his kite was laid in the grave. Yet the lesson of these facts, as well as of the grandmother's spinning-wheel that stands by the parlour fireside, is well to bear in mind. The change therein exemplified since Penelope plied her distaff is far less than that which has occurred within the memory of living men. The developments of machinery, which have worked such wonders, have greatly altered the political conditions of human society, so that a huge republic like the United States is now as snug and compact and easily manage- able as the tiny republic of Switzerland in the eighteenth century. The number of men that can live upon a given area of the earth's sur- face has been multiplied manifold, and while the mass of human life has thus increased, its value has been at the same time enhanced. In these various applications of physical the- ory to the industrial arts, countless minds, of a class that formerly were not reached by sci- 122 THE IDEA OF GOD entific reasoning at all, are now brought into daily contact with complex and subtle opera- tions of matter, and their habits of thought are thus notably modified. Meanwhile, in the higher regions of chemistry and molecular phy- sics the progress has been such that no descrip- tion can do it justice. When we reflect that a fourth generation has barely had time to appear on the scene since Priestley discovered that there was such a thing as oxygen, we stand awestruck before the stupendous pile of chemical science which has been reared in this brief interval. Our knowledge thus gained of the molecular and atomic structure of matter has been alone sufficient to remodel our conceptions of the universe from beginning to end. The case of molecular physics is equally striking. The theory of the conservation of energy, and the discovery that light, heat, electricity, and mag- netism are differently conditioned modes of undulatory motion transformable each into the other, are not yet fifty years old. In physical astronomy we remained until 1839 confined within the limits of the solar system, and even here the Newtonian theory had not yet won its crowning triumph in the discovery of the planet Neptune. To-day we not only measure the dis- tances and movements of many stars, but by means of spectrum analysis are able to tell what they are made of. It is more than a century 123 STUDIES IN RELIGION since the nebular hypothesis, by which we ex- plain the development of stellar systems, was first propounded by Immanuel Kant, but it is only within thirty years that it has been gener- ally adopted by astronomers ; and among the outward illustrations of its essential soundness none is more remarkable than its surviving such an enlargement of our knowledge. Coming to the geologic study of the changes that have taken place on the earth's surface, it was in 1830 that Sir Charles Lyell published the book which first placed this study upon a scientific basis. Cuvier's classification of past and present forms of animal life, which laid the foundations alike of comparative anatomy and of palaeon- tology, came but little earlier. The cell-doc- trine of Schleiden and Schwann, prior to which modern biology can hardly be said to have ex- isted, dates from 1839; and it was only ten years before that the scientific treatment of embryology began with Von Baer. At the present moment, twenty-six years have not elapsed since the epoch-making work of Dar- win first announced to the world the discovery of natural selection. In the cycle of studies which are immediately concerned with the career of mankind, the rate of progress has been no less marvellous. The scientific study of human speech may be said to date from the flash of insight which led 124 THE IDEA OF GOD Friedrich Schlegel in 1808 to detect the kin- ship between the Aryan languages. From this beginning to the researches of Fick and Ascoli in our own time, the quantity of achievement rivals anything the physical sciences can show. The study of comparative mythology, which has thrown such light upon the primitive thoughts of mankind, is still younger, — is still, indeed, in its infancy. The application of the comparative method to the investigation of laws and customs, of political and ecclesiastical and industrial systems, has been carried on scarcely thirty years ; yet the results already obtained are obliging us to rewrite the history of man- kind in all its stages. The great achievements of archaeologists — the decipherment of Egyp- tian hieroglyphs and of cuneiform inscriptions in Assyria and Persia, the unearthing of ancient cities, the discovery and classification of prime- val implements and works of art in all quar- ters of the globe — belong almost entirely to the nineteenth century. These discoveries, which have well-nigh doubled for us the length of the historic period, have united with the quite mod- ern revelations of geology concerning the an- cient glaciation of the temperate zones, to give us an approximate idea of the age of the human race ^ and the circumstances attending its diffu- sion over the earth. It has thus at length be- * Excursions of an Evolutionist ^ ii. 125 STUDIES IN RELIGION come possible to obtain something like the out- lines of a comprehensive view of the history of the creation, from the earliest stages of conden- sation of our solar nebula down to the very time in which we live, and to infer from the char- acteristics of this past evolution some of the most general tendencies of the future. All this accumulation of physical and histori- cal knowledge has not failed to react upon our study of the human mind itself In books of logic the score of centuries between Aristotle and Whately saw less advance than the few years between Whately and Mill. In psycho- logy the work of Fechner and Wundt and Spencer belongs to the age in which we are now living. When to all this variety of achievement we add what has been done in the critical study of literature and art, of classical and Biblical philology, and of metaphysics and theology," illustrating from fresh points of view the his- tory of the human mind, the sum total becomes almost too vast to be comprehended. This cen- tury, which some have called an age of iron, has been also an age of ideas, an era of seeking and finding the like of which was never known before. It is an epoch the grandeur of which dwarfs all others that can be named since the beginning of the historic period, if not since Man first became distinctively human. In their mental habits, in their methods of inquiry, and 126 THE IDEA OF GOD in the data at their command, " the men of the present day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movement are separated from the men whose education ended in 1830 by an immea- surably wider gulf than has ever before divided one progressive generation of men from their predecessors." ^ The intellectual development of the human race has been suddenly, almost abruptly, raised to a higher plane than that upon which it had proceeded from the days of the primitive troglodyte to the days of our great-grandfathers. It is characteristic of this higher plane of development that the progress which until lately was so slow must henceforth be rapid. Men's minds are becoming more flexible, the resistance to innovation is weaken- ing, and our intellectual demands are multiply- ing while the means of satisfying them are in- creasing. Vast as are the achievements we have just passed in review, the gaps in our know- ledge are immense, and every problem that is solved but opens a dozen new problems that await solution. Under such circumstances there is no likelihood that the last word will soon be said on any subject. In the eyes of the twenty- first century the science of the nineteenth will doubtless seem very fragmentary and crude. But the men of that day, and of all future time, will no doubt point back to the age just passing ^ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part i. ch. viii. 127 STUDIES IN RELIGION away as the opening of a new dispensation, the dawning of an era in which the intellectual de- velopment of mankind was raised to a higher plane than that upon which it had hitherto pro- ceeded. As the inevitable result of the thronging dis- coveries just enumerated, we find ourselves in the midst of a mighty revolution in human thought. Time-honoured creeds are losing their hold upon men ; ancient symbols are shorn of their value ; everything is called in question. The controversies of the day are not like those of former times. It is no longer a question of hermeneutics, no longer a struggle between abstruse dogmas of rival churches. Religion itself is called upon to show why it should any longer claim our allegiance. There are those who deny the existence of God. There are those who would explain away the human soul as a mere group of fleeting phenomena attendant upon the collocation of sundry particles of mat- ter. And there are many others who, without committing themselves to these positions of the atheist and the materialist, have nevertheless come to regard religion as practically ruled out from human affairs. No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features with modern knowledge. All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly 128 THE IDEA OF GOD and hopelessly discredited. How, then, it is asked, amid the general wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the religious attitude in which from time immemorial we have been wont to contemplate the universe can any longer be maintained ? Is not the belief in God perhaps a dream of the childhood of our race, like the belief in elves and bogarts which once was no less universal ? and is not modern science fast destroying the one as it has already destroyed the other ? Such are the questions which we daily hear asked, sometimes with flippant eagerness, but oftener with anxious dread. In view of them it is well worth while to examine the idea of God, as it has been entertained by mankind from the earliest ages, and as it is affected by the know- ledge of the universe which we have acquired in recent times. If we find in that idea, as con- ceived by untaught thinkers in the twilight of antiquity, an element that still survives the widest and deepest generalizations of modern times, we have the strongest possible reason for believing that the idea is permanent and answers to an Eternal Reality. It was to be expected that conceptions of Deity handed down from primitive men should undergo serious modifica- tion. If it can be shown that the essential element in these conceptions must survive the enormous additions to our knowledge which have distin- 129 STUDIES IN RELIGION guished the present age above all others since man became man, then we may believe that it will endure so long as man endures ; for it is not likely that it can ever be called upon to pass a severer ordeal. All this will presently appear in a still stronger light, when we have set forth the common char- acteristic of the modifications which the idea of God has already undergone, and the nature of the opposition between the old and the new knowledge with which we are now confronted. Upon this discussion we have now to enter, and we shall find it leading us to the conclusion that throughout all possible advances in human knowledge, so far as we can see, the essential position of theism must remain unshaken. 130 Ill SOURCES OF THE THEISTIC IDEA OUR argument may fitly begin with an inquiry into the sources of the theistic idea and the shape which it has univer- sally assumed among untutored men. The most primitive element which it contains is doubtless the notion of dependence upon something outside of ourselves. We are born into a world con- sisting of forces which sway our lives and over which we can exercise no control. The indi- vidual man can indeed make his volition count for a very little in modifying the course of events, but this end necessitates strict and unceasing obedience to powers that cannot be tampered with. To the behaviour of these external powers our actions must be adapted under penalty of death. And upon grounds no less firm than those on which we believe in any externality whatever, we recognize that these forces ante- dated our birth and will endure after we have disappeared from the scene. No one supposes that he makes the world for himself, so that it is born and dies with him. Every one perforce contemplates the world as something existing STUDIES IN RELIGION independently of himself, as something into which he has come, and from which he is to go ; and for his coming and his going, as well as for what he does while part of the world, he is dependent upon something that is not himself. Between ancient and modern man, as between the child and the adult, there can be no essential difference in the recognition of this fundamental fact of life. The primitive man could not, in- deed, state the case in this generalized form, any more than a young child could state it, but the facts which the statement covers were as real to him as they are to us.^ The primitive man knew nothing of a world, in the modern sense of the word. The conception of that vast consensus of forces which we call the world or universe is a somewhat late result of culture ; it was reached only through ages of experience and reflection. Such an idea lay beyond the horizon of the primitive man. But while he knew not the world, he knew bits and pieces of it ; or, to vary the expression, he had his little world, chaotic and fragmentary enough, but full of dread real- ity for him. He knew what it was to deal from birth until death with powers far mightier than himself. To explain these powers, to make their actions in any wise intelligible, he had but one available resource ; and this was so obvious that * See note A at the end of the volume. 132 THE IDEA OF GOD he could not fail to employ it. The only source of action of which he knew anything, since it was the only source which lay within himself, was the human will ; ^ and in this respect, after all, the philosophy of the primeval savage was not so very far removed from that of the modern scientific thinker. The primitive man could see that his own actions were prompted by desire and guided by intelligence, and he supposed the same to be the case with the sun and the wind, the frost and the lightning. All the forces of outward nature, so far as they came into visible contact with his life, he personified as great be- ings which were to be contended with or placated. This primeval philosophy, once universal among men, has lasted far into the historic period, and it is only slowly and bit by bit that it has been outgrown by the most highly civilized races. Indeed the half-civilized majority of mankind have by no means as yet cast it aside, and among savage tribes we may still see it persisting in all its original crudity. In the mythologies of all peoples, of the Greeks and Hindus and Norse- men, as well as of the North American Indians and the dwellers in the South Sea Islands, we find the sun personified as an archer or wanderer, the clouds as gigantic birds, the tempest as a devouring dragon ; and the tales of gods and heroes, as well as of trolls and fairies, arc made * Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part i. ch. vi., vii. STUDIES IN RELIGION up of scattered and distorted fragments of na- ture myths, of which the primitive meaning had long been forgotten when the ingenuity of mod- ern scholarship laid it bare.^ In all this personification of physical phe- nomena our prehistoric ancestors were greatly assisted by that theory of ghosts which was per- haps the earliest speculative effort of the human mind. Travellers have now and then reported the existence of races of men quite destitute of religion, or of what the observer has learned to recognize as religion ; but no one has ever dis- covered a race of men devoid of a belief in ghosts. The mass of crude inference which makes up the savage's philosophy of nature is largely based upon the hypothesis that every man has another selfy a double, or wraith, or ghost. This " hypothesis of the other selfy which serves to account for the savage's wanderings during sleep in strange lands and among strange people, serves also to account for the presence in his dreams of parents, comrades, or enemies, known to be dead and buried. The other self of the dreamer meets and converses with the other selves of his dead brethren, joins with them in the hunt, or sits down with them to the wild cannibal banquet. Thus arises the belief in an ever-present world of ghosts, a belief which the entire experience of uncivilized man goes to * Mphs and Myth-Makers^ i. THE IDEA OF GOD strengthen and expand." ^ Countless tales and superstitions of savage races show that the hypo- thesis of the other self is used to explain the phenomena of hysteria and epilepsy, of shadows, of echoes, and even of the reflection of face and gestures in still water. It is not only men, moreover, who are provided with other selves. Dumb beasts and plants, stone hatchets and arrows, articles of clothing and food, all have their ghosts ; ^ and when the dead chief is buried, his wives and servants, his dogs and horses, are slain to keep him company, and weapons and trinkets are placed in his tomb to be used in the spirit land. Burial places of primitive men, ages before the dawn of history, bear testimony to the immense antiquity of this savage philosophy. From this wholesale belief in ghosts to the in- terpretation of the wind or the lightning as a person animated by an indwelling soul and en- dowed with quasi-human passions and purposes, the step is not a long one. The latter notion grows almost inevitably out of the former, so that all races of men without exception have entertained it. That the mighty power which uproots trees and drives the storm-clouds across the sky should resemble a human soul is to the savage an unavoidable inference. "If the fire burns down his hut, it is because the fire is a person with a soul, and is angry with him, and * Myths and Myth-Makers, vii. ^ Ibid. ^2S STUDIES IN RELIGION needs to be coaxed into a kindlier mood by means of prayer or sacrifice." He has no alternative but to regard fire-soul as something akin to human- soul ; his philosophy makes no distinction be- tween the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity. It was in accordance with this primitive theory of things that the earliest form of religious wor- ship was developed. In all races of men, so far as can be determined, this was the worship of ancestors.* The other self of the dead chieftain continued after death to watch over the inter- ests of the tribe, to defend it against the attacks of enemies, to reward brave warriors, and to punish traitors and cowards. His favour must be propitiated with ceremonies like those in which a subject does homage to a living ruler. If offended by neglect or irreverent treatment, defeat in battle, damage by flood or fire, visita- tions of famine or pestilence, were interpreted as marks of his anger. Thus the spirits animat- ing the forces of nature were often identified with the ghosts of ancestors, and mythology is filled with traces of the confusion. In the Vedic religion the pitris, or " fathers," live in the sky along with Yama, the original pitri of mankind : they are very busy with the weather ; they send down rain to refresh the thirsty earth, or anon * Myths and Myth-Makers, vii. ; Excursions of an Ev