30 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a better life, these are the radical elements of all religions. . . . 

 Unless they had formed part of the original dowry of the human soul, 

 religion itself would have remained an impossibility." Now, I am not 

 quite sure that I understand in what sense the writer means to assert 

 that these intuitions, which, for practical purposes, may be limited to 

 three, God, sin, and immortality, are part of the original dowry of the 

 human soul. If it is meant that there was a special creation of the 

 human soul, furnished from the beginning with these three intuitions, 

 then science will resolutely refuse to admit the fact. There can be no 

 mistake about the position held by the bulk of scientific men, and little 

 doubt, I should think, as to its reasonableness. If there is any thing 

 that is in ultimate analysis incomprehensible, or any fact that cannot 

 be accounted for by natural causes, then the possibility of special crea- 

 tion and original intuitions must be candidly allowed, but not other- 

 wise. There is just a chance, for instance, that the difference between 

 the brains of the lowest man and the highest animal may ultimately 

 be regarded as a fact inexplicable upon any theory of evolution; more, 

 however, from a lack of evidence than from any other cause. Be this 

 as it may, the possibility of special creation finds a distinct foothold in 

 the acknowledged fact that the connection between thought and the 

 brain of animals, as well as of man, is an ultimate incomprehensibility, 

 a mystery which the law of man's intelligence prevents his ever even 

 attempting or hoping to understand. The famous saying " cogito 

 ergo sum" the foundation of all modern metaphysics, may come to be 

 a formula under which religion, philosophy, and science, may all take 

 shelter, and approach each other without ever actually meeting. 



But the three intuitions of God, sin, and immortality, can all be 

 accounted for by the growth of human experience, as every one 

 knows who has at all studied the subject. At some period of the 

 world's history, science will answer, an ape-like creature first recog- 

 nized that it or he had offended against the good of some other crea- 

 ture and so became conscious of sin, or was created as a moral being. 

 Thus much Mr. Darwin has affirmed, but (speaking from memory) I 

 do not think he has called very special attention to that still greater 

 epoch (or was it the same ?) in man's history, when this ape-like crea- 

 ture, seeing one of its own species lying dead, recognized as a fact " I 

 shall die." This is what we may term the creation of man as an im- 

 mortal being, for in the very conflict of the two facts one, the reflect- 

 ing being, the self-conscious I ; the other, death, the seeming destroyer 

 lie embedded all man's future spiritual cravings for eternity. And 

 the idea of God would come in the order of Nature, before either of 

 these, to the creature which first reflected upon the source of its own 

 existence, and recognized a " tendency in things which it could not 

 understand." This is, in brief, the scientific account of man's creation, 

 and of the growth of the ideas of natural religion within his mind ; 

 and we may remark in passing that it must be a singularly uncandid 



