Chap. XXI. AND CONCLUDING EEMAEKS. 395 



considerable advance in tlie reasoning powers of man, 

 and from a still greater advance in his faculties of im- 

 agination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the 

 assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many 

 persons as an argument for His existence. But this 

 is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to 

 believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant 

 spirits, possessing only a little more power than man ; 

 for the belief in them is far more general than of a 

 beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and bene- 

 ficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in 

 the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long- 

 continued culture. 



He who believes in the advancement of man from 

 some lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does 

 this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. 

 The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has 

 shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind ; but argu- 

 ments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, 

 as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few^ persons 

 feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining 

 at what precise period in the development of the indi- 

 vidual, from the first trace of the minute germinal 

 vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man 

 becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater 

 cause for anxiety because the period in the gradually 

 ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined.^ 



I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this 

 work will be denounced by some^as highly irreligious; 

 but he who thus denounces them is bound to shew why 

 it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as 

 a distinct species by descent from some lower form. 



2 The Eev. J. A. Pic ton gives a discussion to this effect in liis 'New 

 Theories and the Old Faith,' 1870. i 



