27 6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the Tartars or Kerghiz on the bleak mid-Asian plain ? Buddhism 

 " evolved " amongst Indian races in a tropical climate, yet now 

 receives the adoration almost solely of Mongoloid peoples, the 

 bulk of whom live under temperate skies. And in respect to 

 the old animistic beliefs, the Silurian strata of religion, if one 

 fact more than another emerges from their study, it is the wide 

 diffusion, the catholicity, of various concepts in countries 

 diverse as the Poles in all conditions of physical environment. 

 No serious student of the history of religions will discern 

 any nexus between the latitude and race of their origin and 

 the countries where they prevail. 



In the face of the recent metamorphosis of Japan and the 

 bright promise of a new order in China and in Turkey, it scarcely 

 seems necessary to combat the alleged racial fixity of ideation or 

 permanence in national politics. But history teems with similar 

 examples : witness the sudden development from barbarism of 

 Greece and Rome, their equally rapid decadence, the marvellous 

 changes wrought in Arabia and North Africa by Mahom- 

 medanism, the swift uprise of such culture centres as Baghdad 

 under the Caliphs or Spain under Moorish domination. In 

 two hundred years the Seljuks changed their state from 

 barbarism to Christianity and from Christianity to Mahom- 

 medan civilisation. To the Egyptian at the commencement 

 of our era what institutions could seem more irrevocably fixed 

 or more native to the soil than the worship of Isis and Osiris 

 and all the peculiar civilisation of the Nile? Yet in two 

 hundred years their religion had yielded to Christianity, and 

 four hundred years later the Arab conquerors tore from the 

 Egyptians every characteristic they possessed, save only 

 their physical type. 



Conceptions in social states such as those put forward in 

 the address, though not uncommon, spring from an obvious 

 confusion of ideas, and from short-sighted views of history and 

 of existing politics. Religions, for example, or at least the 

 great religions of culture, are not " evolved " any more than 

 were gunpowder, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, or 

 Darwinism. By evolution we denote the adaptation of a race 

 to its environment through the elimination of those members 

 unfitted to that environment, not those moral syntheses or 

 conceptions of cosmos which constitute the foundations of a 

 religious system. Nor can polygamy, trial by jury, parlia- 



