444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



That is the philosophical explanation of the rise of theology, of the 

 peopling of Nature with divine spirits. But does it explain the rise 

 of Religion ? No, for theology and religion are not conterminous. 

 Mr. Spencer has unwittingly conceded to the divines that which they 

 assume so confidently — that theology is the same thing as religion, 

 and that there was no religion at all until there was a belief in super- 

 human spirits within and behind Nature. This is obviously an over- 

 sight. We have to go very much further back for the genesis of 

 religion. There were countless centuries of time, and there were, and 

 there are, countless millions of men for whom no doctrine of superhu- 

 man spirits ever took coherent form. In all these ages and races, 

 probably by far the most numerous that our planet has witnessed, 

 there was religion in all kinds of definite form. Comte calls it Fetich- 

 ism — terms are not important : roughly, we may call it Nature-wor- 

 ship. The religiop in all these types was the belief and worship not 

 of spirits of any kind, not of any immaterial, imagined being inside 

 things, but of the actual visible things themselves — trees, stones, rivers, 

 mountains, earth, fire, stars, sun, and sky. Some of the most abiding 

 and powerful of all religions have consisted in elaborate worship of 

 these physical objects treated frankly as physical objects, without trace 

 of ghost, spirit, or god. To say nothing of fire-worship, river, and 

 tree-worship, the venerable religion of China, far the most vast of all 

 systematic religions, is wholly based on reverence for Earth, Sky, and 

 ancestors treated objectively, and not as the abode of subjective imma- 

 terial spirits. 



Hence the origin of religion is to be sought in the countless a^es 

 before the rise of theology ; before spirits, ghosts, or gods ever took 

 definite form in the human mind. The primitive uncultured man 

 frankly worshiped external objects in love and in fear, ascribing 

 to them quasi-human powers and feelings. All that we read about 

 Animism, ghosts, spirits, and universal ideas of godhead in this truly 

 primitive stage are metaphysical assumptions of men trying to read 

 the ideas of later epochs into the facts of an earlier epoch. Nothing 

 is more certain than that man everywhere started with a simj^le wor- 

 ship of natural objects. And the bearing of this on the future of 

 religion is decisive. The religion of man in the vast cycles of primi- 

 tive ages was reverence for Nature as influencing Man. The religion 

 of man in the vast cycles that are to come Avill be the reverence for 

 Humanity as supported by Nature. The religion of man in the twenty 

 or thirty centuries of Theology was reverence for the assumed authors 

 or controllers of Nature. But, that assumption having broken up, 

 religion does not break up with it. On the contrary, it enters on a far 

 greater and more potent career, inasmuch as the natural emotions of 

 the human heart are now combined with the certainty of scientific 

 knowledge. The final religion of enlightened man is the systematized 

 and scientific form of the spontaneous religion of natural man. Both 



