8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward !N'ature also 

 holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as 

 religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, 

 in seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been 

 forced to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social 

 arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to 

 be living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect 

 the indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it 

 satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite 

 social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united 

 into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an analo- 

 gous transformation. The divine selfishness — the " remota ah nostris 

 rebus " — long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously corre- 

 lated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave 

 way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that 

 more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient char- 

 acters of the later phases of monotheism. The original indifference 

 of Deity toward ethical issues — a widespread feature of the earlier 

 religious conceptions — could not but pass away with the moral stag- 

 nation of the ancient communities out of which it had arisen. So the 

 comparatively new thought of a God definitely identified in his aims 

 and activities with the cause of moral reform is no less obviously a 

 result of the new attitude of man himself toward problems of social 

 improvement; while the persistence with which, in human thought, 

 morals remain associated with religion sufficiently illustrates the ex- 

 tent to which man's view of each has been determined by the self- 

 knowledge which underlies his attitude toward both. Note also, 

 finally, the manifest relation in which our human thought regarding 

 mind and body has always stood toward conceptions of a world-soul, 

 and then the dependence of man's view of the relation of God to 

 the world upon the knowledge of his own planet and of its place in 

 the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the old geocentric 

 theory of the cosmos — regarded the heavens as a set of spheres revolv- 

 ing around a flat earth — the thought of a deity outside the world re- 

 lated to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly devised piece of 

 clockwork which he had brought into existence, was inevitable. But 

 when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth century co-operated 

 with the revelations of Galilei to secure the final triumph of the 

 Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the world-order, the ancient 

 view of Deity as external to his creation gave place to the essentially 

 modern conception of his immanence. 



If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we 

 shall find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the 

 external system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher plane 



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