646 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



tribe, state, and nation coml)ined all the past mental stimuli 

 that had moved them through long thousands of years, and 

 formed a proenvironal picture for the future, the material 

 response to which might seem for highest good, there arose 

 a long procession of advances that we can only briefly mention. 

 Respect and love of children to parents and of parents to chil- 

 dren gave rise to moral family lairs, and to kinship religion, 

 that represented the most primitive but striking advance. 



Next, a recognition of morals as principles that seemed 

 outside of man, and yet that alone guided him aright as a 

 social factor took shape, about the same time that man looked 

 to spirits of the departed dead, of loved animal pets, of trees 

 that lived before he was born and that lived on after his de- 

 parture, or to the sighing "spirit" of the wind. So moral laws 

 and animistic or naturalistic religions for man represented twin 

 moral and religious proenvironal aspirations of deepest moment. 



Thereafter the widespread moral laws — proenvironings 

 truly — of 10,000 to 7500 years possibly ago — that the Sumer- 

 ians, the Egj^ptians, the Assyrians, the Irano- Aryans, and the 

 Chinese evolved, in order to ensure respect, authority, and 

 obedience, were linked with materialized but consecrated 

 idols that symbolized mundane and supra-mundane powers. 

 So moral laws from the gods — the powers of the air whose 

 images filled the temples — and ^polytheistic religion that these 

 gods stood for prevailed for a time over a large part of the 

 earth. 



But ever higher and nobler proenvironings led Zarathushtra, 

 Moses, Socrates, Plato, and Buddha to plan the unified morals 

 of "The Perfect State," in the "Republic" and "Laws" of 

 Plato, or those of the Biblical Pentateuch, along with the 

 clear proenvironed presentation of a unified divine Spirit — 

 a one supreme God, at one with and the author of, these moral 

 laws. So the unified moral laws of one great and moral Being 

 became a sul)lime i)roenvironed plan that centered in mono- 

 theistic religion. 



Man however aspires to the eternal, the undying, but also 

 reveres the paternal hearth. Therefore, when Christ came 



