690 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



and vaguely anthropomorphic Power or Ruler of the earth 

 and heavens was proenvironed always as a mighty national 

 deity of infinite brightness, majesty, and power, who blessed 

 or chastised his people, their allies, or their enemies, according 

 to the degree in which they obeyed his moral laws and strove 

 to link themselves with him, as a great intramundane and 

 ultramundane power, in religious reverence. When they strove 

 proenvironally to become more and more pure, sympathetic 

 man with man, and to live in conformity with their highest 

 aspirations toward the attributes and being of the great God, 

 they were pictured as prospering nationally and often indi- 

 vidually. When they forsook high proenvironal spiritic aspir- 

 ations, turned to and fostered low^er cogitic and specially cog- 

 nitic indulgences, permitted thereby the higher cogitic or 

 moral and the spiritic parts of their being to become dulled and 

 even atrophied, individual and then national degradation and 

 disruption followed. 



Such is the constant refrain in parts of the Zend-iV vesta 

 of Zarathushtra and his successors, in the books of Judges, 

 of the early prophets, of the Kings, of Psalms, and to some 

 degree of Proverbs. 



So the tliree outstanding cogitic and spiritic attitudes of 

 the real forward leaders — the mental wrestlers and aspirers — 

 of both nationalities were either a constant proenvironal out- 

 reaching or aspiration for themselves and for their nation, 

 after "a closer walk with God," or a mourning over back- 

 sliding from such aspirations, or a rejoicing and hymn of praise 

 that after such backsliding they had again been brought to 

 their former aspiring or proenvironing frame of mind. And 

 one need only try to realize the mental agonies, the spiritic 

 wrestlings, which Zarathushtra, Moses, Samuel,. Plato, Isaiah, 

 and Paul experienced, to understand how intense and con- 

 centrated were their expenditures of spiritic, cogitic, and cog- 

 nitic energy, as well as their out-reachings — their proenviron- 

 ings — toward the unseen but yet mentally real power and 

 immaterial personality that had developed in their minds. 



The rise and subsequent wide extension, however, of Mith- 

 raism as a degraded semi-monotheistic, semi-polytheistic off- 



