700 Causes and Course of Organic Evolutjon 



For the frequently wavering, uncertain, and even disreputable 

 courses that many religious movements have exhibited usually 

 represent antagonistic efforts between the intensely true 

 and earnest qualities of the first three, rarely of the fourth, 

 and the more or less unworthy qualities of the remaining ones. 



It is by no means surprising therefore that when some relig- 

 ious cult of unworthy type agreed on a definite religious pro- 

 gram or creed, and required its adherents and specially its 

 priests or clerics to give unswerving allegiance to such creed, 

 under promise or expectation of mercenary reward, individuals 

 were attracted whose sense of mental and moral honesty was 

 of low grade. Thus earnest religious aspirants thereby often 

 became mixed with unworthy men, so that both were judged 

 by common standards. In the long run, mankind from sheer 

 spiritic necessity discovers the true in order to follow it, and 

 rejects the false or unworthy, as tending to drag him down. 



Man only builds up religious "experience" then, by sense 

 impressions from without, or by inherited energizing tenden- 

 cies derived originally from sense impressions that incline him 

 to utilize these impressions more fully. On the religious or 

 spiritic side also, as on the cogitic, the cognitic, and the biotic, 

 man may exhibit any one of the three lines of action open to 

 him, namely evolution, stagnation, or devolution. And it is 

 often difficult at the present day to determine whether some 

 races — e. g., the Australian and the Peruvian Indian — exhibit 

 the first or the last of these stages. 



So, in a succeeding survey of the past and present religions 

 of the world, the discoveries and studies of archaeologists, of 

 anthropologists, of ethnologists, of philologists, and of re- 

 ligiologists* must all be taken into account. So the writer 

 and every one who approaches the subject with a sincere desire 

 to unravel and trace man's religious history is equally indebted 

 to the works of Dawkins, Reinach, Evans, Michaehs, Petrie 

 and many others amongst archaeologists; of Herodotus, Quat- 



* This word the writer reluctantly coins as the only apparently appropriate 

 one that the terms theologist or religious historian, hitherto used, fail to ex- 

 press. 



