706 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



vines and the mountains with spirits or shadows of the departed 

 dead, the human mind became more and more fixed on these 

 surrounding objects as being associated with the spirits, and 

 so with the memory of loved dead ones. The seasonal changes 

 also that most of these surrounding objects showed, and the 

 evident connection they had with his own welfare, as well 

 as with the spirits of his dead, enabled him to summate all 

 of these impressions or stimuli into successively greater and 

 greater proenvironal resultants that linked all into a unified 

 whole. Thus he, next his living relatives, then departed re- 

 vered ones as spirits, thereafter the surrounding natural objects 

 — it might be animal, vegetable, or inorganic — that the spirits 

 hovered or abode amongst, and the seasonal or sudden changes 

 these objects passed through, became a constantly extending 

 environal area of action and reaction, that each individual 

 was affected by and responded to. 



This second or more extended spiritic or religious advance 

 may very well be designated naturalism, though the term 

 has been applied by some in a more general manner. In the 

 gradual evolution of this naturalism, as the cogitic brain cen- 

 ters of man became more and more complex, distinct stages 

 of advance have evidently been made, in some cases by very 

 slow degrees, that illustrate in religion continuous variation, 

 in other cases by marked and rather sudden steps that rep- 

 resent discontinuous variation or mutation. 



As several well-known writers have pointed out, this muta- 

 tion developed evidently along a variety of lines. The seasonal 

 unfolding of trees into leaf, their blooming and subsequent 

 fruiting, the apparent adaptive supply of the fruits to the 

 needs of man, and the springing into life again of some of the 

 enclosed seeds, as distributive and perpetuating bodies, gave 

 rise doubtless to the most primitive, as it still is a recognized, 

 reverential affection for many trees (20 Ji). It is not surprising, 

 moreover, that tree worship developed most largely in tem- 

 perate regions. For, while the Bo-tree of India as well as other 

 tropical forms that gave grateful and social shade became 

 objects of reverence, so many vegetables or fruits grew and 



