708 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



the abodes of certain animals, or that hot springs, echoing 

 rocks, and hke striking natural environments, became pil- 

 grimage spots to which members of a tribe might resort and 

 show their affection for such. Hoping or even gradually 

 believing that the spirit, the breath, the life-energy of departed 

 dear ones might linger there, as suggested by their actual ap- 

 pearance in dreams, these spots became sacred or venerated, 

 and offerings to the ancestral spirits were left on the trees 

 or echoing rocks, as still is done by many rude tribes. Thus 

 probably originated the first "leafy temples" that we should 

 not despise, but regard with high respect as leading surely 

 along an upward way. 



If we pause again to ascertain how that upward way was 

 blazed, amid the many mental and physical tangles that beset 

 man, we would again explain it as primarily and largely due 

 to operation of the law of proenvironment. In his desire 

 to reach out ever to the most satisfied stage of living, he was 

 stimulated by love for wife, for offspring, for dead ones who 

 had loved him during life, for those living who had benefited 

 him. He was also stimulated to know whither the living 

 something, the energy, of the dead body had gone; why his 

 and his parents' imprints — mental and physical — were upon 

 his children; why all experienced a like hunger, disease, pain, 

 and death; or satiety, health, and happiness. 



These varied stimuli he combined in his highest nerve-cells 

 — if we regard the continued mental effort employed, and the 

 complexity of molecular organization that such involved — and 

 summating them there into proenvironal responses of ever 

 greater significance and complexity, the rites, the observances, 

 and the social bonds of Ancestralism became the pathway 

 mapped out and pursued. 



In turn again, man realized by degrees that all ancestral 

 phenomena were but a part of a wider and even more impress- 

 ive set of events that stirred him to reverential affection for, 

 and combination of, the responses of ancestralism with natur- 

 alistic phenomena above described. He in turn combined 

 all of these stimuli into summated states, from which he evolved 



