710 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



had departed life. So mixed groups of benign and evil spirits 

 were proenvironed by man as the only resultant explanation 

 of all the stimuli which seemed to come to him by day and 

 night, in sunshine and in storm, amid grateful rains or de- 

 structive earthquakes. 



But since all spirits could only be thought of by man as 

 the intangible, unmaterial life-exhibitions of his dead friends, 

 or ancestors, or enemies, or deceased animals, such spirits 

 were always anthropomorphic or of some biological concept 

 to him, w^hile at the same time they now exhibited qualities 

 that w^ere dissociated from material existence. And the writer 

 cannot but regard it as striking and even suggestive that, at 

 this stage of man's religious evolution, he should have rec- 

 ognized, with surprising clearness, the possible difference be- 

 tween kinetic energy that might leave one body and yet be 

 continued as an intangible state elsewhere, and material bodies 

 or stores of static energy that might disrupt when a certain 

 amount of spiritic or other energy had left it. It must be 

 acknowledged that the entire view thus proenvironed was 

 crude and very loosely scientific. But it illustrates the great 

 fact that all human history bears witness to, namely, that 

 man on his spiritic side often outruns slow and exact scientific 

 effort and result, so far as they are applicable to man, and 

 reaches positions — even though vague and at times unsci- 

 entific — that slower cogitic effort attains to later and more 

 laboriously. 



In all subsequent considerations therefore of man's religious 

 advance, this animistic outlook on his environment that came 

 only gradually, and subsequent to ancestralism, or even in 

 many cases to naturalism, has to be kept in view and reckoned 

 with. Furthermore, it impressed on his mental being the 

 sense of reverence and inhibitory control, amid many forces 

 that might cause him to act in impetuous and unguarded 

 manner. For it compelled him to realize that often "things 

 are not what they seem." 



We now know enough of the evolving religious life of the 

 Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Aryan, and Iranian families 



