712 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



tunities for enrichment, aggrandizement, or wielding of political 

 or family influence. 



It is to the latter type of individual, who obtrudes himself 

 at every phase of earnest religious aspiration, that humanity 

 owes some of the most misleading, unworthy, debased, and 

 utterly false conceptions of human life now, and of a possible 

 continuation of it in a future state. But, wherever a caste, 

 a class, a sect, or a privileged group of individuals is permitted 

 to develop from amongst their fellows, invariably regrettable 

 and often disastrous consequences follow for the human race. 



The association of departed human spirits with many mate- 

 rial things led by slow degrees to a still wider proenvironal 

 outlook. For in addition to the objects of his more immediate 

 environment, that seem always to have appealed most power- 

 fully to primitive man, up even to the present day, he became 

 increasingly impressed with the relation that he and immedi- 

 ately surrounding objects bore to the celestial bodies. He 

 gradually realized that the recurrent thunders and storms, 

 the moon and the sun in their periodic appearances, the stars 

 in their multitude and movements, were all greatly more 

 important and enduring than himself, or than most objects 

 by which he was surrounded. So by slow degrees he came 

 to view these as great heavenly spirits that might scatter 

 broadcast good or evil, blessing or cursing. Of these naturally 

 the two most impressive for him were the Sun and the Moon. 

 The former appeared as a great dispenser of light, heat, growth, 

 extended capacity for vision and happy human feeling. But 

 at times also the sun hid its face behind a veil of clouds, or 

 even by eclipse almost suddenly left the earth in darkness as 

 if in anger. 



The moon in succeeding the sun by constant appearance 

 and disappearance, in its waxing and waning, in its demar- 

 cation of monthly periods, in eclipses, in halo surroundings, 

 showed a wonderful personality and beauteous majesty. So 

 man collected all his sensory impressions of both bodies in 

 themselves, in their evident connection with many phenomena 

 of the world, and in their action on his tribe, his family, and 



