716 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



probable therefore that some of the Hottentot tribes, which 

 show rather advanced polytheistic beliefs, may have risen 

 from ancestralism and naturalism to polytheism through ancient 

 contact with voyagers from Arabia, Egypt, and other countries, 

 thousands of years ago. But the nations that gave them such 

 have advanced far along higher ideals, while the Hottentot 

 has remained on the stagnating platform of human life, or in 

 some groups has degraded and died out before the pressure 

 and onslaughts of Kaffir and other invaders. 



But for a correct estimation of the scope of polytheism, 

 as of the other religious platforms already referred to, in its 

 effect on any people, one must constantly keep in view the 

 relative degree to which the lower and quite distinct mental 

 and moral activities advanced or stagnated or retrograded. 

 For, since spiritic evolution largely rests on moral and mental 

 platforms, even though distinct from and superior to these, if 

 the latter become degraded in character or tendency the whole 

 religious life suffers. Therefore, amongst minor as amongst 

 the greater nations of antiquity, when an advancing mentality 

 and morality were conjoined with earnest proenvironal as- 

 piration toward pure national deities, the people became cour- 

 ageous, energetic, and dominant. Such was the case, as his- 

 torians like Gruppe and Fowler tell us, with the early Greeks 

 and the Romans in the age of the Republic. 



The family was the healthy moral unit; the daily life of 

 effort in the field, on the thrashing floor, in home and temple 

 building, conduced to active mental effort. The strong vig- 

 orous ancestralism that had developed into naturalism and 

 later animism was giving place to polytheism, in which the 

 gods were reverenced and regarded even with affection. So 

 the festivals of Mars as the primitively protective god of the 

 fields, of Pales and Ceres as the deities of summer plenty, 

 and of Chronus or Saturn and Ops as those of autumnal thanks- 

 giving, were heartfelt and joyous acknowledgments by the 

 nation's ancestors, that great forces outside themselves which 

 they loved to regard as personalities sent the sunshine and 

 the shower, the dew and the drying winds. Only when their 



