746 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



Instead then of religion having been a shadowy emotional, 

 sentimental, anti-scientific, and even unreal thing, it has been 

 — even in the antagonisms, the bitternesses, the wars and 

 destruction that have accompanied it — the greatest proen- 

 vironal principle, in the cogito-spiritic sphere of action and 

 reaction, for lifting humanity steadily and irresistibly for- 

 ward to ever higher platforms of thought and word and action. 

 The action and reaction of hand and eye in relation to the 

 brain have rapidly advanced man from the cognito-cogitic 

 environal standpoint; the action and reaction of eye and mind 

 after man had reached a definite stage of advance, that re- 

 sulted in storing impressions of the objects around him in 

 the universe, as bearing on his happiness and welfare, has as 

 ra})idly advanced man from the cogito-spiritic environal stand- 

 point. 



It is this combination of the moral or higher cogitic with 

 the religious or spiritic forces that has welded mankind from 

 the state of isolated and separately struggling units into ever 

 larger groups, till now it may be said that the North American 

 continent contains one great cogito-spiritic internationality of 

 one and a quarter millions that dominate it. 



Here too it should be observed that over this continent 

 the religious factor was the one which most prominently guided 

 and molded events. For, degraded, mercenary, and blood- 

 thirsty though they often were, the early Spanish and Portu- 

 guese explorers carried monotheistic Christian principles ever 

 before them as a proenvironal ideal, even though their acts 

 often utterly traversed and minimized that ideal. Later the 

 Swedish and Puritan Protestants, the Lutherans, the Friends, 

 the Mennonites, the Dunkards, the Scotch and Dutch Prot- 

 estants, the Hugenots, and the Doukobars all represented 

 human groups who migrated hither not from want, nor from 

 mental incapacity, nor from desire to roam, nor wish to sub- 

 due new lands. They came because moved by a proenvironed 

 response to many stimuli, that pictured a region where a com- 

 l)ined mental, moral, and s])iritual atmosphere of liberty would 

 surround them, and in midst of which they could summate 



