780 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



hypocritical religionists might step in, who for sake of place 

 and wealth might ally themselves with tyrannical rulers, 

 earnest, reflective, and noble spirits must then as always have 

 arisen to direct toward purer aims. So, in spite of the Minoan 

 and similar cruelties associated with worship even in the years 

 2000-3000 B. C, this existed alongside fairly peaceful civili- 

 zations that must have bound together into nationalities hun- 

 dreds of thousands or even millions of Sumerians, Cretans, 

 and Egyptians of those times. 



The evil and regrettable results of the cruelties, the deceits, 

 the imprisonments, the butcheries, the wholesale supplantings 

 and subjugations that the "rulers" of these civilized ones 

 and the peoples themselves, as well as those of less civilized 

 grade, every now and again indulged in or were subjected to, 

 led the nobler minds to compound together all the best points 

 in their civilization, and to proenviron therefrom a more lofty 

 and aspiring plan where not merely justice, but where peace, 

 love, happiness and brotherhood would rule. That the old 

 Aryan and Iranian nationalities were proenvironing it, hoping 

 for it, and even expecting it is shown by the eagerness with 

 which Zarathushtra, the Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, and others 

 were welcomed and their teachings discussed. So, for a thou- 

 sand years at least before the Clu"istian era, the above teachers 

 of humanity proclaimed a gospel that was in many cases no 

 mere idle religious dream, but was an intense struggle toward 

 the humanization and socialization of mankind. They graph- 

 ically realized the abounding evils of struggle for existence, 

 competition, analysis. They clearly foresaw also that by 

 socialization alone could man happily and peacefully overcome 

 competition. 



The origin of the conception of a "Golden Age," as set forth 

 in the Zend-Avesta and in the Latin Poets, is merely a pro- 

 environal longing for what their authors hoped had once ex- 

 isted and might again return, while large parts of the Zoro- 

 astrian Vendidad, fragmentary though they be, are social 

 rules of so general and widespread a character that they might 

 be applied hy any nation at any time, during a certain ad- 



