116 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



some old chief of the tribe ; and, when he himself 

 has thoughts, waking or sleeping, which he can 

 not readily account for, he thinks that these are 

 similarly suggested to him by some ghostly de 

 mon or deity. The daimonion of Sokrates was a 

 specimen of just this sort of barbaric psychology. 

 Now, in modern times and among Christian 

 peoples, this primitive philosophy of Nature is 

 pretty thoroughly superseded. The tendency of 

 modern thought is strongly towards a very strict 

 monotheism. An imperfect monotheism had long 

 ago driven out the general notion of innumerable 

 ghost-deities ; but Christianity arose at a time 

 when the primitive philosophy was still very 

 strong, and so Christianity has always been more 

 or less incrusted with heathen conceptions. In 

 recent times, however, the prolonged study of 

 physical science has begun to tell powerfully upon 

 all our habits of thought ; and one effect of this 

 is that we have at last really begun to grasp the 

 conception of the unity of God, in the only sense 

 in which such a conception can have any validity. 

 We have begun to conceive of Divine action as 

 uniform, incessant, and general, throughout each 

 and every region of the universe, however vast or 

 however tiny, so that the infinite whole is ani 

 mated forever by one immutable principle of 



