114 A Century of Science 



tion for man, and some of the assumptions which 

 underlie every system of religion must be true. For 

 example, with regard to the assumption that what 

 we see of the present life is not the whole thing ; 

 that there is a spiritual side of the question beside 

 the material side ; that, in short, there is for man a 

 life eternal. When I wrote the &quot; Destiny of Man,&quot; 

 all that I ventured to say was, that it did not seem 

 quite compatible with ordinary common sense to 

 suppose that so much pains would have been taken 

 to produce a merely ephemeral result. But since 

 then another argument has occurred to me : that 

 just at the time when the human race was begin 

 ning to come upon the scene, when the germs of 

 morality were coming in with the family, when so 

 ciety was taking its first start, there came into the 

 human mind how one can hardly say, but there 

 did come the beginnings of a groping after some 

 thing that lies outside and beyond the world of sense. 

 That groping after a spiritual world has been 

 going on here for much more than a hundred thou 

 sand years, and it has played an enormous part in 

 the history of mankind, in the whole development 

 of human society. Nobody can imagine what man 

 kind would have been without it up to the present 

 time. Either all religion has been a reaching out 

 for a phantom that does not exist, or a reaching 



