en. v.] RELIGION AS ADJUSTMENT. 457 



as we have seen, must mainly consist in spiritual improve 

 ment, and in it we may recognize the sure token of the 

 glorious fulness of life to which Humanity must eventually 

 attain. 



Such is the crude outline of the theory of sin, and of the 

 ethical sanctions furnished by religion, into which Cosmisrn 

 metamorphoses the anthropomorphic theory. Far from re 

 jecting as a mythologic fiction the doctrine that sin is a 

 violation of God s decrees, entailing inevitable punishment, 

 science recognizes therein the anthropomorphic version of 

 the truth that every failure in the system of adjustments in 

 which life consists is followed inevitably by pain, in some 

 one of its lower or higher forms. And thus, by bringing the 

 whole subject into the philosophic domain wherein the Law 

 of Evolution holds sway, we begin to understand, so far as 

 it is possible to understand, the philosophy of evil, pain, 

 and wrong, which to the anthropomorphic theist, as we have 

 seen, must ever remain a distressing and insoluble enigma. 

 Let us briefly trace the process by which men have slowly 

 arrived at the perception of the beneficence of pain, that 

 we may the more clearly see how the process has been 

 determined by the deanthropomorphization of the agencies 

 by which pain is wrought. 



In treating of the philosophy of fetishism (Part I. chap, 

 vii.) it was shown that by primeval men, unused to scientific 

 generalization, the forces of nature must have been likened 

 to human volition, because there was nothing else with which 

 to compare them. Man felt within himself a source of power, 

 and did not yet surmise that power could have any other 

 source ; and consequently he identified, without any qualifi 

 cation, the forces displayed outside of himself with the force 

 of will as directly revealed in his consciousness. In this 

 necessity of thought originated not only the personifications of 

 ancient mythology, but also the primitive religious worship ; 

 a religion of sacrifice, of sorcery, and of terror, as different 



