418 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



beliefs which, if not absolutely false, contained but small 

 amounts of truth disguised by immense amounts of error. 



Hence the hypothesis that living beings resulted from 

 special creations, being a primitive hypothesis, is probably an 

 untrue hypothesis. It would be strange if, while early men 

 failed to reach the truth in so many cases where it is com 

 paratively conspicuous, they reached it in a case where it is 

 comparatively hidden. 



111. Besides the improbability given to the belief in 

 special creations, by its association with mistaken beliefs in 

 general, a further improbability is given to it by its associa 

 tion with a special class of mistaken beliefs. It belongs to a 

 family of beliefs which have one after another been destroyed 

 by advancing knowledge; and is, indeed, almost the only 

 member of the family surviving among educated people. 



We all know that the savage thinks of each striking phe 

 nomenon, or group of phenomena, as caused by some separate 

 personal agent; that out of this conception there grows up 

 a polytheistic conception, in which these minor personalities 

 arc variously generalized into deities presiding over different 

 divisions of nature; and that these arc eventually further 

 generalized. This progressive consolidation of causal agencies 

 may be traced in the creeds of all races, and is far from 

 complete in the creed of the most advanced races. The un 

 lettered rustics who till our fields, do not let the conscious 

 ness of a supreme power wholly absorb the aboriginal con 

 ceptions of good and evil spirits, and of charms or secret 

 potencies dwelling in particular objects. The earliest mode 

 of thinking changes only as fast as the constant relations 

 among phenomena are established. Scarcely less 



familiar is the truth, that while accumulating knowledge 

 makes these conceptions of personal causal agents gradually 

 more vague, as it merges them into general causes, it also 

 destroys the habit of thinking of them as working after the 

 methods of personal agents. We do not now, like Kepler, 



