

The Descent of Man 



a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies < 

 to be universal, and apparently follows from 

 a considerable advance in man's reason and 

 from a still greater advance in his faculties of 

 imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am 

 aware that the assumed instinctive belief in 

 God has been used by many persons as an argu- 

 ment for His existence. But this is a rash judg- 

 ment, as we should thus be compelled to believe 

 in the existence of many cruel and malignant 

 spirits, only a little more powerful than man; 

 for the belief in them is far more general than 

 in a beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal 

 and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise 

 in the mind of man until he has been elevated 

 by long-continued culture. 



He who believes in the advancement of man 

 from some low organized form will naturally 

 ask, How does this bear on the belief in the 

 immortality of the soul ? The barbarous races 

 of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shown, possess 

 no clear belief of this kind; but arguments 

 derived from the primeval beliefs of savuyvs 

 are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. 

 Few persons feel any anxiety from the im- 

 possibility of determining at what precise period 

 in the development of the individual, from the 

 first trace of a minute germinal vesicle, man 

 becomes an immortal being; and there is no 

 greater cause for anxiety because the period 

 in the gradually ascending organic scale cannot 

 possibly be determined. 

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