24 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 



flee in terror from volcanic outburst or conflagration. 

 This is the instinct of self-preservation, common to ani- 

 mals and men alike. But nothing even remotely 

 resembling an attitude of prayer, entreaty, objurgation 

 or remonstrance to unseen agencies in the air about 

 them, can apparently be detected in them. If that 

 dumb brute, the faithful dog, may be said to worship 

 anything in nature it is the master whom he sees and 

 who feeds him. In this he would seem to approach 

 the intellectual level of the positivist or Comtist school 

 of thought among mankind, who appear to have se- 

 lected the same imperfect, capricious deity as the 

 object of their worship. But this can hardly be called 

 spiritualizing an unseen power of nature. 



PROGRESS 



Now, if to this so-called religious instinct of man be 

 added his apparently infinite capacity for upward 

 development, for progress mentally, morally, spiritually, 

 (and likewise his equally infinite capacity for downward 

 degeneracy along the same lines), I think you will have 

 the real factors in life which cardinally differentiate 

 him from the so-called lower animals. The animals 

 would appear to be comparatively stationary as regards 

 progress. Man must apparently either advance or 

 retrograde. In other words, there would seem to be 

 something more than mind, with its sacred trinity of 

 intelligence, emotion, and will, which makes the real 

 difference between man and the lower animals who 

 appear to possess all these faculties in at least their 



