THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



development of social instincts are particularly striking 

 and equivalent to those of savage tribes when conspicu- 

 ous individuals (old or strong males) have acquired a 

 leadership of the troop, and successfully insure the ob- 

 servance of the proper habits or duties. Many of these 

 organized bands are in some respects higher than the 

 savages at the lowest stages who live in isolated families, 

 or only form loose temporary associations of a few fami- 

 lies. The great progress made by comparative psychol- 

 ogy and ethnology, and historical and prehistorical re- 

 search, in the second half of the nineteenth century, 

 confirms us in the conviction that a long scale of inter- 

 mediate stages joins the rudiments of law in the social 

 primates and other mammals to the sense of law in the 

 lower savage, and this again to that of the barbarian and 

 the civilized human being — right up to the science of 

 law in modern Europe. 



Like civil laws, the commands of religion come origi- 

 nally from the morals of the savage, and eventually from 

 the social instincts of the primates. The important 

 province of mental life to which we give the vague name 

 of religion was developed at an early stage among the 

 prehistoric races from whom we all descend. When we 

 study its origin from the point of view of empirical 

 psychology and monistic evolution, we find that religion 

 has arisen polyphyletically from different sources — an- 

 cestor worship, the desire of personal immortality, the 

 craving for a causal explanation of phenomena, supersti- 

 tion of various kinds, the strengthening of the moral law 

 by the authority of a divine law-giver, etc. According as 

 the imagination of the savage or the barbarian followed 

 one or other of these lines it raised up hundreds of relig- 

 ious forms. Only a few of them survived in the strug- 

 gle for existence, and acquired (at least outwardly) do- 

 j minion over the modern mind. But as independent 

 and impartial science advances in our time, religion is 



420 



