INTRODUCTION 



ency to conceive that the meaning of evolution 

 was, at least in case of man's evolution, some- 

 what legible, there grew upon him also the dis- 

 position to regard the historical religions of hu- 

 manity, despite their crudenesses and their false 

 anthropomorphism, as involving actual pro- 

 cesses of adjustment, possessing positive value. 

 When religion appeared amongst men, it was 

 a new function, resembling in its novelty the 

 first appearance of the function of vision in the 

 lowest animals. Just as vision in its rude be- 

 ginnings in no wise suggested the power of the 

 astronomer to examine the spectra of remote 

 stars, while yet, even in the first pigment-spots 

 that responded to light, there was a beginning 

 of the very function that was afterward to be so 

 far-reaching, just so, as Fiske found himself dis- 

 posed to reason, religion, even in its primitive 

 forms, was the first stage of a functional process 

 that must be regarded as an adjustment tending 

 to lead to something higher. But by hypo- 

 thesis religion was always an attempted adjust- 

 ment to the ultimate reality. Hence, as it now 

 seemed to our evolutionist, this adjustment must 

 have had from the first a positive meaning much 

 more genuine than, in his former discussion, he 

 had been disposed to recognize. Just as he 

 learned, in all these later reflections, to estimate 

 the process of evolution rather by its outcome 

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