COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



that God created the world a few thousand years 

 ago in nearly the same condition in which we 

 now behold it; traditional observances, such as 

 the keeping of a Sabbath, advanced social in- 

 stitutions, like monogamy, and highly elaborated 

 philosophical doctrines, such as monotheism, 

 are unhesitatingly referred back to the begin- 

 ning of the world ; and it is in general taken for 

 granted that the thoughts and feelings current in 

 past ages were like the thoughts and feelings cur- 

 rent in our own. Until within the last three or 

 four generations this statical view of things was 

 shared by cultivated with uncultivated people, 

 though with somewhat different degrees of nar- 

 rowness. On the other hand the dynamic view 

 of things, represented by the Doctrine of Evo- 

 lution, which regards the universe and all that 

 is in it as presenting a different aspect from 

 epoch to epoch, obviously results from the ad- 

 justment of our theories to longer and longer 

 sequences in the past. The progress of geo- 

 logic discovery, revealing the immense antiquity 

 of the earth, was one of the circumstances which 

 began to arouse in educated people a tendency 

 to regard things as continually though slowly 

 changing — and the theories of Goethe and 

 Lyell, the revolution in biology wrought by 

 Lamarck and Cuvier, and the application of the 

 comparative method to the historic and philo- 

 logic interpretation of past states of society, deep- 

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