COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



rogative of that creature whose future career of 

 evolution, as we have seen, must mainly con- 

 sist in spiritual improvement, — and in it we 

 may recognize the sure token of the glorious 

 fulness of life to which Humanity must event- 

 ually attain. 



Such is the crude outline of the theory of sin, 

 and of the ethical sanctions furnished by reli- 

 gion, into which Cosmism metamorphoses the 

 anthropomorphic theory. Far from rejecting as 

 a mythologic fiction the doctrine that sin is a 

 violation of God's decrees, entailing inevitable 

 punishment, science recognizes therein the an- 

 thropomorphic version of the truth that every 

 failure in the system of adjustments in which 

 life consists is followed inevitably by pain, in 

 some one of its lower or higher forms. And 

 thus, by bringing the whole subject into the 

 philosophic domain wherein the Law of Evo- 

 lution holds sway, we begin to understand, so 

 far as it is possible to understand, the philoso- 

 phy of evil, pain, and wrong, which to the an- 

 thropomorphic theist, as we have seen, must 

 ever remain a distressing and insoluble enigma. 

 Let us briefly trace the process by which men 

 have slowly arrived at the perception of the 

 beneficence of pain, that we may the more 

 clearly see how the process has been determined 

 by the deanthropomorphization of the agencies 

 by which pain is wrought. 

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