Moral Ideas 31 



of life and death in their many forms his motive would 

 appear to have been plain: to avert death from those 

 he loved, and thus wittingly or unwittingly to secure 

 the survival of his race. 



Moral Ideas 



It is here, I think, that we can most satisfactorily 

 account for the moral ideas which the fears and loves 

 wrought through this evolutionary struggle have de- 

 veloped in our race. For as man progressed upward, 

 finding many enemies in the path of his survival, you 

 saw how he duly deified the wild beasts that endangered 

 his life. Then followed mysterious diseases, blasting 

 heats, freezing colds, panic-breeding earthquakes, vol- 

 canoes, floods, thunderstorms, conflagrations, the spirits 

 of which he also duly attempted to pacify by sacrifice and 

 oblation. Last of all seems to have come the idea of 

 spirits of good as opposed to these powers of evil, of 

 divinities which brought back to earth warmth after 

 winter, coolness after oppressive summer heat; of 

 spirits which gave plenty after famine, health after 

 pestilence, peace after war; of spirits of good which 

 stilled the violence of passing thunderstorms, earth- 

 quakes, volcanic outbursts, floods, or raging conflagra- 

 tions. In other words, man was spiritualizing the idea 

 of survival from the many enemies that assailed his 

 life or the lives of those he loved. And inextricably 

 intertwined with it came the new idea, likewise born 

 from the same evolutionary stress of life, of the survival 

 of his race as opposed to the survival of himself, an 



