44 Evolution and Religion 



It is an intellectual cut de sac; I do not see how you 

 can possibly escape it. But fortunately for these offen- 

 ders against the social organism, man is not always 

 strictly logical. Being complex, he allows his emotions 

 to influence his cold reason. 



Religion 



I have already referred to man's inveterate tendency 

 to spiritualize the many enemies that stand in the way 

 of his survival, and likewise to deify the friendly powers 

 that seem to help toward that survival. Whatever is 

 mysterious, unknown, life-giving, terrible, or death-com- 

 pelling, as you saw, becomes a hidden divinity to be 

 propitiated by sacrifice; and how perverted the sacrifi- 

 cial idea might become in man's mind, Moloch and 

 other juggernauts only too well attest. The motive of 

 this tendency appeared to be fear or gratitude, its 

 basis, love, as we noticed in the way in which man 

 deified all the powers that militated against, or helped 

 toward, his own or his family's continued existence. 

 To him now, out of these very conditions of life and 

 death, came the new startling idea (forced constantly 

 and relentlessly upon his attention by the inevitable 

 law of mortality), that he must subordinate individual 

 survival of self to survival of race. The idea stood as 

 resolutely across the path of self-survival as any one of 

 the many enemies of his life. Individual survival was 

 ultimately impossible through the very law of mor- 

 tality common to all human beings; but survival of 



