THE CONTROVERSIALIST I7I 



these matters. Beliefs are no longer only attacked, 

 they are explained. Religions are no longer treated 

 as wholly true or as wholly false, as the inventions of 

 designing priests or as of supernatural origin ; but as 

 the product of man's crude speculations concerning 

 himself and his surroundings, and of his spiritual 

 needs, no matter in what repulsive form these are sat- 

 isfied. And a survey shows how each one, with its 

 outcome in creed and ritual, falls into line with the 

 processes of evolution ; how, like organisms, all 

 spring from common elements ; how, like these, they 

 bear within themselves the traces of their stages of 

 development ; how natural selection acts upon them, 

 their survival depending on their power of adaptation, 

 and how, this failing, they perish and become fos- 

 silised in the strata of obsolete creeds. 



Beyond the general remark that religion arises, 

 " like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action 

 and interaction of man's mind with that which is not 

 in man's mind, and takes the intellectual coverings 

 of Fetichism or Polytheism ; of Theism or Atheism, 

 of Superstition or Rationalism," ] Huxley refrained 

 from speculations as to the particular primary im- 

 pulses which gave this or that shape to it. All such 

 speculations — and history, both past and present, has 

 seen many of them — are foredoomed to failure, be- 



1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 138. 



