6 THE LESSON OF EVOLUTION 



dently among the negroes of Africa and the Eed 

 Indians of America, as well as among the semi- 

 civilised nations near the eastern shores of the Medi- 

 terranean. In Persia and North- West India the 

 philosophers developed Animism into Pantheism ; a 

 philosophy which teaches that mind pervades all 

 matter, and that nature and God are one. On the 

 other hand, among the Semitic nations, the prophets 

 of Israel gradually passed from a belief in tribal gods 

 to Theism, in which God is recognised as existing 

 outside of and unconnected with the material universe, 

 which He has created. But with this belief they 

 combined the idea of a rival evil spirit, who was 

 constantly tempting men to break the moral law. 



The originators of these philosophies were, however, 

 poets or mystics who arrived at their conclusions 

 intuitively and could offer no proofs, thinking, indeed, 

 that their beliefs must be self-evident to all. So, at 

 a later date, we find an atheistic philosophy, or 

 Materialism, also in existence, due, probably, to a re- 

 action against the excesses of the Greek Mythologists. 

 That the truth of none of these philosophies was self- 

 evident is shown by the fact that, in the classical 

 world, all of them flourished together, and highly 

 cultivated men could be found among the Polytheists, 

 the Pantheists, the Theists, and the Atheists. 



At last science awoke from its long sleep and 

 began to study with care the material phenomena of 

 the Universe. Scientific observations commenced with 

 the Chaldeans and early Greeks, but it was a dreamy 

 kind of science, confined to a few. The spirit of 

 inquiry was not thoroughly aroused until the bold 

 navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 



