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and often is strongly moved by them, just because he wants 
them. Whence come these higher spiritual views of the 
things concerning the life towards God? There is certainly 
no proof that they are merely the result of evolution. There 
is nothing to show that the spiritual elevation in which they 
have their source is a product of the age in which they rise, 
and nothing more. 
27, At all events, Religion, spiritual life, life with God for 
its environment, is a fact in nature, patent, certain, and wide- 
spread. Some men haveit not. Some men have no apprecia- 
tion for harmony, some have hardly any comprehension of 
geometry or arithmetic, some are colour-blind. Yet all 
these inward faculties are believed to correspond to outward 
facts. As to the origin of spiritual life, science may perhaps 
_explain it when it has first explained the origin of physical 
life. What science has to do in each case at present 1s rather 
to trace the course of the river than to guess at the causes that 
produce the fountain. 
Tur Cuainman (Mr. Davin Howarp, F.I.C.).—We have, in the first 
place, to thank Mr. Blackett for his very suggestive essay on a point of 
great importance, one which, as it seems to me, requires the very careful 
attention of every one who really follows modern thought on the subject with 
which it deals). We use that unfortunate word ‘ Evolution” in countless 
different meanings, and there would appear to be a serious danger that the 
employment of it—rightly in one sense—has led to its very inaccurate use in 
a different sense. I think that this essay deals with two different conceptions 
of the word “ Evolution” as applied to religion. If we accept Mr. Herbert 
Spencer’s theory—that man is naturally evolved from the ascidian, and there- 
fore must have evolved his religion in the same way—that, as he has evolved 
his complex heart and all the infinite complexities of his physical formation, 
so has he evolved all the mysteries of his moral and spiritual nature. If we 
accept this theory, we shall be bound to explain the point which the author of 
the paper has put before us as to the universal tendency of religions to fall 
back—not to progress in any given direction, but rather to show a continual 
straining upwards, and then a sinking away downwards. The usual method 
of explaining the existence of religion is to assume that those savages who 
have least of it represent the earliest stage of the human race, and therefore 
must represent the childhood of the human race. I do not think the study 
of dotage would be found a very successful mode of explaining the mind ~ 
of a child ; and to take the degraded races, which have fallen from a better 
state, as the representatives of the early progress of those races is a very 
unphilosophical process. The study of geology is better prosecuted in the 
quarry than among the stones of ancient ruins ; and, surely, to study the 
