xxviii HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



power of expansion, for religion is one of tlie highest forms of 

 expansion, both social and individual. But the race or tribe 

 whose power of expansion is less must succumb in the struggle 

 with adversaries possessed of greater expanding power ; and the 

 possession of a religious ideal, however vague, implies a certain 

 degree of expanding power. Ethnology confirms this view. In 

 the measure that social evolution progressed and became more 

 complicated, in the measure that the heterogeneity of social 

 types augmented, religious beliefs and institutions became more 

 comphcated ; and even as the most primitive forms of ancestor- 

 worship are found among the most primitive peoples, so the 

 most developed forms of religion are foimd among the most 

 highly evolved — the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Europeans. 

 But what does this mean, if not that the evolution of religious 

 beliefs has proceeded fari passu with the evolution of society, 

 with the ever-growing expansion, biological, economic, and moral, 

 of humanity ? 



The question may be raised as to why religion is such an 

 indispensable social variation, why human expansion manifests 

 itself invariably, under one of its aspects, as an expansion of 

 religious ideals. We have no intention here of attempting to 

 solve this question. It has been said by Quatrefages that man 

 is a religious animal ; and this is true if we mean thereby that 

 religion is an indispensable social variation, which apparently 

 must be manifested if the survival of the society is to be efEected, 

 and that it is consequently an indispensable instrument of social 

 adaptation. Man, as we know him everywhere to-day, with 

 perhaps a few insignificant exceptions among the lowest savages, 

 is essentially a " metaphysical animal," whether he know it or 

 not. The savage who imagines his other self to go away in 

 dreams, and who, knowing nothing of the phenomenon of death, 

 places food and drink in the dwelling of the fellow-tribesman 

 whom he expects to see return, is a primitive metaphysician ; 

 and as social life becomes ever more and more evolved, this 



