GENERAL, SUMMARY. 607 



including sympatliy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily 

 gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural 

 selection. 



The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the 

 greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between 

 man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we 

 have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in 

 man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agen- 

 cies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a con- 

 siderable advance in man's reason, and from a still greater ad- 

 vance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I 

 am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been 

 used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But 

 this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to 

 believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only 

 a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far 

 more general than in a beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal 

 and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, 

 until he has been elevated by long-continued culture. 



He who believes in the advancement of man from some low 

 organized form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the be- 

 lief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, 

 as Sir J. Lubbock has shown, possess no clear belief of this kind ; 

 but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, 

 as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Pew persons feel any 

 anxiety from the Impossibility of determining at what precise 

 period in the development of the individual, from the first trace 

 of a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being; 

 and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period 

 cannot possibly be determined in the gradually ascending organic 

 scale.^ 



I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work 

 will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who 

 denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to 

 explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from 

 some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural 

 selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the 

 laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species 

 and of the Individual are equally parts of that grand sequence 

 of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of 

 blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion, 

 whether or not we are able to believe that every slight variation 

 of structure, — the union of each pair in marriage, — the dissem- 



2 The Rev. J. A. Pieton gives a discussion to this effect in his 'New 

 Theories and the Old Faith,' 1870. 



