88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tribes into federations, ethnic society is evolved. The ghosts of tribal 

 chieftains are supposed to be more powerful and important than ordi- 

 nary ghosts; they enjoy, therefore, extraordinary honor and attention. 

 They become gods. Eeligion becomes theistic. 



The struggle for existence has now been won. The collective 

 struggle for advantage begins. From every side confederated tribes of 

 barbarian men press toward those regions that offer exceptional oppor- 

 tunities; such regions in early days were the shores and back country 

 of the Caspian Sea, the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. This 

 is the struggle for situation. Bringing together in one habitat a motley 

 multitude of tribes, and fragments of shattered tribes, it grinds the 

 tribal system to destruction. It assembles and mingles the human ele- 

 ments for an evolution of civil society. 



When the struggle for place and opportunity has been won, and 

 command of territory has been achieved, every energy is enlisted in the 

 economic struggle for abundance. The new social order is not yet es- 

 tablished. Miscellaneous men jostle each other, as in a mining camp. 

 Each lives among his fellows on sufferance, or toleration. Society is 

 merely approbational, and its interests are purely materialistic. The 

 deities are gods of crops and generation. 



This state of things, of course, can not last. The struggle for abun- 

 dance begets the struggle for efficiency. Ideas and standards of effici- 

 ency appear. The efficient find each other out. They like each other 

 and each other's ways. They dislike the inefficient, and begin in all 

 possible ways to make life unpleasant for them. Efficiency and the 

 habits that make therefor are identified with righteousness. The gods 

 are credited with righteous impulses, and a desire to have men do right. 

 Society has become congenial, and religion ethical. 



The supreme struggle remains — the struggle for supremacy. To 

 conquer, to dominate, to exploit — this alone can satisfy the state that 

 has become strong enough to impose its yoke upon environing peoples. 

 Armies are mustered and drilled, coercive rule and regimentation 

 transform the domestic order. Society becomes despotic, and, since the 

 gods of the conquerors must be worshipped by the conquered, religion 

 becomes authoritative. 



To show how despotic society breaks down, how in such frontier 

 outposts as were the islands and shores of the iEgean Sea, intellect at 

 last becomes dynamic, and political habit revolutionary, and how, under 

 the hammering of these forces, society becomes contractual or consti- 

 tutional, and religion rationalistic, would be to tell an enthralling 

 story, for which no time remains. In one favored place, the Athenian 

 city state, society became for a brief time idealistic, that is to say, its 

 bonds were those of a common purpose, or ideal, and religion became 

 non-theological. After two thousand years of arrest and slow recovery, 



