112 | The American Naturalist. [February, 
iform inscriptions. We find ourselves looking at the cradle- 
land of our religion, our sciences and our literature; we find 
_ the most touching and passionate appeals to the Divinity in 
the very spirit of the finest Psalms of David, in a land looked 
upon as the seat of the grossest idolatry ; we find a civiliza- 
tion old enough to have been the parent stock of the civiliza- 
tion of China; we look upon an early world, which knew 
nothing of the proud white race which now girdles the earth 
with empire. 
Amidst the surging waves which have carried away so 
many beliefs, we find two anchors linking us to the Unseen, 
which become the firmer the more we know of evolutionary 
processes. One is the enormous strength of the religious in- 
stinct, even at the earliest stages of the civilization of man- 
kind. And if the study of evolution teaches us one thing 
more than another, it is that no instinct exists in vain. The 
other foreign to my present subject is the inscrutable nature 
of the “noumenon,” which lies behind all phenomena; that 
Energy, which, whether we think of it as “gods” with the old 
Accadians, as the “Supreme Being,” or by whatever name we 
strive to approach the Unknown Reality, it remains equally 
Unknown, (though perhaps not forever Unknowable,) and 
equally the eternal object of search and worship. 
