Ciiap. XXI. 
AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 
395 
considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, 
and from a still greater advance in his faculties of im- 
agination, 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, possessing only a little more power than man ; 
for the belief in them is far more general than of a 
beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and bene- 
ficent Creator of the universe 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 lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does 
this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. 
The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has 
shewn, possess no clear belief ol this kind; but argu- 
ments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, 
as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons 
.feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining 
at what precise period in the development of the indi- 
vidual, from the first trace of the minute germinal 
vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man 
becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater 
cause for anxiety because the period in the gradually 
ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined . 2 
I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this 
work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; 
but he who thus denounces them is bound to shew why 
it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as 
a distinct species by descent from some lower form, 
2 The Rev. J. A. Picton gives a discussion to this effect in his 1 New 
Theories and the Old Faith/ 1870. 
