A first book in organic evolutionShute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Science
A first book in organic evolution
Shute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Evolution
These facts are at the bottom of much of the philosophy of the present
and the past. The untutored savage, knowing that his personality can
cause motion, and beholding moving objects in nature, instinctively made
the induction that all these objects had personalities behind them. He
saw a spirit in his own voice that came back to him as an echo from
the rocks; he saw a personality in his shadow; he saw personalities in
falling stones, in running brooks, in waving foliage; he beheld them in
the raging tempest, in the thunder and the lightning, as well as in the
blazing sun and the twinkling stars; he saw spirits in the dead that came
back to him in dreams. In short, he recognized a separate personality
in every isolated phenomenon in nature. The child talking to its doll,
petting it, rebuking it, or whipping it; Xerxes castigating the ocean
for wrecking his ships, are illustrations of the strong human tendency
to project (or eject)[19] personalities into the inanimate objects of
nature. This natural, but lowly, phase of culture and philosophy is known
as _Fetichism_.
As encephalic and psychic evolution advanced; as men, with wider
knowledge and broadening experience, ascertained the laws that govern
the isolated phenomena of nature, the separate beings in every distinct
object and occurrence vanished from thought; but they still beheld a
separate personality in every great department of nature. The Romans,
for instance, saw Neptune as God of the Ocean, Pluto as God of the lower
world, Jupiter as God of the Heavens, and so on. This phase of culture
and philosophy, and therefore of religion, is _Polytheism_.
In the two phases of culture now briefly outlined the personalities
were grossly anthropomorphic. They were like human beings, capricious,
revengeful, subject to flattery, good and evil, and were therefore to be
placated and cajoled by sacrifices and offerings.
Psychic evolution continuing, there appeared from time to time great
thinkers who saw one “Infinite Personality” behind the cosmos.[20]
This “personality” is still in every phenomenon, though no longer as a
separate soul, but only as the separate manifestation of the Soul of
the Universe. This is _Monotheism_, a phase of culture which marks the
culmination of philosophy and religion through psychic evolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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