Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated
by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also
holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as
religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in
seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced
to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social
arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be
living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the
indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it
satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite
social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united
into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an
analogous transformation. The divine selfishness--the "_remota ab
nostris rebus_"--long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously
correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave
way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that
more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient
characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original
indifference of Deity toward ethical issues--a widespread feature of
the earlier religious conceptions--could not but pass away with the
moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had
arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely
identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform
is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself
toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with
which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion
sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has
been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude
toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our
human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward
conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of
the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet
and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the
old geocentric theory of the cosmos--regarded the heavens as a set of
spheres revolving around a flat earth--the thought of a deity outside
the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly
devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was
inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth
century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the
final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the
world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation
gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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