Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical InquiryCurtis, George Ticknor
Religion
Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry
Curtis, George Ticknor
Creation; Evolution
Setting out with the statement that "unlike the ordinary
consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that
which lies beyond the sphere of sense," I went on to show that the
rise of this consciousness begins among primitive men with the
belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, capable of
wandering away from him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after
death; and that from this idea of a being eventually distinguished
as supernatural, there develop, in course of time, the ideas of
supernatural beings of all orders up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has
alleged that the primitive religion is not belief in and propitiation
of the ghost, but is worship of "physical objects treated frankly as
physical objects" (p. 498). That he has disproved the one view and
proved the other, no one will, I think, assert. Contrariwise, he has
given occasion for me to cite weighty authorities against him.
Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural beings
thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were
superior to others; and that, as the compounding and recompounding
of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers
of different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy
of ghosts or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued
that while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the
minor supernatural agents became merged in the major supernatural
agent, this single great supernatural agent, gradually losing the
anthropomorphic attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to
retain but few of them; and, eventually losing these, will then merge
into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes
can be ascribed. This proposition has not been contested.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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