for, in the one system, reason degenerates into instinct, and instinct at last reaches its lowest possible action, or ceases entirely; and, in the other, instinct rises from its lowest action through successive improvements until it becomes mind or intellect: so that somewhere in the two processes there must be a point where they pass each other in opposite directions, the one losing or merging intellect in instinct, the other losing and merging instinct in mind, each of the two processes being a process of development or evolution, but in opposite directions.[20] It is not easy to ascertain at once what was Mr. Darwin's idea of the mode in which a supreme intelligence has presided over the creation. In his work on "The Descent of Man", he adduces some evidence that man was not "originally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God," this evidence being that numerous savage races have existed, and still exist, who have had and have no words in their language to express this idea. But this, if true, does not help us to understand what part in Mr. Darwin's theory an Omnipotent God is supposed to play. Scattered through the same work we find references to the hypothesis of such a being, and to the influences which this belief has exerted upon the advance of morality. But I assume that we are to understand that Mr. Darwin adopts as a fact, to be taken into account in judging of his theory of evolution, that there is such a being as an Omnipotent God, having equally the power to make separate creations, or to establish certain laws of matter, and to leave them to operate through secondary causes in the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world. In his work on the "Origin of Species" he refers to "what we know of the laws impressed upon matter by the Creator."[21] In his "Descent of Man" the following passage occurs toward the close of the work: "He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organized 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 shown, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments, 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 individual, from the first trace of a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety, because the period can not possibly be determined in the gradually ascending organic scale."