The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its ScopeCrampton, Henry Edward
Science
The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its Scope
Crampton, Henry Edward
Evolution
The third element, human responsibility to the infinite personality, is
variously recorded in lower and higher religions. Its conception grows
partly out of the feelings of awe and terror inspired by great works of
nature such as the thunder-storm, the cyclone, and the volcano, while the
orderly and regular workings of even everyday nature seem to demonstrate
the direct control of the powers who rule man as well. The savage sees his
crops destroyed by a tempest or drought; he attributes the disaster to the
particular powers concerned with such things whom he must have angered
unwittingly, and whom he must propitiate by sacrifice or penitence. His
individual and tribal acts do not always accomplish the desired ends, and
again the laws of infinite and ultimate powers must have been contravened,
as he interprets the situation. Therefore his whole religious
consciousness was exerted in the direction of finding out what was the
ultimate constitution of nature, with which human activities must
harmonize if they are to be successful. Bound by custom and convention and
biological law, he looks about wonderingly to find the external authority
for his bonds. To his mind this authority must be the host of spirits and
gods who had made him and the things of his world. It is in this way that
so many ethical elements have found places in religious doctrines, to be
viewed as absolute rules of conduct coming from outside of nature, and not
from nature itself, in the way the earlier sections of this chapter have
shown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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