Religion, it is to be remembered, is in the broadest sense a fact of
humanity. The distinguished anthropologist Quatrefages is sustained
by the fullest evidence when he asserts that man is essentially a
religious being. It appears in every tribe on earth. Moral conceptions
and sentiments, however faint and faultily applied, are a part of this
omnipresent religious mind of the race.
==Pervades Literature.==
=5.= Such moral conceptions pervade the general literature of the
world. Wherever a people has progressed in culture sufficiently to
create and preserve a literature, it is found to be many-tongued
witness to a recognized difference between right and wrong. In its
pages these discriminations appear as a never-ceasing characteristic
of human thought. They come to us out of the remotest past and from
regions untaught by the decalogue of Sinai. They illuminate, as
already implied, the sacred books of India, China, Egypt, Persia and
Babylonia, as well as the classic writings of ancient Greece and
Rome and the Saga writing of Northern Europe. They not only form the
body of the moral disquisitions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cato,
Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many others, but color and shape
the drama and lyric poetry in which the thought and sentiment of the
race have been embalmed. To see illustrations of this we need only
read the tragedies of Sophocles, for instance Œdipus Tyrannus, lines
863-871, or Antigone, lines 449-460, or listen to the verse of Horace,
Book III, Ode 3, tracing the supremacy and triumph of a consciousness
of right over all other authority and power. With the advance of
humanity as the centuries have passed away literature is more and
more the representation of human sentiment and life under the action
and reaction of these ethical discriminations in the ever-changing
conditions of the world. Philosophy and science and fiction and
poetry and politics and jurisprudence are occupied in dealing with
the principles and questions thus raised, and our modern libraries
are largely the accumulated treasures of the thinking world on the
significance and application of these principles.
==Anthropological Confirmation.==
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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