I have not undertaken to make my outline sketch of the genesis of
Humanity approach to completeness, but only to present enough salient
points to make a closely connected argument in showing how morality is
evolved in the cosmic process and sanctioned by it. In a more complete
sketch it would be necessary to say something about the genesis of
Religion. One of the most interesting, and in my opinion one of the most
profoundly significant, facts in the whole process of evolution is the
first appearance of religious sentiment at very nearly the same stage at
which the moral law began to grow up. To the differential attributes of
Humanity already considered there needs to be added the possession of
religious sentiment and religious ideas. We may safely say that this is
the most important of all the distinctions between Man and other
animals; for to say so is simply to epitomize the whole of human
experience as recorded in history, art, and literature. Along with the
rise from gregariousness to incipient sociality, along with the first
stammerings of articulate speech, along with the dawning discrimination
between right and wrong, came the earliest feeble groping toward a world
beyond that which greets the senses, the first dim recognition of the
Spiritual Power that is revealed in and through the visible and palpable
realm of nature. And universally since that time the notion of Ethics
has been inseparably associated with the notion of Religion, and the
sanction for Ethics has been held to be closely related with the world
beyond phenomena. There are philosophers who maintain that with the
further progress of enlightenment this close relation will cease to be
asserted, that Ethics will be divorced from Religion, and that the
groping of the Human Soul after its God will be condemned as a mere
survival from the errors of primitive savagery, a vain and idle reaching
out toward a world of mere phantoms. I mention this opinion merely to
express unqualified and total dissent from it. I believe it can be shown
that one of the strongest implications of the doctrine of evolution is
the Everlasting Reality of Religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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