Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/40

30 a better life, these are the radical elements of all religions .... Unless they had formed part of the original dowry of the human soul, religion itself would have remained an impossibility." Now, I am not quite sure that I understand in what sense the writer means to assert that these intuitions, which, for practical purposes, may be limited to three, God, sin, and immortality, are part of the original dowry of the human soul. If it is meant that there was a special creation of the human soul, furnished from the beginning with these three intuitions, then science will resolutely refuse to admit the fact. There can be no mistake about the position held by the bulk of scientific men, and little doubt, I should think, as to its reasonableness. If there is any thing that is in ultimate analysis incomprehensible, or any fact that cannot be accounted for by natural causes, then the possibility of special creation and original intuitions must be candidly allowed, but not otherwise. There is just a chance, for instance, that the difference between the brains of the lowest man and the highest animal may ultimately be regarded as a fact inexplicable upon any theory of evolution; more, however, from a lack of evidence than from any other cause. Be this as it may, the possibility of special creation finds a distinct foothold in the acknowledged fact that the connection between thought and the brain of animals, as well as of man, is an ultimate incomprehensibility, a mystery which the law of man's intelligence prevents his ever even attempting or hoping to understand. The famous saying "cogito ergo sum" the foundation of all modern metaphysics, may come to be a formula under which religion, philosophy, and science, may all take shelter, and approach each other without ever actually meeting.

But the three intuitions of God, sin, and immortality, can all be accounted for by the growth of human experience, as every one knows who has at all studied the subject. At some period of the world's history, science will answer, an ape like creature first recognized that it or he had offended against the good of some other creature and so became conscious of sin, or was created as a moral being. Thus much Mr. Darwin has affirmed, but (speaking from memory) I do not think he has called very special attention to that still greater epoch (or was it the same?) in man's history, when this ape like creature, seeing one of its own species lying dead, recognized as a fact "I shall die." This is what we may term the creation of man as an immortal being, for in the very conflict of the two facts—one, the reflecting being, the self conscious I; the other, death, the seeming destroyer—lie embedded all man's future spiritual cravings for eternity. And the idea of God would come in the order of Nature, before either of these, to the creature which first reflected upon the source of its own existence, and recognized a "tendency in things which it could not understand." This is, in brief, the scientific account of man's creation, and of the growth of the ideas of natural religion within his mind; and we may remark in passing that it must be a singularly uncandid