Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/41

Rh and prejudiced mind which does not recognize that the book of Genesis, which, upon any theory, contains man's earliest thoughts about himself, expresses in allegorical fashion exactly the same views.

The same views are also apparently expressed by Prof. Max Müller, in a very beautiful passage in the article on Semitic Monotheism, in the same volume:

"The primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of dependence upon God could only have been the result of a primitive revelation in the truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw and felt God as the only source of his own and all other existence. By the very act of the creation God had revealed Himself. Here He was, manifested in His works in all His majesty and power before the face of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit of God."

The first impression made by this passage may be, that, in speaking of a "revelation in the truest sense," it affords an instance of that hateful habit of using religious words in a non natural sense. But a little deeper consideration will show that no possible definition of a revelation, accompanied and attested by miracles, can exclude the revelation made by Nature to the first man who thought. In fact, we have here a description of creation, which science, with possibly a little suspiciousness at some of the phrases, may accept, while, at the same time, natural religion is carried to its utmost and highest limits, and along with this a foundation is laid for a truer theory of the miraculous. But, while gladly admitting all this, the fact remains that these intuitions, following upon a revelation in which Nature herself was the miracle, are still plainly only the expressions of man's inward experiences, and that, however old, and venerable, and exalted, they are still only hopes, wishes, and aspirations, which may or may not be true, but which are incapable of proving the actual facts toward which they soar. It is open, therefore, to any man, accustomed to look for positive demonstration, to dismiss them as dreams of the infancy of man, or to relegate them into the prison house of the incomprehensibilities, or to content himself with a purely natural theory of human life which rejects and dislikes the theological.

2. But when we come to inquire how far these primary intuitions have been universal, and whether they can be fairly called ineradicable, we are met by some very startling facts. The dictum ὅ πᾃσι δὀκεί τῦοτό αἲναι φαμεν is so reasonable in itself that no serious attempt would be made to question a belief that even approached to being universal, even if it could not be shown to be part of the original furniture of the mind. But the real difficulty lies in finding (apart from morals) any beliefs of which this universality can be predicated, and assuredly the immortality of the soul is not one of them. The mind of man at its lowest seems incapable of grasping the idea, and the