Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/92

88 tribes into federations, ethnic society is evolved. The ghosts of tribal chieftains are supposed to be more powerful and important than ordinary ghosts; they enjoy, therefore, extraordinary honor and attention. They become gods. Religion becomes theistic.

The struggle for existence has now been won. The collective struggle for advantage begins. From every side confederated tribes of barbarian men press toward those regions that offer exceptional opportunities; such regions in early days were the shores and back country of the Caspian Sea, the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. This is the struggle for situation. Bringing together in one habitat a motley multitude of tribes, and fragments of shattered tribes, it grinds the tribal system to destruction. It assembles and mingles the human elements for an evolution of civil society.

When the struggle for place and opportunity has been won, and command of territory has been achieved, every energy is enlisted in the economic struggle for abundance. The new social order is not yet established. Miscellaneous men jostle each other, as in a mining camp. Each lives among his fellows on sufferance, or toleration. Society is merely approbational, and its interests are purely materialistic. The deities are gods of crops and generation.

This state of things, of course, can not last. The struggle for abundance begets the struggle for efficiency. Ideas and standards of efficiency appear. The efficient find each other out. They like each other and each other's ways. They dislike the inefficient, and begin in all possible ways to make life unpleasant for them. Efficiency and the habits that make therefor are identified with righteousness. The gods are credited with righteous impulses, and a desire to have men do right. Society has become congenial, and religion ethical.

The supreme struggle remains—the struggle for supremacy. To conquer, to dominate, to exploit—this alone can satisfy the state that has become strong enough to impose its yoke upon environing peoples. Armies are mustered and drilled, coercive rule and regimentation transform the domestic order. Society becomes despotic, and, since the gods of the conquerors must be worshipped by the conquered, religion becomes authoritative.

To show how despotic society breaks down, how in such frontier outposts as were the islands and shores of the Ægean Sea, intellect at last becomes dynamic, and political habit revolutionary, and how, under the hammering of these forces, society becomes contractual or constitutional, and religion rationalistic, would be to tell an enthralling story, for which no time remains. In one favored place, the Athenian city state, society became for a brief time idealistic, that is to say, its bonds were those of a common purpose, or ideal, and religion became non-theological. After two thousand years of arrest and slow recovery,