LITMIR.BIZ

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bequeathed to us with the former by our ancestors. This explains the trait of superstition which is often absolutely beyond the control of the reason or will, and which we notice with such surprise in ourselves, and in others of the most extensive culture; it also explains that exaltation of religious sentiment to which persons of poetic temperament are so liable, because they are particularly susceptible to the influence of heredity. This source of superstitious ideas, heredity, can be only controlled and done away with by the accumulated efforts of many generations. Centuries will be required to produce a human being, who from his birth up, is prepared to comprehend life and the universe from the point of view of reason and natural science, without prejudice or superstition, because a hundred generations before him had been convincing themselves of the correctness of this point of view.

      We on the contrary, are predisposed to look upon the phenomena of this life and the world, from an irrational and superstitious standpoint, owing to the fact that not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of generations before us, have been in the habit of carrying on a false and mistaken habit of thought and theorizing. Among the causes which led to the conception of Religion and its continued existence in the human mind, are some which, although not capable of producing by themselves the ideas of God, the soul and immortality, were yet powerful in impressing and perpetuating them upon the heart ​of man. One of these accessory causes of the continuation of religious sentiments, is the natural cowardice of man; he dislikes to cut himself loose from any powerful organization, to stand alone, only supported by his own will, with no invisible helper or protector to come to his assistance. The human race rarely produces an individual who, realizing his power, and upheld by an exalted self-appreciation, is prepared to enter alone upon life's battlefield, on which he must wield his sword and shield with might and skill to come out as victor or even alive. These exceptional men, who offer the finest and most perfect types of our race, become party leaders, conquerors, rulers of the people. They look with contempt upon the beaten paths, and open new highways for themselves. They do not accept with patient resignation what destiny offers them, but hew out for themselves a new destiny, even if they know they will perish in the attempt. But the great multitude of mankind has not this independence. The average individual prefers to enter upon the struggle for existence, supported by hundreds of others, and turn a close, serried front to the enemy. They want to feel an armed comrade behind and at each elbow, and in front too, if possible. They like to listen to the words of command, and have their movements determined by a higher authority. Such men cling to Religion as to a weapon and a consolation. What a comfort to imagine that in the midst of the tumult and smoke of the battle, a protecting shield is held up in front of them by a watchful God or guardian angel! The humblest tailor or day-laborer can have the satisfaction of sharing the privilege of Achilles who was protected by the invisible shield of Pallas Athene during the battle on the plains of Troy. And what a sense of strength fills the mind of him who feels that at all times and in all places, he is armed with ​a powerful weapon—prayer! It is difficult to despair when one believes that a word, a supplication, will remove any disturbing element from his path. To take an extreme case—an aeronaut falls from the car of his balloon, a thousand feet high. If he is a freethinker, he knows that he is lost and that there is no power on earth that can prevent his body from being smashed to pieces on the ground beneath, in less than ten seconds. But if he is a believer in God, he retains during the entire extent of his fall, or at least until he loses consciousness, a hope that some superhuman power, to which he offers up supplications of intense fervor as he falls, will, to save him, suspend the laws of nature for a few minutes and deposit him gently and softly upon the ground. As long as he retains consciousness the impulse of self-preservation maintains its sway, and he clings obstinately to a visionary, superstitious possibility, even against such an irrevocable sentence of death as has been passed upon him. The human heart has no more precious possession than illusion. And what more beneficent and consoling illusion could there be than the self-deception of faith in God and prayer? In consequence of this fact the majority of mankind will continue to seek refuge from life's pains and griefs in conceptions founded on a childish superstition, until they become so impressed by and convinced of the necessity of viewing the world from the standpoint of natural science, that they learn to consider the death of an individual, even although it be their own, as a circumstance of the most trifling importance for their race and the—universe not until the solidarity of mankind has become so generally and firmly organized that each individual will turn instinctively for help to his fellow-men in any disasters that befall him, and not to an incomprehensible, supernatural power.

      ​Another one of these causes of the continuation of Religion, which I have designated as accessory, consists in the necessity for an ideal that is experienced by all human hearts, even the rudest and most uncultivated. What is this ideal? It is the remote type towards which mankind is developing and perfecting itself; not only the type of physical perfection, but the type of the inner life, of the mode of thinking, and of the constitution of society. The impulse towards this ideal, the longing to attain to it, are implanted in the breast of every intellectually and physically normal man; it is something organically inherent in him, of which he is not necessarily conscious, and in which even in the deepest and closest thinker, there is always much that is unconscious. In building a railroad embankment, a row of wooden stakes is first driven into the ground, of the same height and extending as far, as the embankment is to be; then the workmen shovel dirt upon the stakes until they are entirely covered up and lost to sight. Every living being contains within itself a law for its growth and development, which fulfills the same purpose as the stakes in the embankment; it grows and developes in accordance with this law, trying to fill out the invisible but none the less real framework which it has built up for itself, as the embankment grows and finally covers up the stakes. If an organism developes so that it coincides at all points with the figure which represents the extreme limit of its capacity for development, it has reached perfection and fully attained to its ideal. Usually each individual being remains far behind the ideal of its type, but its effort to reach it is the mysterious compelling force of its instinct for self-preservation and development, that is, of all organic activity. The race as a whole, has also its standard of development, and everything within it to raise it to this ​standard, as well as the individual. Like the individual every species has its law of growth. It arises, has that within it which impels it to attain to a certain standard of size and strength, and last a certain length of time, it grows to a certain point, and then retrogrades and vanishes from the face of the earth, making way for a more elevated form of life, to which it served as a stepping stone, or, I might say as a sketch or design. Paleontology makes us acquainted with a long list of animal species, who lived during one or more geological periods, and then became extinct. The same is also true of the human race. It forms one zoological entity taken as a whole, and is governed by one law of life. It had its origin in a certain geological age (whether this was in the beginning of the Quaternary epoch, or in the middle or latter part of the Tertiary period is a matter of little moment), according to analogy, it will become extinct in some other geological period in the future. We can only guess at the forms of life that preceded it, and those that are to follow it are even beyond our imagination. But as long as the human race lives upon earth, as long as it has not attained to the summit of its development, it will continue to struggle earnestly to fill in the invisible framework of its preordained culture and progress and this struggle for the realization of its ideal, the growth to the height of its unseen standard, is felt and experienced by every single member of the human family, with the exception of idiots, although of course most men perceive it only dimly and without comprehending its true import. This dim perception becomes consciousness in cultivated minds. In others, less cultivated, it remains in the stage of an indistinct, impelling longing, which we can call an impulse towards higher things, or a yearning for the ideal, as we may prefer, and which under either name, is nothing else than an ​intense longing to emerge from our individual isolation and feel more distinctly our unity with our fellow-men. The chain that unites all men of one race into a race, and binds the species itself into one zoological entity, making of it one individual of a higher order, presses upon every human heart, and is felt by all distinctly as a solidarity. This solidarity is constantly seeking expression. Once in a while every man feels the need of knowing that he is a fragment of a mighty whole, of convincing himself that the great current of race development is flowing through his veins side by side with the current of individual self-development and that his individual existence is but a trivial

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