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Show .394 GENERAL SUMl\IARY PART H. well developed, will Le led to good actions, an<l may have a fairly sensitive conscience. But whatever renders the imagination of men more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive, and may even compensate to a certain extent for weak social affections and sympathies. The moral nature of man has reached tho highest standard as yet attained, partly through the advancement of the reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially through tho sympathies being rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection. It is not improbable that virtuous tendencies may through long practice be inherited. ·with the more civilised races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the .advancement of morality. Ultimately man no longer accepts the praise or blame of his fellows as his chief guide, though few escape this influence, but his baLi· tual convictions controlled by reason afford him the safest rule. His conscience then becomes his supreme judge and monitor. Nevertheless tho :first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection. The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies :aeems to be universal; and apparently follows from a CHAP. XXJ. AND CONCLUDING REMARI\S. 395 considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, , and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God bas been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in tho existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, possessing only a little more power than man; for the belief in them is far more general than of a beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long- continued culture. He who believes in the advancement of man from some lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. r:rhe barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind ; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of the minute germinal vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period in tho gradually ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined.2 I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who thus denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, 2 Tho Rov. J. A. Picton gives a discussion to this effect in his' New ~rheorics o.nd the Old Fo.itb,' 1870. |