Chapter II: The Original State Of Man (2)

H. H. Bawden has reviewed Prof. Loeb’s work in the Psychological
Review, Jan. 1900. Janósik has found segmentation in the
unfertilized eggs of mammalians. Prof. Loeb considers it possible
that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origin
of embryos in mammals, and thinks it not improbable that by a
transitory change in these ions it will be possible to produce
complete parthenogenesis in these higher types. Dr. Bawden goes on
to say that “both parent and child are dependent upon a common
source of energy. The universe is one great organism, and there is
no inorganic or non-organic matter, but differences only in
degrees of organization. Sex is designed only secondarily for the
perpetuation of species; primarily it is the bond or medium for
the connection and interaction of the various parts of this great
organism, for maintaining that degree of heterogeneity which is
the prerequisite of a high degree of organization. By means of the
growth of a lifetime I have become an essential part in a great
organic system. What I call my individual personality represents
simply the focusing, the flowering of the universe at one finite
concrete point or centre. Must not then my personality continue as
long as that universal system continues? And is immortality
conceivable if the soul is something shut up within itself,
unshareable and unique? Are not the many foci mutually
interdependent, instead of mutually exclusive? We must not then
conceive of an immortality which means the continued existence of
an individual cut off from that social context which is really
essential to his very nature.”

J. H. Richardson suggests in the Standard, Sept. 10, 1901, that
the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation of the
spiritual part of man only—that part which was made in the image
of God—while the second chapter describes the creation of man’s
body, the animal part, which may have been originated by a process
of evolution. S. W. Howland, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:121-128,
supposes Adam and Eve to have been twins, joined by the ensiform
cartilage or breast-bone, as were the Siamese Chang and Eng. By
violence or accident this cartilage was broken before it hardened
into bone, and the two were separated until puberty. Then Adam saw
Eve coming to him with a bone projecting from her side
corresponding to the hollow in his own side, and said: “She is
bone of my bone; she must have been taken from my side when I
slept.” This tradition was handed down to his posterity. The Jews
have a tradition that Adam was created double-sexed, and that the
two sexes were afterwards separated. The Hindus say that man was
at first of both sexes and divided himself in order to people the
earth. In the Zodiac of Dendera, Castor and Pollux appear as man
and woman, and these twins, some say, were called Adam and Eve.
The Coptic name for this sign is _Pi Mahi_, “the United.” Darwin,
in the postscript to a letter to Lyell, written as early as July,
1850, tells his friend that he has “a pleasant genealogy for
mankind,” and describes our remotest ancestor as “an animal which
breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an
imperfect skull, and was undoubtedly a hermaphrodite.”

Matthew Arnold speaks of “the freshness of the early world.”
Novalis says that “all philosophy begins in homesickness.”
Shelley, Skylark: “We look before and after, And pine for what is
not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our
sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thought.”—“The
golden conception of a Paradise is the poet’s guiding thought.”
There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural
state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our
true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: “Such thoughts, the
wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate’er of
good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage.” Poetry and music echo the
longing for some possession lost. Jessica in Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”
All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy,
as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body.
See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek
Poets, 225, 226.

Wellhausen, on the legend of a golden age, says: “It is the
yearning song which goes through all the peoples: having attained
the historical civilization, they feel the worth of the goods
which they have sacrificed for it.” He regards the golden age as
only an ideal image, like the millennial kingdom at the end. Man
differs from the beast in this power to form ideals. His
destination _to_ God shows his descent _from_ God. Hegel in a
similar manner claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an
ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the
traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody
the world’s recollection of an historical fact, when man was free
from external evil and possessed all that could minister to
innocent joy? The “golden age” of the heathen was connected with
the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man’s
original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized,
properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man’s
own powers, but only through God’s provision in Christ. For
references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and
Days, 109-208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil,
Ec., 4, Georgics, 1:135, Æneid, 8:314.

(_b_) Provisions for the trying of man’s virtue.—Since man was not yet in a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence, he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). The one slight command best tested the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall, If resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the _posse non peccare_ would have become the _non posse peccare_.

Thomasius: “That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is
Satan’s doctrine and philosophy.” The tree was mainly a tree of
probation. It is right for a father to make his son’s title to his
estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as
Thaddeus Stevens made his son’s possession of property conditional
upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the
tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not
know.

(_c_) Opportunity of securing physical immortality.—The body of the first man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking this decay and preserving the body’s youth. This means was the “tree of life” (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In other words, the _posse non mori_ might have become a _non posse mori_.

The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man’s
dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical
efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it
sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without
holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore
shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it
by God’s righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only
restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally
created to attain: _1 Cor. 15:45_—“_The first man Adam became a
living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit_”;
_Rev. 22:14_—“_Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they
may have the right to come to the tree of life._”

The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man’s original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man’s prehistoric condition point to a development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most civilized.

For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir
John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The
primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism”; but
especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human
progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and
the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as
follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of
speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by
fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and
hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and
use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic
animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by
invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears,
with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S.
Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892:844, defines civilization
as “enforced social organization, with written records, and hence
intellectual development and social progress.”

With regard to this view we remark:

(_a_) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.—History shows a law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation whose history runs back of the Christian era—as for example, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians—the subsequent progress has been downward, and no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result of influence from without.

Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he
shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample
of man’s first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many
such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching,
for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict
sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far
more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with
degeneration “as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting
the development of civilization.” So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of
Nature: “Civilization and savagery are both the results of
evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the
upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason,
neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as
the primitive condition of man.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“As
plausible an argument might be constructed out of the
deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove
that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that
which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved
upward from one.”

Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and
expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are
unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The
same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks.
Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were
Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions
of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons
from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests
of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer
as saying: “Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them,
had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain
some which were evolved during those higher states.... It is quite
possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has
been as frequent as progression.” Spencer, however, denies that
savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.

Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to
rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be
elevated and sustained by some force from without and above
himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are
apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s
primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately,
Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a
divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A
Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in
Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to
till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes,
clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams,
skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught
the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he
led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition
and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first
be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power
genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol.
14:408-412.

Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that
evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards
particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders.
As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in
others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the
Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the
history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen
and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between
these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled
against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The
humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his
power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental
life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some
shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the
higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking
up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward
into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond,
Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do
not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went
up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The
stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson:
“Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever
dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes
devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life,
rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging
steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which
there is no outlet.”

(_b_) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.

On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see
Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the
debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest
art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may
accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland,
where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were
until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been
lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart,
referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have
been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually.
Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian
mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no
certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread
tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese
peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple
people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of
Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.

Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence
that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada,
and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.”
An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given
by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of
Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are
the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations
of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis” for four, etc.,
or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of
the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter
method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit
reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals,
now in general use in the islands.

Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed
that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species]
is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number
of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change
gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we
determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or
degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all,
like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay
in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether
lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in
the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000,
and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the
proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that
passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear,
there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a
similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom
continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce
man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite
designing Wisdom.

(_c_) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel
treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower
animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find
the most of this cruel treatment among savages.” Tylor instances
“street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but
savage tribes to a builder’s yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval
Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223;
McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July,
1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the
anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates
and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but
men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who
use their powers for the destruction of society.”

Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an
administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of
Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the
negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde
one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been
cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the
purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing
towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by
degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel’s History of Mankind:
“We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New
Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly
occupied territories, the development of the population began upon
a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris’ decadence resulted
in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the
people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of
art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”

Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan’s theory
of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie,
Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity
is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher
animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of
family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single
pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male
gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype
of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for
political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes
that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system
introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural
paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the
maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.”
Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family
are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the
benefit of the young that male and female continue to live
together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than
the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine
evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general
stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of
promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which
are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is
essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial
Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman,
though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated,
is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human
race.”

(_d_) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.

For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt,
Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion,
1:205—“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the
lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in
untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the
gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not
immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep.” We may
add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral
conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the
later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later
generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been
very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are
clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals,
171—“Precisely because such tribes [Australian and African
savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they
failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest
of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage
degradation.” On petrified civilizations, see Henry George,
Progress and Poverty, 433-439—“The law of human progress, what is
it but the moral law?” On retrogressive development in nature, see
Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, “Did the
Romans Degenerate?” in Internat. Journ. Ethics. Jan. 1893:165-182,
in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances
rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible the most important
single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits
authentically the early development of society from the family,
through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by
glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature
of other nations.

2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,—this first theological stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.

This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy,
English transl., 25, 26, 515-636—“Each branch of our knowledge
passes successively through three different theoretical
conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or
abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.... The first is the
necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the
third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a
state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind,
seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final
causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects—in short, absolute
knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate
action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is
only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of
supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is,
personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of
producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of
phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its
proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has
given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and
destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and
applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their
invariable relations of succession and resemblance.... The
theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it
substituted the providential action of a single Being for the
varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the
metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as
the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities
at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the
positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular
aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for
instance.”

This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following facts:

(_a_) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.

The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special
revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely
evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is
that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded
from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of
Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado,
etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado’s ancestors,
instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was
originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was
deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the
corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew
Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism.
T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in
the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there
is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession,
170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking
University, as follows: “China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree
in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic
Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities,
celebrated the _Pantheos_, the universal God. The odes compiled by
Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme
Ruler. The Vedas speak of ‘one unknown true Being, all-present,
all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the
Universe.’ And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there
were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.”

On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips,
1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge,
Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche
Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East,
65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth.
Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884.

(_b_) “There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher” (Fisher).

See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545;
Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert
Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards
changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the
opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of
savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer
finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of
ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see
Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn
sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts.
Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has
recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to
Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute
impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in
Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen
people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And
this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain
of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s
bones.”

(_c_) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a higher sort than fetichism.

Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative
of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object,
though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however,
identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the
stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from
body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore
proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell,
Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384;
see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are
commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell,
in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the
Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature,
4:208.

(_d_) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it. While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired, positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of necessity become extinct.

John Stuart Mill suggests that “personifying” would be a much
better term than “theological” to designate the earliest efforts
to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of
Positivism, see New Englander, 1873:323-386; Diman, Theistic
Argument, 338—“Three coëxistent states are here confounded with
three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things
with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must
always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on
metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as
permanent as human reason itself.” Martineau, Types, 1:487—“Comte
sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved
monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism
which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern
Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its
civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,”—it
comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol.,
1:24, 62—“The Jews were always a disobliging people; what business
had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house
ever so long before M. Comte’s bell rang to prayers?” See also
Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ.
Christ. Philos., April, 1883:353; Nineteenth Century, Oct.
1886:473-490.