Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE EVOLUTION OP THEISM A New field of research has been entered, and traversed with some success, during the present century, viz. the archaeology of Theism; in other words, the evolution of the belief out of its prehistoric phases and conditions. It has been thought by some that if we could prove that the belief arose out of others unlike it—beliefs that were rude elementary guesses, with no theistic significance whatsoever—the discovery of such an origin would discredit it, as one of the rational convictions of educated men. This, however, is a totally erroneous reading of the origin of belief in general. If, in the history of the race, a higher belief has emerged as the sequel of a lower one, it does not follow that the higher is the progeny of the lower, and has no authority beyond it. Succeeding it in time, the higher may have emerged out of the lower, only because it is a more accurate apprehension or interpretation of the essential truth of things; in other words, a superiorwitness to a Reality, which exists quite independently of the evolution of belief regarding it. Suppose that we go back to Totemism, to the recognition of a second-self, suggested by the shadow cast by the sun, by reflection in water, or by the spiritual shadow (or double) disclosed in dreams. Suppose that this belief—which might at first be limited to certain individuals — grew, in course of time, to a general conviction; and that it further developed into the idea that the spirit of the individual, as a second shadowy self, could come and go from the body — leaving it during sleep, and returning again, its return in fact awakening the body—the belief in its separability at death, and its separate existence after death, would be the most natural of inferences. Suppose that, along wi...