and aspirations and capacities something quite
disparate--something that we could not get by a natural process of
growth from such beginnings of reason as are observed in the lower
animals.

I am aware that Dr. Darwin conceived that the religious feeling of man
might have grown out of the natural emotions of fear,[1] love,
gratitude, &c., when once men began to question as to the explanation of
the phenomena of life, and to ascribe the forces of nature to the
possession of a spirit such as he himself was conscious of: and with
much more positive intent, Mr. H. Spencer has also, after most
painstaking inquiries, formulated what he conceives to be the origin of
religious belief in man. He refers us to the early belief in a "double"
of self, which double could be projected out of self, and remained in
some way after death, so as to become the object of fear, and ultimately
of worship. When this ancestor-worship resulted in the worship of a
multitude of "genii" (whose individuality, as regards their former
earthly connection, is more or less forgotten), then the idea of
attaching the numerous divinities or ancestor-souls to the ocean, the
sky, the sun, the mountains, and the powers of nature, arises; whence
the poetic systems of ancient polytheistic mythology. Gradually men
began to reason and to think, and they refined the polytheism into the
"higher" idea of one great, central, immaterial all-pervading power,
which they called God.

[Footnote: 1 See the "Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 68 (original edition).
But it is right to state that the subject is not treated in any way
whatever so as to argue that the religious belief is a fancy, or
development of fancy, with no God and no facts about God behind it.]

Mr. Spencer, in effect, concludes that this "God" is only man's own
idea of filling up a blank, of explaining the fact that there must be an
ultimate first cause of whatever exists, and there is also a great
source of power of some kind external to ourselves.[1]

I am not going here to enter on any special argument as to the validity
of these theories in their relation to the direct question of the nature
and existence of God. What we are here concerned with is, whether they
enable us to exclude the idea of a gift and a giver of spiritual or
mental (we will not quarrel about terms) nature to man, and whether, by
any fair reasoning from analogy, we can suppose man's reason and his
"_sensus numinis_" to arise by the me