were really the case, then man's conception of himself
as superior to the other animals on earth might be but a prejudice of an
arbitrary kind. When, however, we consider, from the point of view of
evolution, the place of man among the other animals that occupy or have
occupied the earth, it is indubitable that the human organism is in
point of time the latest evolved and the human brain is in point of
complexity and efficiency the most highly developed. Further, the
evidence of embryology goes to show that the organism which has
eventually become human became so only by passing through successive
stages, each of which has its analogue in some of the existing forms of
animal life. Those forms of animal life exist side by side; and if we
conceive them to be represented diagrammatically by vertical lines,
differing in height according to their degree of evolution, the line
representing the human organism will be the tallest, and may be
considered to have become the tallest by successive increments or stages
corresponding to the height of the various other parallel vertical
lines.

When the conception of evolution, which had been employed to explain the
origin of species and the descent of man, and which had been gained by a
consideration of material organisms, came to be applied to the world of
man's thoughts, to the non-material and spiritual domain, and to be used
for the purpose of explaining the growth and the development of
religion, it was natural that the conception which had proved so
valuable in the one case should be applied without modification to the
other--as natural as that the first railway coach should be built on the
model of the stagecoach. The possibility that the theory of evolution
might itself evolve, and in evolving change, was one that was not, and
at that time could hardly be, present to the minds of those who were
extending the theory and in the process of extending it were developing
it. Yet the possibility was there, implicit in the very conception of
evolution, which involves continuous change--change in continuity and
continuity in change.

Any and every attempt to trace the evolution of religion seems at first
necessarily to involve the assumption that from the beginning religion
was there to be evolved. That was the position assumed by Robertson
Smith in _The Religion of the Semites_, which appeared in 1889. At that
date the aborigines of Australia were supposed to represent the human
ra