hat
this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand, a
belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and
apparently follows from a considerable advance in man's reason and from
a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and
wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been
used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a
rash judgment, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the
existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more
powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a
beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator 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 low organized form
will naturally ask, How does this bear on the belief in the immortality
of the soul? The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shown,
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 a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an
immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the
period in the gradually ascending organic scale cannot possibly be
determined.

I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be
denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is
bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as
a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of
variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the
individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of
the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand
sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of
blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion, whether or
not we are able to believe that every slight variation of structure, the
union of each pair in marriage, the dissemination of each seed, and
other such events have all been ordained for some special purpose.

Sexual selection has been treated at great length in this work; for, as
I have attempted to show, it has played an important part in t