Religion in its relation to Natural Science. In
handling this topic I shall endeavour to take as broad and deep a view
as I can of the present standing of Natural Religion, without waiting to
show step by step the ways and means by which it has been brought into
this position, by the influence of Science.

In the earliest dawn of recorded thought, teleology in some form or
another has been the most generally accepted theory whereby the order of
Nature is explained. It is not, however, my object in this paper to
trace the history of this theory from its first rude beginnings in
Fetishism to its final development in Theism. I intend to devote myself
exclusively to the question as to the present standing of this theory,
and I allude to its past history only in order to examine the statement
which is frequently made, to the effect that its general prevalence in
all ages and among all peoples of the world lends to it a certain degree
of 'antecedent credibility.' With reference to this point, I should say,
that, whether or not the order of Nature is due to a disposing Mind, the
hypothesis of mental agency in Nature--or, as the Duke of Argyll terms
it, the hypothesis of 'anthropopsychism'--must necessarily have been the
earliest hypothesis. What we find in Nature is the universal prevalence
of causation, and long before the no less universal equivalency between
causes and effects--i.e. the universal prevalence of natural law--became
a matter of even the [vaguest] appreciation, the general fact that
nothing happens without a cause of some kind was fully recognized.
Indeed, the recognition of this fact is not only presented by the
lowest races of the present day, but, as I have myself given evidence to
show, likewise by animals and infants[21]. And therefore, it appears to
me probable that those psychologists are right who argue that the idea
of cause is intuitive, in the same sense that the ideas of space and
time are intuitive--i.e. the instinctive or [inherited] effect of
ancestral experience.

Now if it is thus a matter of certainty that the recognition of
causality in Nature is co-extensive with, and even anterior to, the
human mind, it appears to me no less certain that the first attempt at
assigning a cause of this or that observed event in Nature--i.e. the
first attempts at a rational explanation of the phenomena of
Nature--must have been of an anthropopsychic kind. No other explanation
was, as it were, so ready to hand