s existence, he
was led irrevocably to think of those human foes who warred with
him, and to see, back of the warfare of the elements, an inscrutable
malevolent intelligence which took this method to express its
displeasure. But every other line of scientific observation leads
equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless
beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain
a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could
not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations
of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution
of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world
with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, like himself
in their thought and action, differing only in the limitations of their
powers. His own dream existence gave him seeming proof of the existence
of an alter ego, a spiritual portion of himself that could dissever
itself from his body and wander at will; his scientific inductions
seemed to tell him of a world of invisible beings, capable of
influencing him for good or ill. From the scientific exercise of his
faculties he evolved the all-encompassing generalizations of invisible
and all-powerful causes back of the phenomena of nature. These
generalizations, early developed and seemingly supported by the
observations of countless generations, came to be among the most
firmly established scientific inductions of our primeval ancestor.
They obtained a hold upon the mentality of our race that led subsequent
generations to think of them, sometimes to speak of them, as "innate"
ideas. The observations upon which they were based are now, for the most
part, susceptible of other interpretations; but the old interpretations
have precedent and prejudice back of them, and they represent ideas
that are more difficult than almost any others to eradicate. Always,
and everywhere, superstitions based upon unwarranted early scientific
deductions have been the most implacable foes to the progress of
science. Men have built systems of philosophy around their conception of
anthropomorphic deities; they have linked to these systems of philosophy
the allied conception of the immutability of man's spirit, and they have
asked that scientific progress should stop short at the brink of these
systems of philosophy and accept their dictates as final. Yet there is
not to-day in existence, a