t then
began to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a long
process of evolution, but in the origination of man there began the
development of the higher psychical attributes, and those
attributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in the
development of the human race. Just take this mere matter of
"altruism," as we call it. It is not a pretty word, but must serve
for want of a better. In the development of altruism from the low
point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together,
up to the point reached at the present day, there has been a
notable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of
improvement. The progress has been all in the direction of
bringing out what we call the higher spiritual attributes. The
feeling was now more strongly impressed upon me than ever, that all
these things tended to set the whole doctrine of evolution into
harmony with religion; that if the past through which man had
originated was such as has been described, then religion was a fit
and worthy occupation for man, and some of the assumptions which
underlie every system of religion must be true. For example, with
regard to the assumption that what we see of the present life is
not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the question
beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life
eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to
say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common
sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to
produce a merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument
has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was
beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were
coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start,
there came into the human mind--how one can hardly say, but there
did come--the beginnings of a groping after something that lies
outside and beyond the world of sense. That groping after a
spiritual world has been going on here for much more than a hundred
thousand years, and it has played an enormous part in the history
of mankind, in the whole development of human society. Nobody can
imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the present
time. Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom
that does not exist, or a reaching out after something that does
exist, but of which man, with his lim