pointed
at that hare, and not have yielded to the passing temptation of
hunting it.

The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but
the most decisive, of all the distinctions between man and the lower
animals. Darwin brings forward in the book before us a quantity of
reasons for holding it to be impossible that this belief is innate or
instinctive in man. In some races of men, for instance, we encounter a
total want of the idea of God. 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 the faculties of imagination, curiosity, and wonder.
"I am aware," says Darwin, "that the assumed instinctive belief in God
has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this
is a rash argument, 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."

How does the belief in the advancement of man from some low organized
form bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul? Sir John Lubbock
has proved that the barbarous races of man possess no clear belief of
the kind; but, as Darwin continually reminds us, arguments derived from
the primeval beliefs of savages are of little or no avail on either side
of a question. Attention is directed by Darwin to the more relevant fact
that 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.
He submits that there should be no greater cause for anxiety because the
period cannot possibly be determined in the gradually ascending
organic scale.

Darwin was well aware that the conclusions arrived at in the work before
us--namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form--would
be highly distasteful to many. The very persons, however, who regard the
conclusions with distaste admit without hesitation that they are
descended from barbarians. Darwin recalls the astonishment which he
himself felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken
shore, when the r