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 limited intelligence, has only
been able to gain a crude idea. And the latter seems a far more
probable conclusion, because, if it is not so, it constitutes a
unique exception to all the operations of evolution we know about.
As a general thing in the whole history of evolution, when you see
any internal adjustment reaching out toward something, it is in
order to adapt itself to something that really exists; and if the
religious cravings of man constitute an exception, they are the one
thing in the whole process of evolution that is exceptional and
different from all the rest. And this is surely an argument of