regarding God and the world, creator and creature, spirit and matter, as
two completely separated substances. We find this express dualism also in
most of the purer church-religions, especially in the three most
important forms of monotheism which the three most renowned prophets of
the eastern Mediterranean--Moses, Christ, and Mohammed--founded. But
soon, in a number of impure varieties of these three religions, and yet
more in the lower forms of paganism, the place of this dualism is taken
by a philosophical pluralism, and over against the good and
world-sustaining deity (Osiris, Ormuzd, Vishnu), there is placed a wicked
and destroying god (Typhon, Ahriman, Siva). Numerous demi-gods or saints,
good and bad, sons and daughters of the gods, are associated with these
two chief deities, and take part with them in the administration and
government of the cosmos.

In all these dualistic and pluralistic systems the fundamental idea is
that of anthropomorphism, or the humanising of God; man himself, as
godlike (or directly descended from God), occupies a special position in
the world, and is separated by a great gulf from the rest of nature.
Conjoined with this, for the most part, is the anthropocentric idea, the
conviction that man is the central point of the universe, the last and
highest final cause of creation, and that the rest of nature was created
merely for the purpose of serving man. In the Middle Ages there was
associated at the same time with this last conception the geocentric
idea, according to which the earth as the abode of man was taken for the
fixed middle point of the universe, round which sun, moon, and stars
revolve. As Copernicus (1543) gave the death-blow to the geocentric
dogma, so did Darwin (1859) to the anthropocentric one closely associated
with it.[6] A broad historical and critical comparison of religious and
philosophical systems, as a whole, leads as a main result to the
conclusion that every great advance in the direction of profounder