for weak social affections and sympathies.
The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly
through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a
just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been
rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit,
example, instruction, and reflection. It is not improbable that after
long practice virtuous tendencies may be inherited. With the more
civilised races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity
has had a potent influence on the advance of morality. Ultimately man
does not accept the praise or blame of his fellows as his sole guide,
though few escape this influence, but his habitual convictions,
controlled by reason, afford him the safest rule. His conscience then
becomes the supreme judge and monitor. Nevertheless the first
foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts,
including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained,
as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection.
The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but
the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower
animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that
this belief is innate or instinctive in man. 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 his faculties of imagination, curiosity
and wonder. I am aware 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.
He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organised form,
will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality
of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn,
possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the
primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no
avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of
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