life is carried forward. All that is termed "art,” in the broadest meaning of the word, that is, all that is not included either in the products of material nature, which the wit and power of men can neither produce nor modify, or in the strictly involuntary states of mind with their physical effects,- comes into being in the way described. The conduct of men in their individual capacity, the organization of families and states, the government of nations, the management of armies, the diversified pursuits of industry, whatever is because men have willed it to be, is due to self-determination involving design.

There have been philosophers to maintain that man is an automaton. All that he does, they have ascribed to a chain of causes wholly embraced within a circle of nervous and muscular movements. Some, finding it impossible to ignore consciousness, have contented themselves with denying to conscious states causal agency. On this view it follows that the plan to take a journey, to build a house, or to do any thing else which presupposes design, has no influence whatever upon the result. The same efforts would be produced if we were utterly unconscious of any intention to bring them to pass. The design, not being credited with the least influence or control over the instruments through which the particular end is reached, might be subtracted without affecting the result. Since consciousness neither originates nor transmits motion, and thus exerts no power, the effects of what we call voluntary agency would take place as well without it. This creed, when it is once clearly understood, is not likely to win many adherents.1

1 For a clear exposition of the consequences of denying the agency of mind, see Herbert, The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science etc., pp. 103 seq., 128 seq.

The scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy is entirely consistent with the freedom of the will and with the reciprocal influence of mind and body. The doctrine is, that as the sum of matter remains the same, so is it with the sum of energy, potential or in action, in any body or system of bodies. Energy may be transmitted; that is, lost in one body, it re-appears undimin ished in another, or, ceasing in one form, it is exerted in another, and this according to definite ratios. In other words, there is a correlation of the physical forces. While this is true, there is not the slightest evidence that mental action is caused by the transmitting of energy from the physical system. Nor is there any proof that the mind transfers additional energy to matter. Nor, again, is there the slightest evidence that mental action is correlated with physical. That mental action is affected by physical change is evident. That the mind acts upon the brain, modifying its state, exerting a directive power upon the nerve-centres, is equally certain. The doctrine of conservation, as its best expounders - Clerk Maxwell, for example have perceived, does not militate in the least against the limited control of the human will and the supreme control of the divine.

Attending the inward assurance of freedom is the consciousness of moral law. While I know that I can do or forbear, I feel that I ought or ought not. The desires of human nature are various. They go forth to external good, which reaches the mind through the channel of the senses. They go out also to objects less tangible, as power, fame, knowledge, the esteem of others. But distinct from these diverse, and, it may be, conflicting desires, a law manifests itself in conscious

ness, and lays its authoritative mandate on the will. The requirement of that law in the concrete may be differently conceived. It may often be grossly misapprehended. But the feeling of obligation is an ineradicable element of our being. It is universal, or as nearly so as the perception of beauty or any other essential attribute of the soul. No ethical theory can dispense with it. It implies an ideal or end which the will is freely to realize. Be this end clearly or dimly discerned, and though it be in a great degree misconceived, its existence is implied in the imperative character of the law within. The confusion that may arise in respect to the contents of the law and the end to which the law points does not disprove the reality of either. A darkened and perverted conscience is still a conscience.

All explanations of the origin of religion which refer it to an empirical or accidental source are superficial. The theory that religious beliefs spring from tradition fails to give any account of their origin, to say nothing of their chronic continuance and of the tremendous power which they exert among men. The notion that religions are the invention of shrewd statesmen and rulers, devised as a means of managing the populace, probably has no advocates at present. It belongs among the obsolete theories of free-thinkers in the last century. How could religion be made so potent an instrument if its roots were not deep in human nature? "Timor facit deos," is another opinion. It has the sanction of Lucretius. Religion is supposed, on this view, to be due to the effect on rude minds of storms, convulsions of nature, and other phenomena which inspired terror, and were referred to supernatural beings. It is a shallow hypothesis, which overlooks the

fact that impressions of this kind are fleeting. They alternate, also, with aspects of nature of an entirely different character. If nature is terrific, it is also gracious and bountiful. Moreover, as far back as we can trace the history of mythological religions, we find that the divinities which the mythopoeic fancy calls into being are of a protecting or beneficent character. A favorite view of a school of anthropologists at present is, that religion began in fetich-worship, and rose by degrees through the worship of animals to a conception of loftier deities conceived of as clothed in human form. Against this speculation lies the fact, that the earliest mythological deities which history brings to our notice were heavenly beings whose loftiness impressed the mind with awe. Even where fetich-worship exists, it is not the material object itself which is the god. Rather is it true that the stick or stone is considered the vehicle or embodiment of divine agencies acting through it. "The external objects of nature never appear to the childish fantasy as mere things of sense, but always as animated beings, which, therefore, in some way or other, include in themselves a spirit."1 The doctrine that religion begins in a worship of ancestors, not to dwell on other objections to it, does not correspond with the facts of history; since divinities in human shape were not the earliest objects of heathen worship. The earliest supreme divinity of the IndoEuropean race was the shining heaven, which was clothed with the attributes of personality. The same answer avails against the supposition that religion has its origin in dreams, wherein the images of the dead are presented as if alive. Influences of this sort have had some effect, during the long history of polytheism, in

1 Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, p 319

determining the particular shape which mythologies have assumed. As an explanation of the origin of religion itself, and of its hold on mankind, they are miserably insufficient.

Herbert Spencer is one of the writers who make religion spring proximately out of ancestor-worship.1 Ancestor-worship itself he would explain by a dream-theory and a ghost-theory combined. The "primitive man," who is so far off as to give room for any number of guesses about him, mistakes his shadow for another man, the duplicate of himself. Whether he makes the same mistake about every rock and wigwam from which a shadow is cast, we are not told. His image seen in the water gives him a more definite idea of his other self. Echoes help still more in the same direction. Then there is the distinction between "the animate," or, rather, animals, and "the inanimate." Here Spencer rejects what the soundest writers on mythology all hold, that the personifying imagination of men, who as regards reflection are children, confounds the inanimate with the living. The lower animals, dogs and horses, do not; and is man below them in knowledge? This position of Spencer is characteristic of his whole theory. If man were on the level of the dog or the horse, if he were not conscious, in some degree, of will and personality, then, like them, he might never impute to rivers and streams and trees personal life. Dreams, according to Spencer, create the fixed belief that there is a duplicate man, or soul, that wanders off from the body: hence the belief that the dead survive. Naturally they become objects of reverence. So worship begins. Epilepsy, insanity, and the like, confirm the notion that ghosts come and go. Temples were first the tombs of the dead. Fetiches 1 The Principles of Sociology, vol. i. chap. viii seq.