[1] “Social Law in the Spiritual World,” Philadelphia, 1904.
[2] The term a tergo causation means that what happens is produced entirely by the push or the pull of forces. There is an exact equation—the antecedent determines the consequent.
[3] It is not true, of course, that there is an absolute “break” in the upward processes of life. Even in the lower forms of life there are hints of higher possibilities. There is an elemental struggle for the life of others which has in it the potentiality of love and sacrifice. But there is no “sign” on the lower levels—before self-consciousness dawned—of any capacity for an ideal, or of any power to develop by the forecast and vision of the goal.
[4] The term a fronte compulsion means the compelling power of an ideal which influences by an attraction from in front.
[7] I am aware that this feature of child life will seem to some of my readers to be overdrawn. Some Mothers say that no such tendency was observed in their own children. That is quite likely. All children do not express their subtle and complex emotions in the same way. I do not mean to imply that every child expresses a need of sacrifice when he does wrong. But careful observers of children have frequently noted the facts which I have emphasized in the text, and I have often met them in my own experience with children.
[8] It has been shown by Robertson Smith and others that the Hebrews thought of sacrifice not as a gift to appease Jehovah but as a sharing of a common meal with him. Such a lofty view of sacrifice is surely not primitive. When sacrifice had come to be thought of, as of a common meal, it had already been purified and transformed by centuries of development and the heightening presupposes a series of unnamed prophets before the list of great revealers whose names we know. In the earliest stages religion is only very slightly ethical. The moralization of religion is one of the most tremendous facts of human history.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Hover over the Greek text to see its transliteration.
