Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/67

Another one of these causes of the continuation of Religion, which I have designated as accessory, consists in the necessity for an ideal that is experienced by all human hearts, even the rudest and most uncultivated. What is this ideal? It is the remote type towards which mankind is developing and perfecting itself; not only the type of physical perfection, but the type of the inner life, of the mode of thinking, and of the constitution of society. The impulse towards this ideal, the longing to attain to it, are implanted in the breast of every intellectually and physically normal man; it is something organically inherent in him, of which he is not necessarily conscious, and in which even in the deepest and closest thinker, there is always much that is unconscious. In building a railroad embankment, a row of wooden stakes is first driven into the ground, of the same height and extending as far, as the embankment is to be; then the workmen shovel dirt upon the stakes until they are entirely covered up and lost to sight. Every living being contains within itself a law for its growth and development, which fulfills the same purpose as the stakes in the embankment; it grows and developes in accordance with this law, trying to fill out the invisible but none the less real framework which it has built up for itself, as the embankment grows and finally covers up the stakes. If an organism developes so that it coincides at all points with the figure which represents the extreme limit of its capacity for development, it has reached perfection and fully attained to its ideal. Usually each individual being remains far behind the ideal of its type, but its effort to reach it is the mysterious compelling force of its instinct for self-preservation and development, that is, of all organic activity. The race as a whole, has also its standard of development, and everything within it to raise it to this