Principles of western civilisation

162 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Now, in the light of the modern tendencies of research, it has come to be seen that we have undoubtedly in the religious systems of Greece and Rome nothing more or less than a highly specialised form of a religious phenomenon which has profoundly influenced for an immense period the history and development of nearly every section of the human race; namely, the institution of Ancestor Worship. At the present day, as the course of modern research brings slowly to light the conditions under which the first advances of the race towards a social state were made, every student of the early institutions of mankind finds himself brought into continual contact, and at a multitude of points, with the subject of Ancestor Worship. On all the peoples who are playing a leading part in the world nowadays, on a great number even of existing social institutions, and on nearly every religion, Ancestor Worship appears to have left its mark deeply and indelibly impressed.’

When the evolutionist comes to take up for himself the question of the significance in human development of the immense range of phenomena connected with the institution of Ancestor Worship, he soon becomes conscious that it is impossible to accept as sufficient those more or less trivial explanations of the origin of the institution which prevail in the literature of the time, and of which Mr. Herbert Spencer has hitherto been regarded as the principal exponent. In these explanations the phenomenon of Ancestor Worship is said to arise from an intro-

1 Tts influence may be traced, even in the present day, on the beliefs and social customs of peoples so far apart as the existing Chinese, the Semitic races of the East, and the Celtic populations of the British islands. Cf. Ze Structure of Greek Tribal Soctety, by Hugh E. Seebohm, p. 19.