THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.
Importance of the Problem of the Origin of Religion—Universality of Religious Beliefs or Superstitions—Variability of Religions and Religious Evolution.
I. Idealist Theory which Attributes the Origin of Religion to a Notion of the Infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.
II. Theory of a Worship of the Dead and of Spirits—Herbert Spencer—Spencer’s Objections to the Theory of the Attribution of a Soul to Natural Forces.
III. Answer to Objections—Religious Physics Sociological in Form, and the Substitution of Relations between Malevolent or Beneficent Conscious Beings for Relations between Natural Forces—Socio-morphism of Primitive Peoples.
Importance of inquiry into genesis of religion.