ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Spencerian doctrine of the unknowable not in its purely metaphysical but in its broadly religious aspects. It discusses the whole question of what people must predict as the probable future of religion by way of Herbert Spencer's speculations concerning religious development in the past. All sense of the supernatural, according to his view of the matter, may be traced back to the primitive belief in the ghost; and all religious systems whatsoever, arising at the outset from such belief, have passed through the preparatory stage of ancestor-worship on their way to their more complex and highly developed forms. Acceptance of the doctrine of evolution in its application to thought obliges people to acknowledge that in the development of religious, as of all other ideas, there must at every stage be a certain congruity between the beliefs held and the intellectual and moral character of those holding them.
