Note 15 — Chapter I

The question whether the religious sense exists in the lower animals is discussed by Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), p. 65 ff., 101 f., and others. The question is similar to that respecting conscience; in both cases there is in beasts a germ that appears never to grow beyond a certain point. On the genesis of the moral sense see (besides the works of Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and their successors) G. H. Palmer, The Field of Ethics; L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution; E. Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. In regard to religious feeling we observe in certain animals, especially in the domesticated dog, an attitude of dependence and devotion toward the master as a superior Power that is similar to the attitude of man toward a deity, only with more affection and self-surrender. But in the animal, so far as we can judge, the intellectual and ethical conceptions do not come to their full rights—there is no idea of a Power possessing moral qualities and controlling all phenomena. The beast, therefore, is not religious in the proper sense of the term. But between the beast and the first man the difference may have been not great.