It appears to be an unavoidable inference that the ultimate executive
agency must become in some way or other elective. From such evidence as
existing society will afford us, it is to be inferred that the highest
State-office in whatever way filled will continue to decline in
importance. No speculations concerning ultimate political forms can,
however, be regarded as anything but tentative. There will probably be
considerable variety in the special forms of the political institutions
of industrial society; all of them bearing traces of past institutions
which have been brought into congruity with the representative
principle.
To turn to political functions, when corporate action is no longer
needed for preserving a society as a whole from destruction or injury by
other societies, the end which remains for it is that of preserving the
component members of society from injury by one another. With this
limitation of the state function it is probable that there will be
simultaneously carried further that trait which already characterises
the most industrially-organised society--the performance of
increasingly-numerous and increasingly-important functions by other
organisations than those which form departments of the government.
Already private enterprise, working through incorporated bodies of
citizens, achieves ends undreamed of as so achievable in primitive
societies; and in the future other ends undreamed of now as so
achievable will be achieved.
The conclusion of profoundest moment to which lines of argument converge
is that the possibility of a high social state political as well as
general, fundamentally depends on the cessation of war. Persistent
militancy, maintaining adapted institutions, must inevitably prevent, or
else neutralise, changes in the direction of more equitable institutions
and laws; while permanent peace will of necessity be followed by social
ameliorations of every kind.
_III.--Ecclesiastical Institutions_
Rightly to trace the evolution of ecclesiastical institutions, we must
know whence came the ideas and sentiments implied by them. Are these
innate or are they derived? They are derived. And here it may be
remarked that where among African savages there existed no belief in a
double which goes away during sleep, there was found to exist no belief
in a double which survived after death.
From the ordinary absence of the other self in sleep, and its
extraordinary absences in swoons, apoplexy, and so forth, the transition
is to its unlimited absence at death; when after an interval of waiting
the expectation of immediate return is given up. Commonly the spirit is
supposed to linger near the body or to revisit it. Hence the
universality of ministrations to the double of the deceased habitually
made at funerals. The habitat of the other self is variously conceived;
though everywhere there is an approach to parallelism between the life
here and the imagined life hereafter. Along with the development of
grave-heaps into altars, grave-sheds into religious edifices, and food
for the ghost into sacrifices, there goes on the development of praise
and prayer. Turning to certain more indirect results of the ghost
theory, we find that, distinguishing but confusedly between semblance
and reality, the savage thinks that the representation of a thing
partakes of the properties of a thing. Hence the effigy of a dead man
becomes a habitation for his ghost; and idols, because of the indwelling
doubles of the dead, are propitiated. Identification of the doubles of
the dead with animals--now with those which frequent houses or places
which the doubles are supposed to haunt and now with those which are
like certain of the dead in their malicious or benevolent natures--is in
other cases traceable to misinterpretation of names; this latter leading
to the identification of stars with persons and hence to star and sun
worship. In their normal forms, as in their abnormal forms, all gods
arise by apotheosis. Originally the god is the superior living man whose
power is conceived as superhuman. As in primitive thought divinity is
synonymous with superiority, and as at first a god may be either a
powerful living person or a dead person who has acquired supernatural
power as a ghost, there come two origins for semi-divine beings--the one
by unions between a conquering god race and the conquered race
distinguished as men, and the other by supposed intercourse between
living persons and spirits. Where the evidence is examined comparative
sociology discloses a common origin for each leading element of
religious belief.