The Dawn of Civilization

68:3.1Prim­i­tive de­sires pro­duced the orig­i­nal so­ci­ety, but ghost fear held it to­gether and im­parted an ex­trahu­man as­pect to its ex­is­tence. Com­mon fear was phys­i­o­log­i­cal in ori­gin: fear of phys­i­cal pain, un­sat­is­fied hunger, or some earthly calamity; but ghost fear was a new and sub­lime sort of ter­ror.

68:3.2Prob­a­bly the great­est sin­gle fac­tor in the evo­lu­tion of hu­man so­ci­ety was the ghost dream. Al­though most dreams greatly per­turbed the prim­i­tive mind, the ghost dream ac­tu­ally ter­ror­ized early men, driv­ing these su­per­sti­tious dream­ers into each other’s arms in will­ing and earnest as­so­ci­a­tion for mu­tual pro­tec­tion against the vague and un­seen imag­i­nary dan­gers of the spirit world. The ghost dream was one of the ear­li­est ap­pear­ing dif­fer­ences be­tween the an­i­mal and hu­man types of mind. An­i­mals do not vi­su­al­ize sur­vival af­ter death.

68:3.3Ex­cept for this ghost fac­tor, all so­ci­ety was founded on fun­da­men­tal needs and ba­sic bi­o­logic urges. But ghost fear in­tro­duced a new fac­tor in civ­i­liza­tion, a fear which reaches out and away from the el­e­men­tal needs of the in­di­vid­ual, and which rises far above even the strug­gles to main­tain the group. The dread of the de­parted spir­its of the dead brought to light a new and amaz­ing form of fear, an ap­palling and pow­er­ful ter­ror, which con­tributed to whip­ping the loose so­cial or­ders of early ages into the more thor­oughly dis­ci­plined and bet­ter con­trolled prim­i­tive groups of an­cient times. This sense­less su­per­sti­tion, some of which still per­sists, pre­pared the minds of men, through su­per­sti­tious fear of the un­real and the super­nat­u­ral, for the later dis­cov­ery of “the fear of the Lord which is the be­gin­ning of wis­dom.” The base­less fears of evo­lu­tion are de­signed to be sup­planted by the awe for De­ity in­spired by rev­e­la­tion. The early cult of ghost fear be­came a pow­er­ful so­cial bond, and ever since that far-dis­tant day man­kind has been striv­ing more or less for the at­tain­ment of spir­i­tu­al­ity.

68:3.4Hunger and love drove men to­gether; van­ity and ghost fear held them to­gether. But these emo­tions alone, with­out the in­flu­ence of peace-pro­mot­ing rev­e­la­tions, are un­able to en­dure the strain of the sus­pi­cions and ir­ri­ta­tions of hu­man in­teras­so­ci­a­tions. With­out help from super­hu­man sources the strain of so­ci­ety breaks down upon reach­ing cer­tain lim­its, and these very in­flu­ences of so­cial mo­bi­liza­tion—hunger, love, van­ity, and fear—con­spire to plunge man­kind into war and blood­shed.

68:3.5The peace ten­dency of the hu­man race is not a nat­u­ral en­dow­ment; it is de­rived from the teach­ings of re­vealed re­li­gion, from the ac­cu­mu­lated ex­pe­ri­ence of the pro­gres­sive races, but more es­pe­cially from the teach­ings of Je­sus, the Prince of Peace.