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JAIN JOURNAL : Vol-XXXIII, No. 3 January 1999 The extremists of the evolutionist school do not admit the above innate religious tendency in man to believe in a God and try to prove that man began with a clean mind, clear of all religious pre-dispositions. But, however, much down in the mentality of primitive people we go, we always come across a groping there towards an 'indifinite' beyond the presentations of the senses, a leaving towards a 'being beyond', a 'more-than-l-'this 'indefinite being beyond this ‘more-the-I', being held as fit for being venerated, awed, believed in and depended upon. Accordingly, the genetic or the so-called scientific theory about the evolution of religion should not be unmindful of the intuitive basis. In fact, the intuition-theory and the evolution-theory have both their importance and usefulness in the history of religious progress. Evolution does not mean continuous and successive new creations out of nothing; it always implies a development or amplification of what already is, -may be, as potentiality or implicit possibility; evolution thus signifies a constitutive permanent element and a contingent element of change as well. The instinct-theory of religionin however vague a manner it may do,- affirms that man has a native sense of the divinity with its four attributes. The business of the evolution school to show how the history of a religion has been continuously bringing out the inner and the real significance of that intuitive idea of God.
"Religion is intimately wrapped up”, says W. Wallace, "with the tillage of the fields the pasture of the flocks, the rules and modes of wed-lock, the customs of the market, with sanitary rules, with the treatment of disease". In fact, the religious position of a man is connected with his whole psychical nature more or less intimately and is in this respect distinguishable from a particular theory of his, regarding, say, a particular physical or chemical phenomena. The religious consciousness is immediate and involves a commanding persuasion; in the words of Schilling, it means, “What is at once heroism, faith, fidelity to yourself and to God, - a trust and confidence in the divine which excludes or abolishes all choice". This signifies that one's religion or theory of God is essentially a conviction, -not merely a credulity nor even a critical knowledge of facts but rather a realisation of a law, in which he lives, acts, and has his being. This inseparable connection between god-consciousness and the consciousness of one's own essential nature explains the best results we have of the rationalisation of a religion or of the original primitive notion of God. Kant's critical researches led him to find out that some of the most essential matters of life, for their solution in accordance with the principle of practical reason, pointed to a regulative law, nderlying and unifying them and that this law was identifiable with
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