[1][2][3] Eugene Halton has claimed that Stuart-Glennie’s most significant idea was his theory, first published in 1873, of what he termed "the moral revolution", delineating deep changes across different civilizations in the period 2,500 years ago, roughly centered around 600-500 BCE.
"[4] This historical shift around roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, most notably ancient China, India, Judaism, and Greece, was termed the Axial Age ("die Achsenzeit") by Karl Jaspers in 1949.
[5] In his last publication on the moral revolution, published in 1906 in Sociological Papers, Stuart-Glennie reiterated his thesis: “…one great epoch can be signalised—that which I was, I believe, the first, thirty-two years ago ([In the Morningland:] “New Philosophy of History,” 1873), to point out as having occurred in the sixth (or fifth-sixth) century B.C.
Whereas Tylor’s idea of animism held that spirit inhabits things from without, Stuart-Glennie’s panzooinism allowed that inherent powers of nature are worthy of attention and devotion.
Stuart-Glennie's model of religion and history thus originates out of perceptive relations to habitat, that is, as motivated by the belief in the livingness of things as providing clues for human living.
[17] Robertson’s dismissal of Stuart-Glennie’s original thesis concerning the era of the moral revolution demonstrate how the times were not ready for an idea that only became widely known after Jaspers’ book in the mid twentieth century.
[19] He clashed with Annie Besant in wanting to include family matters in the charter of the Social Democratic Federation during the 1880s; and was later a Fabian for a time, before coming up against the same issue of women's rights as foundational.
He was an active participant in the fledgling Sociological Society of London in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a friend of early sociologist and fellow Scotsman Patrick Geddes and also Victor Branford.
This theory was developed by Edwin Sidney Hartland, Andrew Lang, and Laurence Gomme; and as an offshoot emerged the racialist concept that myths and folklore contain a basis of conflicting lower and higher races.