THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGIOXS. 151 



spise or lament. According to others, again, some favor might be 

 granted to Jupiter and Olympus, for whom magnificent temples and 

 beautiful statues had been erected ; but the flood of historical indigna- 

 tion must be turned upon the shame of shames, of Christianity and 

 the middle ages. Such aberrations, with all their variations, form a 

 vast network of prejudices which is not yet broken up and which still 

 holds bound in its toils the whole radical party of France." 



Some minds, struck by the ills which religions have engendered, 

 are willing to admit the utility and even the necessity of hierography ; 

 but they do not pretend to look for anything in the science but argu- 

 ments, or weapons, with which to contest the various forms of belief 

 around them. 



Is there any need of explaining that such can not be the purpose of 

 this course ? In saying that I will try to treat religions by the pro- 

 cesses of science, I am by implication engaged to make neither an anti- 

 religious polemic nor a religious propaganda. Parties and sects are 

 at liberty to draw all the conclusions they please from science ; but 

 science should never stoop to be their instrument or sign. 



"When, in 1879, the French Senate discussed the scheme for intro- 

 ducing the history of religions into the College de France, Edouard 

 de Laboulaye became the spokesman of a prejudice that disputes even 

 the possibility of using historical methods in the study of any relig- 

 ion, saying : " When you believe it is true, everything will seem natural 

 to you. When you believe it is false, everything will seem absurd. 

 How are you going to find a way of teaching impartially ? " 



Henry Martin replied : " I do not say that the comparative history 

 of religions will be to the profit of intolerant religious ideas that pro- 

 scribe one another as they proscribe irreligious ideas ; bxit it will surely 

 be to the profit of the idea of that universal religion which lies at the 

 bottom of all religions, and is their essence." 



I will go further, and say that the historian of religions need not 

 be at the trouble of asking whether the object of the religious senti- 

 ment is real or not, or, in other words, whether the belief in the exist- 

 ence of the Deity is well-founded or illusory. 



I would also add that, to write the history of religions, it wouM be 

 necessary to put one's self at the positivist point of view, provided this 

 phrase is not taken to signify a formal adhesion to the philosophical sys- 

 tem of Auguste Comte, who also has come to hierography with a pre- 

 conceived theory. Here, again, I enter upon a new order of prejudice, the 

 philosophical prejudice, or that which involves finding in the facts the 

 confirmation of a doctrine determined upon in advance. Orthodox posi- 

 tivism omits from its scientific classification, experimental psychology, 

 the study of which is indispensable, as Herbert Spencer declares, for 

 obtaining the key to the religious sentiment and its evolutions. When 

 the positivists afiirm that man must pass, in his individual and so- 

 cial development, through the theological, metaphysical, and positive 



