RELIGION AND SCIENCE 275 



The general effect of man's gregarious instinct is 

 that he desires to find himself in harmony with some 

 traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes 

 to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd 

 ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a 

 stratum within the nation ; of a whole class or of a 

 clique; of science or of art ; of a retired monasticism, 

 or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But they 

 are always herd ideas, and through them man is always 

 member of some community, even though that com- 

 munity be tiny, or consist mainly of writers dead and 

 gone ; and he always strives to put himself in harmony 

 with the traditions of that community. 



• «»*«« 



A long-winded introduction enough ; now for 

 the bearing of it. One of the essentials of every 

 religion is its treatment of the subconscious, is its 

 view and its practice as regards the relation between 

 the personally-organized part of the mind to the 

 remaining non-personal reservoirs. At first the 

 non-personal part is regarded as being wholly outside 

 the organism, and its occasional flooding up into 

 the narrower ego is regarded as an operation of an 

 external personality, a spirit, a God. Comparatively 

 late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but the 

 process by which connection is made is still regarded 

 as divine, and called inspiration. Such ideas belong 

 to the adolescence of the race, in precisely the same 

 way as the discovery and acquisition of great tracts 



