276 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



of this subconscious territory will always necessarily 

 constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. 

 But any developed religion must always in some way 

 help to make these great reserves of power accessible, 

 always teach the enlargements of the personal ego 

 which their conquest brings about. This is one of 

 the ways in which, to use current religious phrase- 

 ology, self may be lost, and found again on a different 

 plane. 



Religion must further always provide some internal 

 harmony, in counterpart to the harmony demanded 

 in the unitary comprehension of external reality. 

 The various activities and experiences of life, as 

 they are originally given by heredity to the child, 

 are either independent, or else antagonistic and dis- 

 harmonious. There must be some means provided 

 for bringing all of them into a true organization — 

 in other words, into a whole which, though yet single, 

 is composed of co-operating parts. Here again the 

 actual responses of actual religions have been many 

 and various ; but they all operate by suppression, 

 repression, and sublimation, or by a combination of 

 these. 



It can at once be said that sublimation is the right 

 and highest way, and that two of the criteria of 

 religious progress are to be found in the stress laid 

 upon sublimation, and in the enlargement and the 

 elevation of the dominant ideas at work in the sub- 

 limating process. It is the right and highest way 



