510 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 



suggestive, but with this reservation — they are true of ritual only 

 when uninformed by personal experience. The very elements in 

 ritual on which Dr Beck lays such stress, imitation, repetition, 

 uniformity and social collectivity, have been found by the experience 

 of all time to have a twofold influence — they inhibit the intellect, 

 they stimulate and suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of 

 Rome knows what she is about when she prescribes the telling of 

 the rosary. Mystery-cults and sacraments, the lineal descendants of 

 magic, all contain rites charged with suggestion, with symbols, with 

 gestures, with half-understood formularies, with all the apparatus of 

 appeal to emotion and will — the more unintelligible they are the better 

 they serve their purpose of inhibiting thought. Thus ritual deadens 

 the intellect and stimulates will, desire, emotion. "Les operations 

 magiques...sont le resultat d'une science et d'une habitude qui 

 exaltent la volonU humaine au-dessus de ses limites habituelles 1 ." 

 It is this personal experience, this exaltation, this sense of immediate, 

 non-intellectual revelation, of mystical oneness with all things, that 

 again and again rehabilitates a ritual otherwise moribund. 



To resume. The outcome of our examination of origines seems 

 to be that religious phenomena result from two delusive processes — 

 a delusion of the non-critical intellect, a delusion of the over-con- 

 fident will. Is religion then entirely a delusion ? I think not 2 . 

 Every dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but 

 for all that the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of 

 apprehending some things and these of enormous importance. It 

 may also be that the contents of this mystical apprehension cannot 

 be put into language without being falsified and misstated, that they 

 have rather to be felt and lived than uttered and intellectually 

 analysed, and thus do not properly fall under the category of true or 

 false, in the sense in which these words are applied to propositions ; 

 yet they may be something for which " true " is our nearest existing 

 word and are often, if not necessary at least highly advantageous 

 to life. That is why man through a series of more or less grossly 

 anthropomorphic mythologies and theologies with their concomitant 

 rituals tries to restate them. Meantime we need not despair. 

 Serious psychology is yet young and has only just joined hands 

 with physiology. Religious students are still hampered by medi- 

 aevalisms such as Body and Soul, and by the perhaps scarcely less 



1 Eliphas L^vi, Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie, n. p. 32, Paris, 1861, and "A 

 defence of Magic," by Evelyn Underhill, Fortnightly Review, 1907. 



2 I am deeply conscious that what I say here is a merely personal opinion or sentiment, 

 unsupported and perhaps unsupportable by reason, and very possibly quite worthless, but 

 for fear of misunderstanding I prefer to state it. 



