44 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



the city state. No building, however majestical, no 

 music, however soul-stirring, no ceremonial, however 

 elaborate, although serving a similar purpose, has im- 

 pressed the human mind with a sense of its subordina- 

 tion as do the rivers and mountains, the waterspouts 

 and thunderbolts that surround the earlier populations. 

 It seems part of the inevitable order that religions 

 should be conceived and born in solitary places, and 

 should droop and decay in crowded thoroughfares, 

 where Nature is hard to seek and far to find, and a 

 paternal government too often takes the responsibility 

 for the relations between man and man and man and 

 Nature out of the hands, often out of the cognizance, 

 of the individual wayfarer. 



Let us accept as our definition of religion " the effec- 

 tive desire to be in right relation to the Power manifest- 

 ing itself in the Universe," and regard it from one side 

 as an attempt to determine the true place on this earth 

 of man the individual, and man the species. We find 

 that in all stages of social evolution the interests of the 

 individual tend to clash with those of the species. For 

 the race it is necessary that selection should be rigorous 

 and effective. Many must be called into life that few 

 may be chosen as the parents of the next generation. 

 For the individual, a stringent natural selection may 

 mean disappointment, privation or death. 



Hence conies the need of a supernatural sanction for 

 unselfish conduct of no immediate advantage to the 

 individual. No merely rational system of ethics has 

 yet been found sufficient to influence the mass of man- 

 kind ; it is doubtful whether such a system ever will be 

 sufficient even when all men realize the racial import- 



