346 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



on the same basis. Though science arises out of and 

 remains indirectly connected with practical interests, these 

 are of course not the interests of immediate action to 

 which the " practical judgment " is limited. It is only 

 when men get interested in needs that go beyond the 

 particular purpose in hand, and begin to generalise and 

 reflect upon them, that they evolve out of their 

 practical skill a body of technical rules that can be handed 

 on and developed. Finally, like art and science, religion 

 is a system of conceptions built up by the aid of imagina- 

 tion out of inward and outward experiences. We do not 

 here inquire into the historical origin of religion. It is 

 sufficient to note that in all its forms its practical efficacy 

 and real meaning in the life of a people rest on the 

 adequacy and faithfulness with which it clothes, in a form 

 which appeals to the feelings, the experience, particularly 

 the moral experience, of the people who profess it. 

 Religion is one. form in which experience, taking the word 

 in its most comprehensive sense, is organised. All true 

 revelation is from within. The only Sinai is a fresh 

 height of man's spiritual nature, and the missionary 

 attempts to preach religion can only succeed in so far as 

 an equation, so to say, establishes itself between the 

 doctrine taught and the minds of those who learn. Thus 

 it is the perpetual tragedy of the higher religions to be 

 vulgarised as they become popular, and to be ruined by 

 success. When the apostle has converted the crowd, he 

 becomes a bishop. 



In the different forms thus cursorily enumerated, in 

 traditional morality, custom, and law, in social organisation, 

 in the technical arts, in science, in religion, and even 

 indirectly in imaginative art human experience organises 

 itself into systems governing human conduct. Past 

 experience, including now the accumulated tradition of 

 the race, is used in an organised form in guiding conduct. 

 Action is shaped and determined by some conception of 

 the permanent good of self, the family, society, and 

 possibly the species. The same factors have been present 

 all along, even before the germ of intelligence appears. 

 For instinct is shaped under the laws of heredity by the 



