Magic Science and Religion 53 



demands the existence of seasonal, periodical feasts with a big con- 

 course of people, with rejoicings and festive apparel, with an 

 abundance of food, and with relaxation of rules and taboos. The 

 members of the tribe come together, and they relax the usual 

 restrictions, especially the barriers of conventional reserve in social 

 and in sexual intercourse. The appetites are provided for, indeed 

 pandered to, and there is a common participation in the pleasures, a 

 display to everyone of all that is good, the sharing of it in a universal 

 mood of generosity. To the interest in plenty of material goods 

 there is joined the interest in the multitude of people, in the 

 congregation, in the tribe as a body. 



With these facts of periodical festive gathering a number of 

 other distinctly social elements must be ranged : the tribal character 

 of almost all religious ceremonies, the social universality of moral 

 rules, the contagion of sin, the importance of sheer convention and 

 tradition in primitive religion and morals, above all the identi- 

 fication of the whole tribe as a social unit with its religion ; that is, 

 the absence of any religious sectarianism, dissension, or heterodoxy 

 in primitive creed. 



I. Society as the Substance of God ■ 



All these facts, especially the last one,, show that religion is 

 a tribal affair, and we are reminded of the famous dictum of 

 Robertson Smith, that primitive religion is the concern of the 

 community rather than of the individual. This exaggerated 

 view contains a great deal of truth, but, in science, to recognise 

 where the truth lies, on the one harid,and to unearth it and bring it 

 fully to light, on the other, are by no means the same. Robertson 

 Smith did not do much more in this matter, in fact, than set 

 forth the important problem : why is it that primitive man 

 performs his ceremonies in public ? What is the relation between 

 society and the truth revealed by religion and worshipped in it ? 



To these questions, some modern anthropologists, as we 

 know, give a trenchant, apparently conclusive, and exceedingly 

 simple answer. Professor Durkheim and his followers maintain 

 that religion is social, for all its Entities, its God or Gods, the Stuff 

 all things religious are made of, are nothing more nor less than 

 Society divinised. 



This theory seems very well to explain the public nature of 

 cult, the inspiration and comfort drawn by man, the social animal. 



