290 Science Religion and Reality 



appeal to our feelings, but we also feel about them largely as we 

 value them. Yet, more frequently perhaps than any other feeling, 

 the sense of the holy follows and depends on its value ; and, on the 

 whole, this becomes increasingly the case as the mind develops. 

 We might even regard it as at least one mark of progress, that while 

 the more primitive the life, the more the feelings determine the 

 value; the more advanced the development, the more the values 

 determine the feelings. 



The sacred, as defined above, might seem to afford a very 

 exalted test of religion, entirely different from the feelings which 

 mix themselves up with all kinds of crudities. But, unfortunately, 

 history is far from confirming this expectation. Even as an 

 absolute valuation, such as we have defined it, we still find that it 

 includes the most weird and even debased objects, and, moreover, 

 to such an extent that even the problem of the most dread sense 

 of the holy is easy, compared with the problem of the grossness of 

 the sacred. The task of conceiving how absolute value should 

 have been ascribed to birds and beasts and creeping things, even 

 by the most primitive minds, entirely baffles, not merely our 

 knowledge, but our imagination. Of how the vault of heaven and 

 certain aspects of the spirit of man should be sacred we have some 

 understanding, because, with Kant, we revere the starry heavens 

 above and the moral law within, and that because they speak to us 

 by what cannot be measured by mathematics or the categorical 

 imperative. But, for the very reason that we have attained so 

 exalted an idea of the manifestations of the sacred, we have diffi- 

 culty in understanding how it could be embodied and expressed in 

 cows and cats. 



This inability to explain why the sacred was embodied in such 

 strange forms should not, however, blind us to the enormous 

 significance of the entrance into human life of a valuation not to 

 be weighed or bargained with, a valuation which spoke to man of 

 another reality than that he knew by his senses and judged by his 

 appetites. 



But the problem of these queer, gross sacreds still remains, and 

 it is impossible to be satisfied with the usual explanation that the 

 whole scale of values of primitive man was different from ours. 

 As the surest measure of progress is the higher quality of our values, 

 this is doubtless part of the answer. But it cannot be the whole, 

 because, on the one hand, primitive man had much more reverence 



