FUNCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 373 



first, since Auguste Comte, to recognise tlie importance and 

 validity of the religious factor in social life — we are unable 

 entirely to follow Mm in his consideration of the sanctions for 

 progress. If we admit, as Mr. Kidd does, that " the forces which 

 are working out our development are primarily concerned, not 

 with the interests of the individual, but with those of the race "; 

 if, in a word, we admit that the conditions of existence are in- 

 dispensable to the race as a whole, but that they injuriously 

 afEect, in a great many cases, the individual ; it seems hard to 

 understand why religious beliefs, which constitute " an ultra- 

 rational sanction for that large class of conduct in the individual 

 when his interests and the interests of the social organism are 

 antagonistic, and by which the former are rendered subordinate 

 to the latter in the general interests of the evolution which the 

 race is undergoing," ^ should have persisted with such remark- 

 able pertiuacity throughout all the vicissitudes of social evolu- 

 tion ; why, in other words, the individual should have striven to 

 maintaia, and should have clung to, a system whose object is to 

 provide a sanction precisely for those conditions which adversely 

 afiect the individual as such. Finding no rational sanction for 

 his suffering, it is not easy to see why the individual should have 

 been at such pains to discover, all the same, an ultrarational 

 sanction for it. 



Religion does not, as Mr. Kidd most truly says, spring from the 

 source of " pure reason "; it has its foundations deep down in 

 the sentiments and instincts of man, in that obscure and often 

 unconscious self which lies at the roots of our whole life. But 

 if reason does not justify the conditions most propitious to the 

 evolution of the race, it is hard to see why that which is deeper 

 than reason should justify them. If the evolution which the 

 race is undergoing is antagonistic to the interests of the indi- 

 vidual, it is hard to conceive of the instinct of the individual, 

 which is the ultimate source of all religious belief, seeking to 

 1 B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 105. 



