616 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



tliey were seeking to avoid ; if the French Revolution, which 

 turned the chiirches into banqueting halls and declared war to 

 the knife against Christianity, was forced to invent a new religion, 

 the so-called ReUgion of Virtue, to take its place ; if the modem 

 State, having declared that it ignores aU reUgion, is nevertheless 

 forced to fall back on the rehgion of patriotism, and to substi- 

 tute itself for the deity it has dethroned ; if a great intelligence 

 like that of Auguste Comte is forced to end up by making a 

 rehgion the basis of his Positivist system ; if every great philo- 

 sopher who seeks to give a value to the ideal of Ufe, is forced 

 to go beyond hfe in order to find that value ; after all this, we 

 may reasonably see in the hesoin de croire, as Bnmetiere has 

 called it, in the " need to beUeve," some justification for the 

 view that religion is a sociological necessity. 



There is, indeed, not a single example in history of a society 

 existing for any length of time without religious behef ; and by 

 rehgious beUef we do not mean Christianity alone, but a spiritual 

 organisation based on supra-rational principles. As Schaeffle has 

 said : " We can recognise as a fact, proved by experience, that 

 ideal love for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful ; that an 

 altruistic belief in a Reahty, in a Perfection, which is for us 

 something primordial ;, form part of the fundamental and in- 

 destructible characteristics of our mental nature. And this 

 ' behef ' is to be found, in some part or other of the mind, 

 even in those who imagine that they beUeve nothing ; even as 

 in another part we find that tendency to injustice and immorality 

 which the former counterbalances."^ And, in his classical 

 work, Schaeffle has dwelt eloquently upon the part played by 

 idealism in the hfe of society : 



" It would be contrary to experience were we to look for the powerful 

 social influence of idealism only in the religious or ecclesiastical activity 

 of the social organism. The popular religion is certainly the foremost, 



1 A. Schaeffle, Ban und Leben des sozialen Korpers, ii. 393. Tiibiagen, 

 1896, 



