306 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



ethical elements have found places in religious doctrines, 

 to be viewed as absolute rules of conduct coming from 

 outside of nature, and not from nature itself, in the way 

 the earlier sections of this chapter have shown. 



Let us now summarize the results of the foregoing 

 brief survey, conducted by the identical methods em- 

 ployed for the analysis of other bodies of fact. We 

 have sought for those characteristics which are common 

 to all religions of whatever time and place and race. 

 Combined with many secondary and adventitious ele- 

 ments of other fields of thought and action, such as social, 

 political, ethical, and psychological factors, they have 

 proved to be the three essential beliefs in God or gods, 

 human responsibility, and immortality. As a veritable 

 backbone, they underlie and support the whole body 

 of religious doctrine and organs of thought formed about 

 them. We have seen, furthermore, that a natural ex- 

 planation of the way these elements have originated can 

 be discovered by the comparative student of religion, 

 who describes also how they have variously evolved 

 among different peoples. In all of this we have not 

 questioned at any time the validity or reality of any one 

 of these concepts; to ask whether or not they corre- 

 spond actually to the truth is beyond our purpose, which 

 is simply and solely to inquire whether even these mental 

 conceptions furnish evidence of their evolution in the 

 course of time. I believe that such evidence is found, 

 and I believe also that this discovery must be of the 

 greatest importance to everyone in formulating a system 

 of religious belief, but the construction of this is not the 

 task of science as such. Every individual must work 

 out his own relation to the world on the basis of knowl- 



