not the whole of religion. For the note of universality is absent.
Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a selected group that
it is practicable and it is a selected experience upon which it rests.
Its standards are esoteric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardly
necessary to point out the immense part which humanism, as thus
defined, is playing in present life.

But there is another law which, from remotest times, man has
followed whenever he dared. It is not the law of the group but of
the individual, not the law of civilization but of the jungle. "Most
men," says Aristotle, "would rather live in a disorderly than a sober
manner." He means that most men would rather consult and gratify their
immediate will, their nearest choices, their instantaneous desires,
than conform the moment to some regulated and considerate, some
comprehensive scheme of life and action. The life of unreason is their
desire; the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, the
expression which has no rational connection with the past and no
serious consideration for the future. This is of the very essence of
lawlessness because it is revolt against the normal sequence of law
and effect, in mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure.

Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often call it. Naturalism
is a perversion of that high instinct in mankind which issues in the
old concept of supernaturalism. The supernaturalist, of a former and
discredited type, believed that God violates the order of nature
for sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so to speak,
"revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, arbitrary ways. By a
sort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, the
naturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divine
law for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecent