thought. They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitrary
and fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notion
of equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present
tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the source
of all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness;
particularly to derive it all from group experience. Here, then, is
a theory of religious origins which once more turns the spirit of man
back upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejecting
an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not in
contemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perception
of something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the group
experience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy
imparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the _Religion
of the Semites_,[9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of
ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers as
part of an organic society." Durkheim goes beyond this. There are
not at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group and the
collective emotions and representations which are generated through
membership in the group.

[Footnote 9: P. 32.]

Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of the
citadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of any
extra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptions
were only the felt participation of the individual in a collective
consciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and always
continuous with the individual consciousness. So that, whatever may or
may not be true later, the beginning of man's metaphysical interests,
his cosmic consciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply his