Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new steps in the expanding humanistic movement, so in these last days, critical scholarship, itself largely a product of the humanistic viewpoint, has added another factor to the group.  The new methods of historical and literary criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and the other arts, have exerted a vast influence upon contemporary religious 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 social experience, his collective emotions and representations.  Thus Durkheim:  “We are able to say, in sum, that the religious individual does not deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portion of himself.  That power exists; it is society.  When the Australian feels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surprises him, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and it is really the product of forces that are external and superior to the individual."[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself and his own race.  To Leuba, in his Psychological Study of Religion, this has already become the accepted viewpoint.  Whatever is enduring and