Let us now summarize the results of the foregoing brief survey, conducted by the identical methods employed 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 elements 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 explanation 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 correspond 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 knowledge as complete as he can make it, but every individual must accomplish this end for himself.  Because no two men can be exactly alike in temperament, intellect, and social situation, it is impossible for entire agreement in religious faith to exist.  One’s outlook upon the whole universe is and must be an individual matter; science and evolution are of overwhelming value, not by directing the mind to adopt this or that attitude toward the unseen, but by providing the seeker after the truth with definite knowledge about the things of the world, so that his position may be taken on the sound basis of reasonable and common-sensible principles.

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When we take up science and philosophy, or knowledge as a whole, after religion, it may seem that we have reversed the proper sequence.  There are many reasons for following this course, inasmuch as “knowledge” is the all-inclusive category of thought; our world is after all a world of individual consciousness and ideas.  In dealing with religion, ethics, social organization, and human culture, we have been concerned with the evolution of so many departments of thought and action; and now we are to develop a final conception of evolution as a universal process in the progress of all knowledge.