Now the function of religion, it has been assumed, is to restore confidence, when man is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of the mysteries that obtrude on his life, yet compelled, if not exactly wishful, to face them and wrest from them whatever help is in them.  This function religion fulfils by what may be described in one word as “suggestion.”  How the suggestion works psychologically—­how, for instance, association of ideas, the so-called “sympathetic magic,” predominates at the lower levels of religious experience—­is a difficult and technical question which cannot be discussed here.  Religion stands by when there is something to be done, and suggests that it can be done well and successfully; nay, that it is being so done.  And, when the religion is of the effective sort, the believers respond to the suggestion, and put the thing through.  As the Latin poet says, “they can because they think they can.”

What, from the anthropological point of view, is the effective sort of religion, the sort that survives because, on the whole, those whom it helps survive?  It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, but there is at any rate a good deal to be said for classing the world’s religions either as mechanical and ineffective, or as spiritual and effective.  The mechanical kind offers its consolations in the shape of a set of implements.  The “virtue” resides in certain rites and formularies.  These, as we have seen, are especially liable to harden into mere mechanism when they are of the negative and precautionary type.  The spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, which is especially associated with the positive and active functions of life, tends to read will and personality into the wonder-working powers that it summons to man’s aid.  The will and personality in the worshippers are in need not so much of implements as of more will and personality.  They get this from a spiritual kind of religion; which in one way or another always suggests a society, a communion, as at once the means and the end of vital betterment.

To say that religion works by suggestion is only to say that it works through the imagination.  There is good make-believe as well as bad; and one must necessarily imagine and make-believe in order to will.  The more or less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the mind, however, need to be supplemented by the power of articulate reasoning, if the will is to make good its twofold character of a faculty of ends that is likewise a faculty of the means to those ends.  Suggestion, in short, must be purged by criticism before it can serve as the guide of the higher life.  To bring this point out will be the object of the following chapter.

CHAPTER IX MORALITY

Space is running out fast, and it is quite impossible to grapple with the details of so vast a subject as primitive morality.  For these the reader must consult Dr. Westermarck’s monumental treatise, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, which brings together an immense quantity of facts, under a clear and comprehensive scheme of headings.  He will discover, by the way, that, whereas customs differ immensely, the emotions, one may even say the sentiments, that form the raw material of morality are much the same everywhere.