I make no apology for describing these proceedings at some length.  It is necessary to my argument to convey the impression that the essentials of religion are present in these apparently godless observances of the ruder peoples.  They arise directly out of custom—­in this case the hunting custom.  Their immediate design is to provide these people with their daily bread.  Yet their appeal to the imagination—­which in religion, as in science, art, and philosophy, is the impulse that presides over all progress, all creative evolution—­is such that the food-quest is charged with new and deeper meaning.  Not bread alone, but something even more sustaining to the life of man, is suggested by these tangled and obscure solemnities.  They are penetrated by quickenings of sacrifice, prayer, and communion.  They bring to bear on the need of the hour all the promise of that miraculous past, which not only cradled the race, but still yields it the stock of reincarnated soul-force that enables it to survive.  If, then, these rites are part and parcel of mere magic, most, or all, of what the world knows as religion must be mere magic.  But it is better for anthropology to call things by the names that they are known by in the world of men—­that is, in the wider world, not in some corner or coterie of it.

* * * * *

In order to bring out more fully the second point that I have been trying to make, namely, the close interdependence between religion and custom in primitive society, let me be allowed to quote one more example of the ritual of a rude people.  And again let us resort to native Australia, though this time to the south-eastern corner of it; since in Australia we have a cultural development on the whole very low, having been as it were arrested through isolation, yet one that turns out to be not incompatible with high religion in the making.

Initiation in native Australia is the equivalent of what is known amongst ourselves as the higher education.  The only difference is that, with them, every one who is not judged utterly unfit is duly initiated; whereas, with us, the higher education is offered to some who are unfit, whilst many who are fit never have the luck to get it.  The initiation-custom is intended to tide the boys over the difficult time of puberty, and turn them into responsible men.  The whole of the adult males assist in the ceremonies.  Special men, however, are told off to tutor the youth—­a lengthy business, since it entails a retirement, perhaps for six months, into the bush with their charges; who are there taught the tribal traditions, and are generally admonished, sometimes forcibly, for their good.  Further, this is rather like a retirement into a monastery for the young men, seeing that during all the time they are strictly taboo, or in other words in a holy state that involves much fasting and mortification of the flesh.  At last comes the time when their actual passage across the threshold of manhood has to be celebrated.  The rites may be described in one word as impressive.  Society wishes to set a stamp on their characters, and believes in stamping hard.  Physically, then, the lads feel the force of society.  A tooth is knocked out, they are tossed in the air to make them grow tall, and so on—­rites that, whilst they may have separate occult ends in view, are completely at one in being highly unpleasant.