is so.

Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of
religion. The only religion of any importance which has ever been
consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste
Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure
moral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, he
required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of
Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a
definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and
loved woman--his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure
always in the same attitude and dress, so that it should always present
itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate association
with the word Humanite.[12] With that would be automatically associated
the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon as
possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller
but less cogent emotional associations connected with that meaning. This
invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in
the Roman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's own
experiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One of
the reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that men
in general are not quite such good 'visualisers' as Comte found himself
to be.

[12] _The Catechism of Positive Religion_ (Tr. by Congreve), First Part,
'Explanation of the Worship,' e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyes
during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'

Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his _Apologia_, explains
how he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that
behind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense of
the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the
'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of
religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits
'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or
malicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to the
Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced
by the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and I
think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the
Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the s