ch conceptions is by no means improbable, the
alleged traces are too dim to build a theory on. The supposition of a
continuous religious development from the earliest times is in accord
with all that we know of human history, but, until more facts come to
light, it will be prudent to reserve opinion as to the character of
prehistoric religion.[15]

+13+. In general, religious development goes hand in hand with social
organization. Those groups which, like the Rock Veddas of Ceylon
(described by Sarasin) and the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego (described by
Hyades and Deniker), have scarcely any clan organization, have also
scarcely any religion. In most of the lowest communities known to us we
find well-constituted clans and tribes, with strict (and usually
complicated) laws of relationship and marriage, and a somewhat developed
form of religion.[16] Here again it is evident that we see in the world
only the later stages of a long social process; the antecedent history
of this process belongs to sociological science, and does not concern us
here;[17] its later history is inseparably connected with the
development of religion.

+14+. It is in this social process that science, philosophy, art, and
ethics are constructed, and these, though distinct from the religious
sentiment, always blend with it into a unity of life. Religion proper is
simply an attitude toward a Power; the nature and activity of the Power
and the mode of approaching it are constructed by man's observation and
reflection. The analysis of the external world and of man's body and
mind, the discovery of natural laws, the history of the internal and
external careers of the human race--this is the affair of science and
philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through
men's association with one another in society, their basis being certain
primary instincts of self-assertion and sympathy; art is the product of
the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by
side and coalesce in unitary human life.

+15+. The external history of religion is the history of the process by
which the religious sentiment has attached itself to the various
conceptions formed by man's experience: ritual is the religious
application of the code of social manners; the gods reflect human
character; churches follow the methods of social organization;
monotheism springs from the sense of the physical and moral unity of the
world. Ideas concernin