and the
collective emotions and representations which are generated through
membership in the group.

[Footnote 9: P. 32.]

Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of the
citadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of any
extra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptions
were only the felt participation of the individual in a collective
consciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and always
continuous with the individual consciousness. So that, whatever may or
may not be true later, the beginning of man's metaphysical interests,
his cosmic consciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply his
social experience, his collective emotions and representations. Thus
Durkheim: "We are able to say, in sum, that the religious individual
does not deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moral
power upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portion
of himself. That power exists; it is society. When the Australian
feels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surprises
him, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and it
is really the product of forces that are external and superior to the
individual."[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself
and his own race. To Leuba, in his _Psychological Study of Religion_,
this has already become the accepted viewpoint. Whatever is enduring
and significant in religion is merely an expression of man's social
consciousness and experience, his sense of participation in a common
life. "Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation of
creative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for a source
of religious inspiration." Professor Overstreet, in "The Democratic
Conception of God," _Hibbert Journal_, volume XI, page 409, says: "It
is this large figure, not simply of human but of cosmic society which
is to yield our God of the future. There is no place in the future for
an eternally perfect being and no need--society, democratic from end
to end, can brook no such radical class distinction as that between a
supreme being, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and the
mass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imperfect struggle."

[Footnote 10: _Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse_, p. 322.]

There is certainly a striking immediacy in such language. We leave for
later treatment the question as to the historical validity of such
an