sm the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.

Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
satisfying its devotional inclinations by any "long psalter unmindfully
mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have
an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will condition what we
obtain.

"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck long ago.[82] The mind's
content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
In most acts of perception--and probably, too, in the intuitional
awareness of religious experience--that which the mind brings is bulkier
if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
machinery of apperception--humbling though its realization must be to
the eager idealist--does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to