ce
a lessened need of wholesale substitutions. Human methods have become
viviparous; the New nowadays lives for a time in the form of the Old.
The friend I quote in Chapter 2.10 writes of a possible sect with a
"religious edifice" and ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and
a new ritual. In practice I doubt whether "real" people, people
who matter, people who are getting things done and who have already
developed complex associations, can afford the extensive re-adjustment
implied in such a new grouping. It would mean too much loss of time,
too much loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice of existing
co-operations.

New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting
upon their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful
wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where
movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae
unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England,
for example, in the last century, where social conditions have been
comparatively stable, discussion good and abundant and internal
migration small, there have been far fewer such developments than in
the United States of America. In England toleration has become an
institution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all
meet at the same dinner-table and spend an agreeable week-end together,
there is no need for defensive segregations. In such an atmosphere
opinion and usage change and change continually, not dramatically as the
results of separations and pitched battles but continuously and fluently
as the outcome of innumerable personal reactions. America, on the other
hand, because of its material preoccupations, because of the dispersal
of its thinking classes over great areas, because of the cruder
understanding of its more heterogeneous population (which constantly
renders hard and explicit statement necessary), MEANS its creeds much
more literally and is at once more experimental and less compromising
and tolerant. It is there if anywhere that new brotherhoods and new
creeds will continue to appear. But even in America I think the trend
of things is away from separations and segregations and new starts, and
towards more comprehensive and graduated methods of development.

New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases
of social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people
are detached from old s