e not there. And it may
be, it may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable instinctive
conviction, since they are certainly not founded on either reason or
observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious
animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the great spaces between
the stars.

"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of."

There the passage and the lecture end.

I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the reality of
God.

Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there existed
solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure individualists,
"atheists" so to speak, and as though this appeal to a life beyond one's
own was not the universal disposition of living things. His classical
training disposes him to a realistic exaggeration of individual
difference. But nearly every animal, and certainly every mentally
considerable animal, begins under parental care, in a nest or a litter,
mates to breed, and is associated for much of its life. Even the great
carnivores do not go alone except when they are old and have done with
the most of life. Every pack, every herd, begins at some point in a
couple, it is the equivalent of the tiger's litter if that were to
remain undispersed. And it is within the memory of men still living
that in many districts the African lion has with a change of game and
conditions lapsed from a "solitary" to a gregarious, that is to say a
prolonged family habit of life.

Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher apes,
is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has passed
within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to a nearly
cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him. He is not, as
Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST gregarious beast. Why
should his desire for God be regarded as the overflow of an unsatisfied
gregarious instinct, when he has home, town, society, companionship,
trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? Why should
gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class
carriage and the public-house? Why should gregariousness drive men out
of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer
in a memorable passage (about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is
flatly opposed to Professor Murray, and seems far more pla