"great man," a "formidable person," a superior or
inferior, one who is interested or indifferent to our talk, and all the
subtlest degrees of approval and disapproval.

A similar sensibility may quicken us even in situations where no direct
individual attitude to ourselves is implied. We regard places and
communities as congenial when we are in sympathy with the prevailing
purposes or standards of value. We may feel ill at ease or thoroughly at
home in cities where we know no single human soul. Indeed, in a
misanthrope like Rousseau (and who has not his Rousseau moods!) the mere
absence of social repression arouses a most intoxicating sense of
tunefulness and security. Nature plays the part of an indulgent parent
who permits all sorts of personal liberties.

"The view of a fine country, a succession of agreeable
prospects, a free air, a good appetite, and the health I gain
by walking; the freedom of inns, and the distance from
everything that can make me recollect the dependence of my
situation, conspire to free my soul, and give boldness to my
thoughts, throwing me, in a manner, into the immensity of
things, where I combine, choose, and appropriate them to my
fancy, without restraint or fear. I dispose of all nature as I
please."[64:6]

[Sidenote: Religion as Belief in the Disposition of the Residual
Environment, or Universe.]

Sect. 20. In such confidence or distrust, inspired originally by the
social environment, and similarly suggested by other surroundings of
life, we have the key to the religious consciousness. But it is now time
to add that in the case of religion these attitudes are concerned with
the universal or supernatural rather than with present and normal human
relationships. Religious reactions are "total reactions."

"To get at them," says William James, "you must go behind the
foreground of existence and reach down to that curious _sense
of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence_,
intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious,
which in some degree everyone possesses. This _sense of the
world's presence_, appealing as it does to our peculiar
individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless,
devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant about life at large;
and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half
unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our an