energetic in deed, and generally hostile to an unbiased pursuit of the
truth.

Naturally those temperaments and those physical conditions which chiefly
foster these emotions will tend to religious systems in which they are
prominent. Let us see what some of these conditions are.

It has always been noticed that impaired vitality predisposes to fear.
The sick and feeble are more timorous than the strong and well. Further
predisposing causes of the same nature are insufficient nourishment,
cold, gloom, malaria, advancing age and mental worry. For this reason
nearly invariably after a general financial collapse we witness a
religious "revival." Age, full of care and fear, is thus prompted to
piety, willing, as La Rochefoucauld remarks, to do good by precept when
it can no longer do evil by example. The inhabitants of swampy,
fever-ridden districts are usually devout. The female sex, always the
weaker and often the worsted one in the struggle for existence, is when
free more religious than the male; but with them hope is more commonly
the incentive than fear.

Although thus prominent and powerful, desire, so far as its fruition is
pleasure, has expressed but the lowest emotions of the religious
sentiment. Something more than this has always been asked by sensitively
religious minds. Success fails to bring the gratification it promises.
The wish granted, the mind turns from it in satiety. Not this, after
all, was what we sought.

The acutest thinkers have felt this. Pascal in his _Pensees_ has such
expressions as these: "The present is never our aim. The future alone is
our object." "Forever getting ready to be happy, it is certain we never
can be." "'Tis the combat pleases us and not the victory. As soon as
that is achieved, we have had enough of the spectacle. So it is in play,
so it is in the search for truth. We never pursue objects, but we pursue
the pursuit of objects." But no one has stated it more boldly than
Lessing when he wrote: "If God held in his right hand all truth, and in
his left the one unceasingly active desire for truth, although bound up
with the law that I should forever err, I should choose with humility
the left and say: 'Give me this, Father. The pure truth is for thee
alone.'"[56-1] The pleasure seems to lie not in the booty but in the
battle, not in gaining the stakes but in playing the game, not in the
winning but in the wooing, not in the discovery of truth but in the
search for it.

What i