e deity we hasten to
appease it, to welcome it, or to get out of its way. Cult precedes fable
and helps to frame it, because the feeling of need or fear is a
practical feeling, and the ideas it may awaken are only incidental to
the reactions it prompts. Worship is therefore earlier and nearer to the
roots of religion than dogma is.

[Sidenote: Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices.]

At the same time, since those reactions which are directly efficacious
go to form arts and industrial habits, and eventually put before us the
world of science and common-sense, religious practice and thought are
confined to the sphere in which direct manipulation of things is
impossible. Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even when
the worshipper's motives are most sordid and his notions most material;
for in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never be
traced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity and
disproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rational
living more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man's
consciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetative
union with the general life; it bemoans division and celebrates harmony
with a more passive and lyrical wonder. The element of action proper to
religion is extremely arbitrary, and we are often at a loss to see in
what way the acts recommended conduce at all to the result foretold.

As theoretical superstition stops at any cause, so practical
superstition seizes on any means. Religion arises under high pressure:
in the last extremity, every one appeals to God. But in the last
extremity all known methods of action have proved futile; when resources
are exhausted and ideas fail, if there is still vitality in the will it
sends a supreme appeal to the supernatural. This appeal is necessarily
made in the dark: it is the appeal of a conscious impotence, of an
avowed perplexity. What a man in such a case may come to do to
propitiate the deity, or to produce by magic a result he cannot produce
by art, will obviously be some random action. He will be driven back to
the place where instinct and reason begin. His movement will be
absolutely experimental, altogether spontaneous. He will have no reason
for what he does, save that he must do something.

[Sidenote: Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice.]

What he will do, however, will not be very original; a die must fal