ials and
his conception of the ultimate powers of the universe, its scope is so
extended as to include the ideas of the atheists and agnostics as well as
the crude conceptions of lower races and those systems of piety and
worship conventionally regarded as religions by civilized peoples. More
than this: we cannot regard the total reaction of a thinking being as
essentially different in ultimate value from the attitudes toward their
worlds of animals lower than man. The situation of a well-trained sheep
dog is one of pastures and fences and gates, of rain and sunshine, of
sheep, and of a master whose voice is to be obeyed. What the dog may do is
partly determined by what it finds in its world of animate and inanimate
things. Although the animal's "conception" of such things must be far
simpler than a human being's, nevertheless its life is lived in reaction
to all of its surroundings as they are presented to its cerebral apparatus
by the proper organs. So in the human case, conduct is directly affected
by the living and lifeless objects of a total human situation, the only
difference being that reflective consciousness and reasoned interpretation
have their share in determining the assumed attitude in ways that seem to
have no counterparts as such in the mental lives of lower animals. But
whether or not the similarity between human religion and lower organic
reaction be admitted,--and the admission is one that greatly facilitates
an understanding of evolution in this field,--the general resemblance of
all religions in fundamental character at least must be accepted.

Another general feature of religious systems is their complexity. The
essential elements of all of them are few indeed, as we shall see at a
later point; they are beliefs regarding ultimate powers, human
responsibility to such powers, and future existence. These have taken one
specific form or another in various lines of racial evolution, but aside
from their own changes they have gathered about them many other articles
of creed relating to other departments of thought and life. Ethical rules
of conduct are so added, as in the Hebrew religion where the idea of
Jehovah involves God the Ruler and Judge who imposes and administers the
laws of right living. Social customs are almost invariably intertwined
with religious views, among savages as well as among the more advanced
Mohammedans whose rules relating to family organization form an integral
part of the whol