Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/376

 the origin of ideas about the super-mundane and transcendental is explained, neither the subjective emotional value of these ideas, nor their objective value as matters of fact, is at all in question. Both of these values lie beyond the limits which our merely genetic, psychological inquiry aims to reach.

In attempting to find the beginnings of religion in human relations which are in themselves non-religious, we merely follow a well-known method. It has long been admitted that science is merely a heightening, a refinement, a completion, of those means of knowledge which, in lower and dimmer degree, assist us in forming our judgments and experiences in daily, practical life. We only then arrive at a genetic explanation of art when we have analyzed those aesthetic experiences of life, in speech, in the emotions, in business, in social affairs, which are not in themselves artistic. All high and pure forms existed at first experimentally, as it were, in the germ, in connection with other forms; but in order to comprehend them in their highest and independent forms, we must look for them in their undeveloped states. Their significance, psychologically, will depend upon the determination of their proper places in a series which develops, as if by an organic growth, through a variety of stages, so that the new and differentiated in each appears as the unfolding of a germ contained in that which had preceded it. Thus it may help us to an insight into the origin and nature of religion, if we can discover in all kinds of non-religious conditions and interests certain religious momenta, the beginnings of what later came to be religion, definitely and independently. I do not believe that the religious feelings and impulses manifest themselves in religion only; rather, that they are to be found in many connections, a co-operating element in various situations, whose extreme development and differentiation is religion as an independent content of life. In order, now, to find the points at which, in the shifting conditions of human life, the momenta of religion originated, it will be necessary to digress to what may seem to be entirely foreign phenomena.

It has long been known that custom is the chief form of social control in the lower culture conditions. Those life-conditions