Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/388

 analogies to the individual’s relations to his God that they would seem almost to be nothing more than their condensation and transformation. The whole wonderful fulness of the former is reflected in the many ways in which we “sense” the divine. The compelling and punitive gods, the loving God, the God of Spinoza who cannot return our love, the God who both bestows and deprives us of the inclination and ability to act—these are precisely the tokens by which the ethical relation between the group and its members unfolds its energies and oppositions. I call attention to the feeling of dependence, in which the essence of all religion has been found. The individual feels himself bound to a universal, to something higher, out of which he came, and into which he will return, and from which he also expects assistance and salvation, from which he differs and is yet identical with it. All these emotions, which meet as in a focus in the idea of God, can be traced back to the relation which the individual sustains to his species; on the one hand, to the past generations which have supplied him with the principal forms and contents of his being, on the other, to his contemporaries, who condition the manner and extent of its development. If the theory is correct which asserts that all religion is derived from ancestor-worship, from the worship and conciliation of the immortal soul of a forbear, especially of a hero and leader, it will confirm this connection; for we are, as a matter of fact, dependent upon what has been before us, and which was most directly concentrated in the authority of the fathers over their descendants. The deification of ancestors, especially of the ablest and most successful, is, as it were, the most appropriate expression of the dependence of the individual upon the previous life of the group, even though consciousness may reveal other motives for it. Thus the humility with which the pious person acknowledges that all that he is and has comes from God, and recognizes in him the source of his existence and ability, is properly traced to the relation of the individual to the whole. For man is not absolutely nothing in contrast to God, but only a dust-mote; a weak, but not entirely vain, force; a vessel, but yet adapted to its contents. When a given idea of God is, in essence, the origin and at the same time the unity of all the varieties of