Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/653

 CHAPTER VIII.

THE OBJECTIVE ELEMENT.

The general result which has thus been reached by the decomposition of religion into its ultimate constituents must now be rendered somewhat more specific by illustrative examples tending to explain the character of the power the idea of whose existence forms the foundation of the religious sentiment, and such examples will tend to throw light upon the question whether the admission of such a power is or is not a necessity of thought. For the proof of necessity is twofold· a posteriori and a priori. We may show by the first mode that certain assumptions are always made under certain conditions as a matter of fact; not that they are always made by every human being, but that given the appropriate grade of culture, the beliefs in question arise. And we may show by the second that no effort of ours is able to separate certain ideas which have become associated in our minds; that the association persists under every strain we can put upon it, and that the resulting belief is therefore a necessary part of the constitution of the mind. Both modes of proof must be attempted here.

Now, in the first place, it must be remarked that few, if any, of the nations of the world are wholly destitute of some religious creed; and that those which have been supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be without it, have generally been savage tribes of the lowest grade of culture. So slender is the evidence of the presence of a people without some theological conception that it may be doubted whether the travelers who have reported such facts have not been misled, either by inability to comprehend the language, or unfamiliarity with the order of thought, of those with whom they conversed.