Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/192

 1 82 Prc-aniniistic Religion.

lapping. I, on the other hand, would hold out for the widest possible rendering of the idea of Religion on practical and theoretical grounds alike. As regards the former, I should fear to cut myself off prematurely from any group of facts that might possibly bear upon the history of man's religious evolution. As regards theory, I would rest my case on the psychological argument that, if there be reason, as I think there is, to hold that man's religious sense is a constant and universal feature of his mental life, its essence and true nature must then be sought, not so much in the shifting variety of its ideal constructions as in that steadfast groundwork of specific emotion whereby man is able to feel the supernatural precisely at the point at which his thought breaks down. Thus, from the vague utterance of the Omaha, " the blood pertains to Wakanda," onwards through Animism, to the dictum of the greatest living idealist philosopher "the Universe is a Spiritual Whole," a single impulse may be discerned as active — the impulse, never satisfied in finite consciousness yet never abandoned, to bring together and grasp as one the That and the What of God.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21st, 1900. The President (Mr. E. Sidney Hartland) in the Chair.

The minutes of the last Meeting were read and confirmed.

The election of the following new Members was an- nounced, viz. : Mr. R. Blakeborough, Mr. E. im Thurn, Mr. Bernard Hamilton, Mr. P. J. Heather, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, and Mr. Ralph Shirley.

The deaths of Mr. J. Kermack and Mrs. C. M. Layton and the resignations of Mr. A. H. Diack and Mr. J. F. Gomme were also announced.