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 194 HENEY EUTGEES MARSHALL : tory rites is very closely related to the approach of the age of puberty in the active participants. 1 That this relation between the time of the enforcement of these initiatory rites and the growth of sexual capacity is one to be expected seems to me clear ; for at the age of puberty the boy and the girl have suddenly forced upon them racial leadings that have never before been felt ; at this period of their lives they are compelled to attend to cravings of an organic nature that demand satisfaction and yet which are based upon no personal experience of previous satisfactions. The boy and the girl then become perforce introspective ; and it is at this moment that the general teaching to listen to the " voices " within them would be most likely to prove effective. 7. I shall now ask my reader to turn from the study of modes of religious expression which, when carried to excess, so often lead to the production of hallucinations, to the con- sideration of a special habit which of all religious habits is the most widely prevailing and the most persistent, and yet which in itself seldom if ever leads to the production of hallucinatory states. I refer to the habit of prayer. In studying the habits of seclusion, of fasting, and of self- torture, we have had to deal with the theory that they originated and have persisted in the race because of the im- pressive hallucinations which they not infrequently occasion ; but in relation to the habit of prayer such a theory can scarcely be upheld. On the other hand there are many indications that prayer in its inception must have arisen in connexion with efforts to obtain mercy from human conquerors in the bloody con- tests which must have been common amongst the early ancestors of our race. Its expressive attitudes themselves tell this story. He who prays is found prostrate on the ground ; or kneeling, with hands clasped, with head bowed, with eyes closed ; and all these attitudes are suggestive of powerlessness to attack; of absence of aggressive tendencies; and of willingness to become the slave of a conqueror, and to listen and obey his command. Habits thus acquired to meet the exigencies of savage life, might continue in force during those greater emergencies which from time to time come upon man apart from human agency, because of the notion that the peril in which the 1 Cf. " The New Life," A. H. Daniels. American Journal of Psychology, vol. vi., 1.