Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/68

 52 HENEY BUTGEBS MABSHALL : in relation to religious activities in common speech is so usual that there can be no doubt this notion is generally held ; although the implications involved in the assertion are in no sense realised. But we cannot take this common- sense view without question ; we must examine the subject from the standpoint of Psychology. As we have already seen in an earlier article, our instincts are those springs of action which exist within the organism : our instinct actions occur because we are organisms, and because as organisms we inherit with our organic structure habits of action which lead to the attainment of certain ends which have significance for the organism : and we inherit these habits because our ancestors have become better adapted to their environment in consequence of the recur- rence of these tendencies to act in certain specific ways upon the appearance of the appropriate stimuli. Instinct actions, as I have observed in the first article of this series, are determined first by their organisation and especially by some biological end which this organisation subserves. I shall not attempt here to establish the first point ; viz., to show that the actions expressive of religious feeling are organic in their nature ; the proof of that will appear as we proceed with this particular discussion, and will become convincing, I think, before we conclude this consideration in the next article of this series. But the question as to the existence of a biological end related to religious expression is one which may well engage our attention. As I have already said, we naturally take as examples of typical instincts those particular instincts which express themselves by what seem to us to be invariable actions occurring in definitely co-ordinated relation to one another, so that the actions appear to be always the same, and to be aroused always by the same stimuli. But, as we have seen, the definiteness and the invaria- bility of the co-ordination of these actions are relative definiteness and relative invariability only. This became evident to us when we noted that many instincts, even of the lower types, show that their efficiency depends upon the trend of the activities they induce, even where there is a certain degree of variation in circumstances of stimulation or in the stimuli themselves, and consequently in the reac- tion to these stimuli. The reader will also recall that as we studied instincts of a higher type we found less definiteness and invariability of reaction, and a marked preponderance of cases where the