Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/72

 56 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL: In our day the nearest approach that we find to a man without religion is the savage of the icy plain, the barbaric negro of the deep forest, the cannibal of the desert island ; and with all these low types of mankind it must be agreed that social life and the social instincts are at most but embryonic. Among all the civilised races religious expression is found, and the more complex their social organisation, the more prominent become the actions of religious expression in the history of the people. 18. Religious activities like the expression of all true instincts seem often to be spontaneously developed. The masses of mankind do not have to be argued into the ex- pression of religious feelings : rather is it true that rational- istic or other barriers must be raised if we are to prevent the expression of the religious force that is found in man in varying degree. And even then, however fully we may acquiesce in the dictates of an inquisitorial power, or be led by argument, howe,ver much we, under such influences, repress our religious impulses, they still exist within us, calling upon us aloud at times to give them play, and forcing themselves to the front in moments of weakness or despair. The most pronounced of atheists seldom fails to pray in the face of terrible danger or deep sorrow. 19. I shall assume then, from this time on, that my reader agrees with me that the religious instinct exists within us ; that religious actions are the expressions of a force which, as in the case of other instincts, is organic in its nature ; that our religious impulses are determined by the nature of the organism that we inherit. But from this time on, I also wish to lay especial stress upon the fact above discussed, but usually little appreciated ; viz., that if it once be allowed that a religious instinct exists which, broadly speaking, is developed in all of mankind, then evidently we are immediately forced to the conclusion that the religious instinct must subserve some valuable function in the biological development of the human race. For as we have so often said above, it is exceedingly dim- cult for us to conceive how any instinct can have arisen, how it can have become developed and elaborated, and more than all, how it can have persisted from generation to generation, as has this religious instinct so far back as we are able to look into the history of the earliest of civil-