Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/73

 THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT. 57 isations, unless it has fulfilled some function of value in the development of the race. It is of course always possible that certain habits of action may have become fixed in our race that have no bearing whatever upon the persistence of the race : habits which are inherited because they belong to a race which has come to persist for reasons entirely unrelated to these habits : but this supposition is difficult to sustain in rela- tion to any instinct which is widespread and persistent in a race, as is the case with the religious instinct in man. And on the whole we are compelled to assume that there is little probability that the religious instinct is one of the few exceptions to the general rule which connects instincts with functioning advantageous to the race in which they appear. That I believe the function of the religious instinct can be traced I have already stated : and I shall devote the next article of this series to an attempt to show in some detail that religious expressions, of ceremonial or of other kinds, whilst on the whole of little advantage and often of distinct disad- vantage to individual life, are on the other hand advantageous on the whole to the tribal life of the social organism which we believe to be beginning to develop. I shall further attempt to show that this advantage accrues through the subordination of the individual variant elemental influences within us, and the emphasis of the racial influences ; this subordination and emphasis being brought about by, or in necessary connexion with, the habits of action which form the expression of this religious instinct ; we being able thus to account for the persistence of these habits of action, although we recognise, as I have just said, that to us as individuals they are apparently at times of disadvantage and ordinarily of no appreciable value. 20. In closing this article let me say just a word upon one subject to which a separate article might well be devoted, and which I am unable to treat adequately in this series without overstepping the limits of space which I am able to ask the editor of MIND to allow me. In all that has preceded this I have been calling attention to the importance of the subordination of elemental variance to typical action, and I have argued that without this subordination our social life as it exists could not have been built up. But I must not be understood to hold that variance is not in itself of importance. If material changes occur in en-