Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/31

 mere response to practical necessities, so religion in this further stage begets thoughts divorced from the mere battling with the pressure of circumstances. Imagination secured in it a machinery for its development; thought has been thereby led beyond the immediate objects in sight. Its concepts may in these early stages be crude and horrible; but they have the supreme virtue of being concepts of objects beyond immediate sense and perception.

This is the stage of uncoordinated beliefs. So far as this is the dominant phase there can be a curious tolerance, in that one cult does not war upon another cult. Since there is a minimum of coördination, there is room for all. But religion is still a thoroughly social phenomenon. The cult includes the tribe, or at least it includes some well-defined body of persons within the social organism. You may not desert your own cults, but there need be no clash between cults. In the higher stages of such a religion there are