, that I am justified in
regarding it rather as a name given to the emotional thrill
and ecstatic abandonment which accompanies any sort of co-ordination
of the attributes of the complex vision, proportioned or
disproportioned, than as a distinct and separate attribute in itself.

Only when the co-ordination of our human activities rises to the
height of a supreme music, can we regard "religion" as the most
beautiful and most important of all human experiences. And at the
moment when it takes this form it resolves itself into nothing more
than an unutterable feeling of ecstasy produced by the sense that
we are in harmony with the rest of the universe. Religion, as I am
compelled to think of it, resolves itself into that reaction of
unspeakable happiness produced in us, when by any kind of
synthetic movement, however crude, we are either saved from
unreality or reconciled to reality.

Religion is, in fact, the name we give to the ecstasy in the heart of
the complex vision, when, in any sort of coordination between our
contradictory energies, we at once escape from ourselves and
realize ourselves. We are forbidden to speak of the "religious
sense" or the "religious instinct" because, truly interpreted,
religion is not a single activity among other activities, but the
emotional reaction upon our whole nature when that nature is
functioning in its creative fulness.

Religion must therefore be regarded as the culminating ecstasy of
the art of life, or as a premature snatching at such an ecstasy while
the art of life is still discordant and inchoate. In the first instance
it is the supreme reward of the creative act. In the second instance it
is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an
illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning"
is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is
frequently a hindrance to the rhythm of the apex-thought. It may
be a sentimental consolation. It may be an excuse for cruelty and
obscurantism. There is always a danger when it is thus
prematurely manifested, that it should darken, distort, deprave and
obstruct the movement of creation.

At this point, an objection arises to our whole method of research
which it is necessary to meet at once. This objection, a peculiarly
modern one, is based upon the theory, handed about in modern
literature as a kind of diploma of cleverness and repeated
superficially by many who are not really sceptical a