profitably dispensed with.

What really remains for discussion is a problem of socio-psychology.
That is, we have to determine the conditions of origin of so widespread
a belief, but which we believe to be false. The materials for answering
this question are now at our command, and whatever differences of
opinion there may be concerning the stages of development, there is
very little concerning their essential character. And it is not without
significance that this question of origin is one that the present-day
apologists of theism seem pretty unanimous in leaving severely alone.

Let us commence with the fact that religion is something that is
acquired. Every work on the origin of religion assumes it, and all
investigation warrants the assumption. The question at issue is the mode
of acquisition. And here one word of caution is advisable. The wide
range of religious ideas and their existence at a very low culture
stage, precludes the assumption that religious ideas are generated in
the same conscious way as are scientific theories. Even with the modern
mind our conclusions concerning many of the affairs of life are formed
in a semi-conscious manner. Most frequently they are generated
subconsciously, and are only consciously formulated under pressure of
circumstances. And if we are to understand religion aright we must be on
our guard against attributing to primitive mankind a degree of
scientific curiosity and reflective power to which it can lay no claim.
We have to allow for what one writer well calls "physiological thought,"
thought, that is, which rises subconsciously and has its origin in the
pressure of insistent experience.

A comprehensive survey of religious beliefs show that there are only two
things that can be said to be common to them all. They differ in
teachings, in their conceptions of deity, and in modes of worship. But
all religions agree in believing in some kind of ghostly existence and
in a continued life beyond the grave. I use the expression, "ghostly
existence," because we can really trace the idea of God backward until
we lose the definite figure in a very general conception, much as
astronomers have taught us to lose a definite world in the primitive
fire-mist. So when we get beyond the culture stage at which we meet with
the definite man-like God, we encounter an indefinite thought stage at
which we can dimly mark the existence of a frame of mind that was to
give birth to the more concrete