tion of one man by another in the
evolution of civilisation. Imitation is one of the chief spurs to
action. Imitation begets custom, custom begets sanctity. At first all
custom is sacred. To the savage it is as much a religious duty to tattoo
himself as to sacrifice to his gods. But certain customs naturally
survive, because they are really useful; they actually have good
effects, and so need no social sanction. Others are really useless;
but man is too conservative and imitative to abandon them. These become
ritual. Custom is cautious, but la vie est aleatoire. (Bergson, op. cit.
page 143.)

Dr Beck's remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and suggestive,
but with this reservation--they are true of ritual only when uninformed
by personal experience. The very elements in ritual on which Dr
Beck lays such stress, imitation, repetition, uniformity and social
collectivity, have been found by the experience of all time to have
a twofold influence--they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and
suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of Rome knows what she is
about when she prescribes the telling of the rosary. Mystery-cults and
sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged
with suggestion, with symbols, with gestures, with half-understood
formularies, with all the apparatus of appeal to emotion and will--the
more unintelligible they are the better they serve their purpose of
inhibiting thought. Thus ritual deadens the intellect and stimulates
will, desire, emotion. "Les operations magiques... sont le resultat d'une
science et d'une habitude qui exaltent la volonte humaine au-dessus de
ses limites habituelles." (Eliphas Levi, "Dogme et Rituel de la haute
Magie", II. page 32, Paris, 1861, and "A defence of Magic", by Evelyn
Underhill, "Fortnightly Review", 1907.) It is this personal EXPERIENCE,
this exaltation, this sense of immediate, non-intellectual revelation,
of mystical oneness with all things, that again and again rehabilitates
a ritual otherwise moribund.

To resume. The outcome of our examination of ORIGINES seems to be that
religious phenomena result from two delusive processes--a delusion of
the non-critical intellect, a delusion of the over-confident will. Is
religion then entirely a delusion? I think not. (I am deeply conscious
that what I say here is a merely personal opinion or sentiment,
unsupported and perhaps unsupportable by reason, and very possibly quite
worthless, b