ive faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of
religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has
assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of
it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago
pronounced. Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an
active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that
in our prayerful communion with them,[333] work is done, and something
real comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity, and to
decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general
philosophy, such beliefs can be considered TRUE.

[333] "Prayerful" taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 453
ff.

Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the
other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but
in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of
nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no
practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards
which general philosophy inclines. The scientist, so-called, is,
during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may
well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against the
notion that religion should be recognized at all. And this antipathy
to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself.
The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many
groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises
in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In
the "prayerful communion" of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities
as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual
work--even though it were work relative only to their dark savage
obligations-- can possibly be done.

The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are
as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that
the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us
that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival," an
atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more
enlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious
anthropologists at present do little to counteract.

This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it
with some explicitnes