o recent is the change that we have hardly had time to
appraise it. The modern point of view toward human society has worked
a change in all our thinking, comparable only to the one which
resulted when the true purport of the concept "evolution" became
apparent. The human race has lived through the forces generated by
social existence without having been aware of them, even as it went on
living for thousands of years without knowing the numerous forces that
were latent in the earth, air and sea. It will probably take a much
longer time for man to estimate at their worth the forces that are at
work in social life than it took him to perceive the forces that
dominate the physical world.

With all that, it is now generally established that the study of any
phase of human life, whether for theoretical or for practical
purposes, must be based upon the recognition that man is not merely a
social animal, as Aristotle put it, but that his being more than an
animal is due entirely to his leading a social life. In opposition to
the older point of view, which prevailed in the more materialistic
schools of thought during the nineteenth century, social science has
proved that the forces that operate in human life are not merely those
that are derived from the physical environment, but also those which
are of a mental character. These psychical forces operate with a
uniformity and power in no way inferior to those of the physical
world. Social science is gradually accustoming us to regard human
society not merely as an aggregate of individuals but as a psychical
entity, as a mind not less but more real than the mind of any of the
individuals that constitute it. The perennial source of error has been
the fallacy of considering the individual human mind as an entity
apart from the social environment. Whatever significance the study of
the mind, as detached from its social environment, may have for
metaphysical inquiry, it can throw no light upon the practical
problems with which the mind has to deal--problems that arise solely
from the interaction of the individual with his fellows. The
individual human being is as much the product of his social
environment as the angle is of the sides that bound it.

This new method of studying mental life both in the race and in the
individual has revealed not merely the true significance of religion,
but the way in which it functions and the conditions which affect its
career. We now know that tho