ion of ideas, the so-called "sympathetic magic,"
predominates at the lower levels of religious experience--is a
difficult and technical question which cannot be discussed here.
Religion stands by when there is something to be done, and suggests
that it can be done well and successfully; nay, that it is being so
done. And, when the religion is of the effective sort, the believers
respond to the suggestion, and put the thing through. As the Latin
poet says, "they can because they think they can."

What, from the anthropological point of view, is the effective sort
of religion, the sort that survives because, on the whole, those whom
it helps survive? It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations,
but there is at any rate a good deal to be said for classing the world's
religions either as mechanical and ineffective, or as spiritual and
effective. The mechanical kind offers its consolations in the shape
of a set of implements. The "virtue" resides in certain rites and
formularies. These, as we have seen, are especially liable to harden
into mere mechanism when they are of the negative and precautionary
type. The spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, which is
especially associated with the positive and active functions of life,
tends to read will and personality into the wonder-working powers that
it summons to man's aid. The will and personality in the worshippers
are in need not so much of implements as of more will and personality.
They get this from a spiritual kind of religion; which in one way or
another always suggests a society, a communion, as at once the means
and the end of vital betterment.

To say that religion works by suggestion is only to say that it works
through the imagination. There is good make-believe as well as bad;
and one must necessarily imagine and make-believe in order to will.
The more or less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the mind,
however, need to be supplemented by the power of articulate reasoning,
if the will is to make good its twofold character of a faculty of ends
that is likewise a faculty of the means to those ends. Suggestion,
in short, must be purged by criticism before it can serve as the guide
of the higher life. To bring this point out will be the object of the
following chapter.

CHAPTER IX
MORALITY

Space is running out fast, and it is quite impossible to grapple with
the details of so vast a subject as primitive morality. For these the
reader m