the inevitable
line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now
endeavor to explain.

(1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic
tendency was very marked in Mithraism. "Il est certain," says Cumont,
"qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes inferieures de
la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste
longtemps la religion des humbles." Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.

(2) See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire,
ch. viii.

(3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.

XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL

The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think,
from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it
will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition,
to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the
dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps
a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a
gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain
stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena
of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by
step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution
concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the
strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all
over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have
been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.

And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate
with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple
Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage
which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal
Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be
analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only
desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that
it is from them and from their passage one into another that there
has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions and
magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its
incantations and prophecies, and services of speech a