aders weighing with the utmost
care the proofs that are offered.

RELIGION AND SEX

CHAPTER ONE

SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Accepting Professor Tylor's famous minimum definition of religion as
"the belief in Spiritual Beings," it is safe to say that religious
belief constitutes one of the largest facts in human history. No other
single subject has occupied so large a share of man's conscious life, no
other subject has absorbed so much of his energy. In very early stages
of culture religious belief is universal in the fullest sense of the
word. It shapes all primitive institutions; it dominates life from the
cradle to the grave, and creates a shadow-land beyond the grave from
which the dead continue to influence the actions of the living. At a
later stage of culture we see a distinction being drawn between the
natural and the supernatural, the secular and the spiritual, and the
beginning of an antagonism that is still with us. Of all antagonisms
conceived by the brain of man this is the deepest and the most
irreconcilable. Each feels that the growth of the other threatens its
own supremacy, with the result that advance from either side has been
contested with the greatest obstinacy and determination. And although it
is true that at present the supernatural is very largely "suspect," it
is still powerful. Nor is its influence confined to the lower strata of
European society. It has very many representatives among the higher
culture, disguised it may be under various pseudo-philosophic forms.
Altogether we may say that the supernatural has never been without its
"cloud of witnesses." At all times there have been individuals, or
groups of individuals, who have believed themselves, and have been
believed by others, to be in touch with another order of existence than
that with which people are normally in contact. And apart from these
specially favoured persons, the wide vogue of the belief in good and
evil portents, in lucky and unlucky days, the attraction of the "occult"
in fiction and in fact, all serve as evidence that belief in the
supernatural is still a force with which one has to reckon.

To what causes are we to attribute the persistence of this belief in the
supernatural? It is useless replying that its persistence is evidence of
its truth. That clearly begs the whole question at issue. Mere social
heredity will doubtless count for much in this direction. Men do not
start their thinking afresh with