that were to be subject to it, must there not have been already in the hearts of men a religious sentiment that would clothe the institution with a sacred character? The terms must be reversed: it is not priesthood that explains religion, but religion that explains priesthood.

The theory propounded by Positivism is profounder and more serious. Religion, which dates from the earliest ages, can only have been a first attempt at an explanation of the extraordinary phenomena by which man in his ignorance was astonished and frightened. It is the beginning of the childish form of science, which, in course of time, would naturally give place to higher and more rigorous forms. Children and savages animate all things round about them with a psychical life; they see particular wills behind every phenomenon that excites their hope or fear. Thus the imagination of primitive man peopled the universe with an infinite number of spirits, good and evil, whose mysterious action made itself felt at every moment of their destiny. A while ago we had the explanation of religion by priesthood; now we have the explanation by mythology. But it is the same vicious circle: it is an insufficient psychology once more mistaking the effect for the cause.

To conceive of religion as a species of knowledge is an error not less grave than to represent it as a sort of political institution. No doubt religious faith is always accompanied by knowledge, but this intellectual element, however indispensable, so far from being the basis and the substance of religion, varies continually at all the epochs of religious evolution. Doctrinal formulas and liturgies are means of expression and of education, of which religion avails itself, but which it can exchange for others after each philosophical crisis. Rites and beliefs become obliterated or die out; religion possesses a power of perpetual resurrection, whose principle cannot be exhausted in any external form or in any dogmatic idea.

Comte's theory of the three stages through which human thought has passed is well known: the theological stage of primitive times, the metaphysical stage in the Middle Ages, the positive or scientific stage of modern times. If knowledge were the essence of religion, one could easily understand the logical course of this evolution, an inferior form of knowledge being condemned to disappear before a superior form. The proof that it is nothing of the kind is the fact that religion does not cease to reappear at all epochs and in the most widely different conditions of culture. The three stages are not successive but simultaneous; they do not correspond to three periods of history, but to three permanent needs of the human soul. You find them combined in various degrees in antiquity, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; in modern times, in Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Claude Bernard, and Pasteur. The more science progresses and becomes conscious of its true method and of its limits, the more does it become distinguished from philosophy and religion. Scientific research, exclusively devoted to the determination of phenomena and of their conditions in time and space, is one thing; the philosophic need of comprehending the universe as an intelligible whole, and of explaining all that exists by a principle of sufficient reason, is another and a different thing; and, lastly, differing from both, is the religious need which, rightly understood, is but a manifestation, in the moral order, of the instinct of every being to persevere in being. Why may not these divers tendencies of soul, coexisting always and everywhere, manifest themselves simultaneously and on parallel lines?

We need not go beyond the Positivists themselves for examples and proofs of this persistence of the religious sentiment. Comte, Spencer, and Littré may be called as witnesses. The founder of Positivism, who had predicted the fatal extinction of the disposition to religion in the human soul, crowned his system and ended his career by founding a new religion, clumsily copied from the sacerdotal organisation and the ritual practices of Roman Catholicism. There actually exists a Positivist Church, with a calendar of saints, with relics and anniversaries, with a catechism, and with a high priest not less infallible than the one at Rome. A few disciples, scandalised by this supreme temptation of the master, desired to excuse him by declaring that he had gone mad. It was a mistake. The fact is that, arriving at the construction of a Positive Sociology, Comte comprehended the rôle of the religious instinct and of religious feeling in the life of peoples, and he believed that he would only be able to cement the edifice of society in the future by religion. It is said that those who have been amputated sometimes feel sharp twitches in the limbs they have lost. Comte and his disciples have experienced something similar. Nature, with her usual irony, has avenged herself on them for the violence they have done to her.

Of Herbert Spencer not much need be said; everybody knows that the Unknowable in his system has become a sort of undetermined and unconscious force, eluding every effort of the mind to grasp it, but remaining, none the less, the cause explaining evolution, and the source profound whence all things flow. Under different names, do we not recognise the First Cause of the philosophers, and the image, half-effaced, of the God of believers? Need we be surprised that the English thinker pronounces religion to be eternal? that he finally reduces the mental life of man to these two essential and primordial activities—the scientific activity which pursues the knowledge of phenomena and their transformation, and religious activity delivering itself up to mystical contemplation and to silent adoration of universal being?

The example of Littré is more touching still. I remember reading a sublime page in one of his works, in which the savant, after running through the terra firma of positive knowledge, reaches its utmost limit, and, seating himself on the extremest promontory, sees himself surrounded by the mystery of the unknowable, as by an infinite ocean. He has neither barque, nor sails, nor compass wherewith to explore this boundless sea; nevertheless, he stands there gazing into it; he contemplates it; he meditates in presence of this vast unknown, and finally abandons himself to a movement of adoration and of confidence which renews his mental vigour and which fills his heart with peace. What is this, I ask, but a sudden outburst of religious feeling which positive science, so far from extinguishing, has only served to deepen and accentuate? And since we have here the religion of the unknowable, is it not evident that religion is not necessarily knowledge?

I now come to a third explanation which, older than either of the others, will bring us nearer to the end at which we aim. "It is fear," says a Latin poet, "that engenders the gods." There is a sense in which this is true. It cannot be doubted that religion was at first awakened in the heart of man under the impress of the terror caused by the disordered and destructive forces of primitive Nature. Thrown naked and disarmed on the barely-cooled planet, walking tremblingly upon a soil that quaked beneath his tread, his would be a state of misery and distress which filled his heart with an infinite terror. But the explanation needs completing. In itself and of itself, fear is not religious; it paralyses, crushes, stuns. In order that it may become religiously fruitful, it is necessary that, from the outset, it should be mixed with an opposite sentiment, an impulse of hope; it is necessary that man, the prey of fear, should conceive, in some way or other, the possibility of surmounting it—that is to say that he should find above him some help, some succour, by which to confront the dangers which threaten him. Fear only gives birth to religion in man because it awakens hope and calls forth prayer—prayer that opens an issue to human distress. There is that amount of truth in the ancient hypothesis. It brings us near