faculty, or to the wholeness of the human mind. The final criterion of the value or validity of any particular product or instance of religion or philosophy or science has always lain in the response or reaction of other faculties or parts of man to the action of the faculty which is operative; or, conversely, in the responsiveness of that faculty and its product to the reasonable insistence of the sum of the balanced faculties of man acting in their corporate union.

Thus the religious impulse, or the predominantly religious mind, must, in the end, justify itself before the court of the other human impulses and rational faculties. Philosophy, likewise, will seek to adjust itself with the imperative religious impulse. Nor can philosophy for long ignore the action of the scientific mind proceeding constructively through close and systematic observation of the natural world with ingenious experiment and verification. And natural science, with its tentative hypotheses and experimental methods which disclaim all knowledge that cannot be verified, may feel limited and narrow and insufficient, may be conscious of a pressure toward metaphysics to supplement its intermediacy, and even feel the temptations of religion; it may recognize that it is no complete and adequate creed for man, since man is other than a scientist, even as he is other than a philosopher or a saint.

Not every man is saint and philosopher and

scientist; many a man is not even one of these! But the full gamut of humanity includes them all and needs them all for its grand harmonies.

It may be doubted whether men were free discriminating agents in the savage beginnings of what should become religion, philosophy, or science. Human environment everywhere presents some like features, some like suggestions. The sun and moon rise and set in all lands and the stars appear; there is everywhere a change of seasons; everywhere injury and disease come upon men, and men have cause to fear; everywhere they are nourished and protected in childhood, and eat the fruits of earth; everywhere they yearn in desire, beget, bring forth, and nourish. Thus they receive some like enlightenment, and have something of the same rude sense of the facts of life. Hence it is that like mental processes and parallel conceptions appear everywhere. Savage ethical notions have a general resemblance, and everywhere men project their crude self-consciousness into the outer world, and imagine its occurrences to be as acts of things alive. Everywhere men have worshipped the sun and moon and their own ancestors, and have buried food and utensils with the dead, failing to conceive of any complete cessation of bodily need and function. Very strikingly they have everywhere used, and indeed still use, perforce, the analogies of physical qualities and relations to help themselves to turbid spiritual concepts, in which the dregs of

matter gradually settle downward, leaving the spiritual more clear.

We may infer that, through these early stages, confused and slowly clarifying thoughts arise from natural suggestions-the suggestions of the human environment and of common ways of living. Very gradually and slowly will human thinking begin to free itself from the compulsions of early need and the universal suggestions of circumstance, and evince some intellectual and volitional discrimination. Therewith a more palpable individuality arises among men. For one may note that whereever discrimination and ingenuity appear, they are the discrimination and ingenuity of an individual, are, indeed, of the essence of individuality. The herd, as a herd, is neither discriminating, originative, nor free. Freedom and discrimination are of the individual, the salient individual.1

Strikingly will this appear in those most salient individuals, those great men who fashion the knowledge, virtue, and ideals of mankind. The founders of religions, poets, philosophers, discoverers, and men of science lifted themselves from the cradle of the world and became creators of what was new

1 Speaking comparatively. It is accepted to-day that throughout the whole organic world no two individuals of even the lowest orders of plants and animals, and not even any two cells, are absolutely like. So no two human beings. But in the text I am referring to that more salient individuality from which come thoughts and acts noticeably different from those of other members of the tribe.

and what was better. With them the mind worked free, though often building better than it knew. These men were themselves in their self-directings, supreme individuals; they were also the sum of prior human development, which made the groundwork of their loftier constructions. Each was as the apex mentis of his age, and the accumulated energies of life and thought wrought in the action of his mind. His own discriminations, his free determinings and constructions, in adding to the intellectual and spiritual faculties of men, made for the enlargement of human freedom.

One more point, to keep us from confusing two different but related concepts. We have argued for the freedom of the mind, inclusive of the will as its kinetic or conative faculty. There is no nobler office of this mental freedom than to liberate the soul from the bondage of its foolish fears and give it peace. It is the mind, in its essential freedom, that through increasing knowledge and finer discrimination works ever for its own deliverance from fear, thus moving in freedom toward its peace, its spiritual adjustment with the universe and God.

II

EGYPT, CHINA, AND INDIA

A mass of early crude conception survived in the practical thinking and terrified or more hopeful

imaginings of the folk of those two fertile river valleys, Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile. Two thousand years and more before the birth of Christ the changing races of Babylonia, as we have noted, had built up a material civilization amply guarded by law, by custom, and royal power. But their thought of all the powers not human was wrapped in fear. Spiritually, they were driven and pursued; and their vision of the grave was horrible. So they grovelled before gods and demons and the plagues with which the superhuman powers smote men. They developed a complex of astrology, soothsaying, and magic, which survived the walls of Babylon, and passed on to afflict men for thousands of years. The later Assyrians brought the fear of God close to the Hebraic stage of its evolution, and developed an acute sense of sin. Yet throughout their obvious and sometimes articulate perplexity they never reached valid moral distinctions. Ceremonial error, or touching the forbidden thing, brought plagues from the gods as fatally as fraud, incest, or murder. Scant freeing of the spirit lay in any Mesopotamian scheme of things.

The magic and religious code of the equally ancient Egyptian civilization, undisturbed by its inconsistencies, fabricated an existence within and beyond the tomb that should be a magically safeguarded replica of life on earth. Only Pharaohs and great nobles might build eternal tombs, and furnish them with those substantial images and