Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY III. The present-day student who devotes himself to the History of Religion is oppressed by the wealth of material which lies before him. The investigations of the last century, pursued in the dispassionate spirit which befits science, have made a multitude of fresh facts available. Through the intricate and varied mass of phenomena set before him the student finds it no easy thing to thread his way, and reach a point where he can see general principles and state determinate conclusions. We might compare him to a man wandering in a vast forest, now overshadowed by great trees, now plunged into a rank undergrowth, and doubtful whether he will ever see the wood for the trees. The phenomena are so complex, and higher and lower elements are so often intermingled, that a logical arrangement of them must to some extent be arbitrary. Hence to accept Plato's rule and follow always the natural joints in our divisions is, in the nature of the case, not practicable.1 Tiele, one of the most competent workers in this field, finally contents himself with a broad classification of religions into Natural and Ethical. And even here there may be difference of opinion as to where the line should fall. This difficulty then faces us when we turn to study the history of religion. The facts cannot naturally be compressed within a scheme of logical development. There is, indeed, a continuity in the growth of a religion, and no phase of it but has a meaning. Thought, however, is only one element in the religious consciousness, and does not suffice to control the evolution of religion by the principle of intellectual consistency. If we are to speak of the logic of religious evolution, it must be that larger logic which embraces the working of human needs, emotions, and desires. The worker...