Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized communities is the fact that sexual maturity occurs long before marriage is possible or desirable.
In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the various combinations of suppression, or repression, or sublimation.
Man’s gregariousness, together with his power of speech, learning, and generalization, have led to the development of a new thing in the world--persistent and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to the mind of man, and is handed down, by speech or imitation or in some permanent record, from generation to generation. Language, general ideas of right and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling--all this and much more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s environment--is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot escape modelling by this social environment.
The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a stratum within the nation; of a whole class or of a clique; of science or of art; of a retired monasticism, or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But they are always herd ideas, and through them man is always member of some community, even though that community be tiny, or consist mainly of writers dead and gone; and he always strives to put himself in harmony with the traditions of that community.
A long-winded introduction enough; now for the bearing of it. One of the essentials of every religion is its treatment of the subconscious, is its view and its practice as regards the relation between the personally-organized part of the mind to the remaining non-personal reservoirs. At first the non-personal part is regarded as being wholly outside the organism, and its occasional flooding up into the narrower ego is regarded as an operation of an external personality, a spirit, a God. Comparatively late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but the process by which connection is made is still regarded as divine, and called inspiration. Such ideas belong to the adolescence of the race, in precisely the same way as the discovery and acquisition of great tracts of this subconscious territory will always necessarily constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. But any developed religion must always in some way help to make these great reserves of power accessible, always teach the enlargements of the personal ego which their conquest brings about. This is one of the ways in which, to use current religious phraseology, self may be lost, and found again on a different plane.