+11+. There is at present no satisfactory historical evidence (whatever psychological ground there may be, or whatever deduction from the theory of evolution may seem necessary) of the existence of a subreligious stage of human life--a stage in which there is only a vague sense of some extrahuman power affecting man's interests, without definition of the power, and without attempt to enter into social relations with it.[13]
+12+. True, in the great mass of existing savage humanity we find social and religious customs so definite that we are forced to suppose a long preceding period of development. It has even been held that traces of religious conceptions are discernible in the first surviving records of "prehistoric" man, the contemporary of the cave bear--a period separated from the earliest clear historical records by many millenniums;[14] but, though the existence of such conceptions is by no means improbable, the alleged traces are too dim to build a theory on. The supposition of a continuous religious development from the earliest times is in accord with all that we know of human history, but, until more facts come to light, it will be prudent to reserve opinion as to the character of prehistoric religion.[15]
+13+. In general, religious development goes hand in hand with social organization. Those groups which, like the Rock Veddas of Ceylon (described by Sarasin) and the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego (described by Hyades and Deniker), have scarcely any clan organization, have also scarcely any religion. In most of the lowest communities known to us we find well-constituted clans and tribes, with strict (and usually complicated) laws of relationship and marriage, and a somewhat developed form of religion.[16] Here again it is evident that we see in the world only the later stages of a long social process; the antecedent history of this process belongs to sociological science, and does not concern us here;[17] its later history is inseparably connected with the development of religion.
+14+. It is in this social process that science, philosophy, art, and ethics are constructed, and these, though distinct from the religious sentiment, always blend with it into a unity of life. Religion proper is simply an attitude toward a Power; the nature and activity of the Power and the mode of approaching it are constructed by man's observation and reflection. The analysis of the external world and of man's body and mind, the discovery of natural laws, the history of the internal and external careers of the human race--this is the affair of science and philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through men's association with one another in society, their basis being certain primary instincts of self-assertion and sympathy; art is the product of the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by side and coalesce in unitary human life.
