Unfortunately, it remains a favourite policy with many writers to use and define the word religion, not in accordance with a comprehensive survey of facts, but in a way that will harmonize with existing pre-possessions. To this class belongs Matthew Arnold's famous definition of religion as "Morality touched with emotion," Professor Seeley's statement that we are entitled to call religion "any habitual and permanent admiration," or the common description of religion as consisting in devotion to an ideal. All such definitions may be set on one side as historically worthless, and as not harmonizing with the facts. Arnold's definition is in the highest degree superficial, since there exists no morality that is not touched with emotion, and on the other hand there exist phases of religion that have not any connection with morality, however slight. Professor Leuba properly rules definitions of this class out of order in the comment that, as it is "the function of words to delimitate, one defeats the purpose of language by stretching the meaning of a word until it has lost all precision and unity of meaning."[16] A definition that includes everything may as well, for all the use it is, not cover anything. [16] _The Psychological Origin and Nature of Religion_, p. 92. Equally faulty are those definitions that are based upon an assumed conscious effort to explain the mysteries of existence. No stranger lapse ever overtook a great thinker than occurred to Herbert Spencer when he described religion as consisting in a worship of the unknowable, and as due to the desire to explain a mystery ever pressing for interpretation. Granting the existence of an Unknowable, the sense of its presence belongs to the later stages of mental evolution, not to the earlier ones. Metaphysical and mystical theories of religion are indications of its disintegration, not of its beginnings. Primitive man began to believe in ghosts and gods for the same reasons that he believed in other things; he worshipped his gods for very concrete considerations. Even the distinction between "spiritual" and material existence is quite foreign to his mind. Such distinctions arise gradually with the progress of knowledge and its disintegrating influence on inherited beliefs. If primitive man may be credited with a philosophy, and if one may use the word in a purely convenient sense, then one may say that he is neither a dualist, nor a pluralist, but a monist. The soul or double he believes in is similar to the body he sees; the unseen forces he credits with various activities are of the same kind as those with which he is acquainted. To read our conceptions into the mind of primitive man because we use our words to explain his thoughts is a procedure that is bound to end in confusion. Man's earliest conception of things is vague and indefinite. Later, he distinguishes differences, qualitative and quantitative, his conception