It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish. The regard that every custom receives from the individual who supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is self-surrender. But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it, like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on this trouble. Every country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind upon a disease of the savage.