This is the worst that an institution can do. The individual is crushed. The primeval reverence for custom seen in the ants has crystallized without getting developed and specialized into its higher form of reverence for the individual ant. He is a type of arrested development. The natural history of religion is then to be sought in a reverence for custom that gradually specializes itself into a regard for the individual. If these things are true, the advancement of any civilization may be measured by the extent in which the rights of individuals are held sacred. And this is what we have always been taught. Government was in its origin indistinguishable from religion, and down to the latest day of time, the fluctuating institutions of man will record this kinship between ritual and law. The scientists, in trying to explain religion and progress as the result of an egoism gradually expanding itself to a regard for mankind, have been pulling at the wrong end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a bit and then broke; unwound again and again broke. They were puzzling themselves over a conception fundamentally unscientific and at war with their own first principles. The genesis of the emotions proceeds like other developments from the simple towards the complex. The notion that the egoism of man gradually expanded so as to include the whole human race in a love which was in reality a love of himself, assumes that this large love is the sum of lesser loves. It fixes the attention on the objects of human feeling, and not upon the character of the feeling itself. This character is the thing to be studied. When we contrast the religious and social feelings of the civilized man with those of the savage we see the same specialization and complexity in the emotions themselves which is traceable in any higher development. The forms, arguments, theories, customs by which the feeling is expressed, show an ever-increasing refinement of sympathy. We are not approaching a general and vague emotion built up out of lesser regards for particular people. We are approaching a stage of differentiation, of analysis, a stage of the personal application of that same altruism which appears in its lower form as blind worship and self-abasement before some fetich. The utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of its development, is a consideration that may justify it to the philosopher, but which is not the _primum mobile_ in the breast of him that has it. The whole history of man shows that progress comes in the shape of an increasing tender-heartedness which can give no lucid account of itself, because it is an organic process.