In addition, to the lines of investigation followed in the foregoing pages, a great deal might be said as to how far the religious idea has been perpetuated by an exploitation of purely social qualities. It must be obvious to even the cursory student that a great deal of what is now being put forward as religious is really no more than a sociology with a religious label. The feeling for truth, beauty, justice, the desire for social intercourse, are all treated as expressions of religious conviction. All sorts of social reforms are urged in the name of religion, and the degree of success achieved dwelt upon as fruits of the religious spirit. But in no legitimate sense of the word can these things be called religious. They may or may not be consonant with the existing religion, but in themselves they are very clearly the outcome of man's social nature, and would exist even though religion disappeared entirely. The appeals made to man's moral sense, to his sense of justice, to his sympathies, are thus fundamentally appeals made to his social nature, and so far as the religious appeal is placed upon this basis it becomes an exploitation of the social consciousness. Unfortunately, the long association of religious forms with social life and institutions, due ultimately to the immense power of supernaturalism in early society, this, combined with early education, makes it a matter of no small difficulty for the average man or woman to separate the two things. Finally, let us imagine for a moment that the course of human history had been different to what it actually has been. Suppose that by some miracle humanity had started its career in full possession of that knowledge of nature which has been so laboriously accumulated. In that case, would the belief in the supernatural have ever existed? Would the thousand and one 'spiritual beings' of primitive society have ever had being? And if not called into being then, from what other source could they have been derived? Is there anything in later scientific knowledge that would ever have suggested the supernatural? We know there is not; we know that the whole of modern science is an emphatic protest against its existence. Unfortunately the scientist does not come first, but last; and by the time he appears, the supernatural has made good its foothold; it has permeated human institutions, and has bitten so deeply into habits of thought as to make its eradication the most difficult of all tasks.