Let us carry our imagining yet a step further. Imagine that even after primitive ignorance had created the supernatural, it had come to an abrupt stop when man had emerged from the purely savage stage. Suppose a generation born, not without knowledge of what their progenitors believed, but with a sufficient knowledge of their own to correct their ancestor's errors. Suppose that generation in a position to recognise disease, insanity, delusion, hysteria, hallucination for what they are. Assume them to be under no delusion concerning the nature of man, physically or mentally. Would the religious idea have persisted in the way that it has done? Granted religion would still have continued to exist as an ultimate philosophy of nature that appealed to some minds, as other systems of philosophy number their disciples, would it have been the dominating power it has been? What under such conditions would have become of that evidence for the supernatural, accepted generation after generation, but which is now rejected by all educated minds? Where would have been that long array of seers, prophets, illuminants, whose credentials have been found in states of mind that are now seen to have been pathological in character? For remember it was not always--very seldom, in fact--the justice, or the reasonableness of the teachings set forth, that won support, but generally the 'signs and wonders' that were pointed to as evidence of the divine commission of the teachers. Assume, then, that these 'signs and wonders' had been wanting, and that for thousands of years people had looked at natural phenomena from the point of view of the educated mind of to-day, what would have been the present position of the religious idea? Would it not have been like a tree divorced from the soil?