More recently the psychological aspect of the problem has been considered by a group of American writers, notably by Professor James Leuba (_A Psychological Study of Religion_) and Dr Irving King (_The Development of Religion_, New York, 1910). The latter work is a most suggestive and judicious survey of the evidence afforded {xiii} by savage rites and belief. The writer insists on the priority of rites to belief, and finds their origin in social activities, largely in what he calls play-activities, and in spontaneous reactions to the environment. The religious attitude may be coeval with these activities, but organized beliefs were developed gradually. The particular forms they took were the result of different social situations, these in turn depending on the physical and cultural environment. “In and so far as they have elements which are similar functionally, religion and magic,” he holds, “originally formed a part of a primitive, undifferentiated attitude, and separated from each other as experience became more complex and the requirements of action more varied.” Magic became the individualist and antisocial application of the impulses and organized methods of which religion was the social expression and application. Lastly, Professor Durkheim, taking Totemism as the most primitive religion known to us, has in _Les Formes Elémentaires de la vie Religieuse_ analyzed elementary conceptions, with the result that he derives religious ideas and practices entirely from a social origin. As I have considered his theory more fully on another page, it needs no further reference here. Thus at the present moment the controversy stands--if it be legitimate to call it a controversy. Criticism, according to a pregnant saying of Andrew Lang’s, is a form of co-operation--of co-operation in the pursuit of truth. The following essays are intended in that spirit as a humble contribution to the discussion. Their primary intention is not controversial. They rather seek to express some of the results of a study of the phenomena, from the point of view of one who has been convinced that the emotions and the imagination--and {xiv} not merely the individual, but the collective emotions and imagination--have had at least as much to do with the generation of religious practices and beliefs as the reason, and that for the form they may have assumed, physical, social, and cultural influences must be held accountable.