That _religion_ consists essentially in the establishment of a bond—at first mythical, and subsequently mystic, in the first instance between man and the forces of the universe, then between man and the universe itself, and ultimately between man and the elements of the universe—is distinctly the outcome of every study of religion; but what we wish especially here to consider is the precise way in which this bond has been conceived. Well (it may appear more clearly at the close of this inquiry), the religious bond has been conceived _ex analogia societatis humanæ_: the relations, amicable and inimical, of men to each other were employed first for the explanation of physical phenomena and natural forces, then for the metaphysical explanation of the world, of its creation, conservation, and government; in short, sociological laws were universalized, and the state of war or peace which existed among men, families, tribes, and nations was conceived as existing also among the volitions which were fancied to exist beneath or beyond the forces of nature. A mythic or mystic sociology, conceived as containing the secret of all things, lies at the basis of all religions. Religion is not simply the expression of an anthropomorphism—animals and fantastic beings of various sorts have played no inconsiderable rôle in different cults; it is an imaginative extension, a universalization of all the good or evil relations which exist among conscious beings, of war and peace, friendship and enmity, obedience and rebellion, protection and authority, submission, fear, respect, devotion, love: religion is a universal _sociomorphism_. Social relations with animals, with the dead, intellectual and social relations with good and evil genii, with the forces of nature, are nothing more nor less than various forms of this universal sociology in which religion has sought to find the reason of things—of physical phenomena such as thunder, storm, sickness, death, as well as of metaphysical relations—the origin and destiny of things, and of moral relations—virtue, vice, law, and sanction. If, therefore, we were forced to condense the theory of this book into a single definition, we should say that religion is the outcome of an effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short it is a universal sociological hypothesis, mythical in form. To justify this conception we shall review the various definitions that have been put forth of the religious sentiment; we shall see that each of them needs completion by the rest, and that, too, from the sociological point of view.