II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it. III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics. IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin. _I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men._ [Sidenote: Religion and morals not originally related.] We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said, lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers; man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings, at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature, man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals: human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]