Is it then true that religion is thus, for the mass of mankind, either a necessary good or a necessary evil, rooted in the human heart? * * * * * [Sidenote: Confusion of religious sentiment with need for philosophy and morality.] The belief that the religious sentiment is innate and perpetual rests upon a confusion of the religious sentiment with the need that exists in mankind for philosophy and morality; and however closely bound up together philosophy and morality and religion may be, they are in themselves distinct and separate, and tend progressively to become more and more manifestly so. [Sidenote: Religious sentiment not innate.] In the first place, how universal soever the religious sentiment may appear to be, it must be admitted that it is not innate. Persons who have passed their childhood without any communication with other human beings, owing to some corporal defect, display no signs of the possession of religious ideas. Dr. Kitto, in his book on the loss of the senses, cites the case of an American woman who was congenitally deaf and dumb, and who later, after she was capable of communicating with the people about her, was found not to possess the slightest notion of a divinity. The Rev. Samuel Smith, after twenty-three years intercourse with deaf mutes, says that, education apart, they possess no notion of a divinity. Lubbock and Baker cite a great number of examples of savages who are in the same case. According to the conclusions set forth above, in the beginning religions did not spring ready-made out of the human heart: they were imposed on man from without, they reached him through his eyes and through his ears; they contained no element of mysticism—in their first steps. Those who derive mysticism from an innate religious sentiment reason a little after the manner of those who in politics should derive royalty from some supposed innate respect for a royal race. Such a respect is the work of time, of custom, of the sympathetic tendencies of a body of men long trained in some one direction; there is contained in it no single primitive element, and yet the power of the sentiment of loyalty to a royal race is considerable. The Revolution showed as much, in the wars of the Vendée. But this power wears out some day or other, the cult for royalty disappears with the disappearance of royalty itself; other habits are formed, creating other sentiments, and the spectator is surprised to see that a people which was royalist under monarchy becomes republican under republicanism. The reign of sensibility over intelligence is not perpetual; sooner or later, the position of the two must be reversed; there is an intellectual habitat to which we must as inevitably adapt ourselves as to our physical habitat. The perpetuity of the religious sentiment depends upon its legitimacy. Born, as it is, of certain beliefs and certain customs, its fate is one with theirs.