It is easy of course to point to the numerous evils that religion has directly or indirectly brought about; conservatism, intolerance, persistent opposition to the progress of scientific or unprejudiced thought, the fostering of manifold delusions and absurdities, the retention of vast masses of mankind in superstitious fear and ignorance when they should have been acquiring confidence and knowledge. In spite however of these and of the many other very serious charges that may be brought against it, religion can claim to have played a very necessary and beneficial rôle in the past history of culture. Sublimation is, as we have seen, a process that works slowly and by finely graduated steps, so that neither in the individual nor the race can we expect to see far-reaching moral transformations rapidly and easily achieved. The feelings and tendencies of the child in relation to the family environment are in many of their aspects so primitive and crude and yet so powerful and persistent, that we must welcome gladly any means of displacement that has proved itself of value to the individual and to Society. It is for this service, above all others, that we are indebted to religion in the past. [Sidenote: The future of religion] As regards the future, it is evident that the needs of humanity to which religion has ministered will, in some sense at any rate, long continue to exist. The backward pull of the tendencies of infancy and childhood, forming, as they do, the foundation upon which all subsequent desires and aspirations are built up; the closeness of the similarity between the situation of the adult confronted with the vast and overwhelming power of Nature and that of the child who helplessly depends upon his parents both for happiness and life--these are influences which may well continue to make religion in some form a permanent necessity. Nevertheless it would appear that the future progress of human culture will demand a very considerable modification and purification of most existing religious forms. The study of the psychology of religion is showing that these forms are, for the most part, based on crude unconscious motives which have to be outgrown and superseded if civilisation is to prosper and advance. In retaining and fostering these forms we are in many cases playing into the hands, not of the higher, but of the baser and more primitive aspects of our nature, aspects which, at our present level of development, it is necessary indeed to understand, but not to venerate or even to approve. Even in so far as the forms of religion give expression not so much to the direct promptings of these baser aspects as to the reactions we have formed against them, it must be remembered that true moral advance lies in sublimation rather than in repression and that so long as the human mind confines itself to the purely negative task of opposing its own primitive tendencies, it will never achieve either true emancipation or true progress[199].