(4) Lastly, from this time forward, the religious feeling has a _social_ character, or rather, the religious and social tendencies amalgamate into a whole. It strengthens the principle of authority, often in favour of the altruistic tendencies, which are still very weak. The chiefs, priests, sorcerers, speak and act in the name of a higher power, and keep up the social tie. The worship of the dead, which Spencer has made the mistake of generalising too much, is an element of stability, establishing a continuity between different generations. The community of worship and ritual is the objective and visible expression of social solidarity. I do not consider as belonging to this period institutions such as the religious oath, trial by ordeal, or others presupposing the addition of a novel element, which is still absent. But there are other customs, local or general—_e.g._, that of the _tabu_, existing in nearly the whole of Oceania and elsewhere under different forms, in which religion performs a social office, but a novel one (at least according to our present ideas), and safeguards institutions and conventions by terror, while still remaining outside the region of morality. II. Except the intellectual feelings themselves, no emotional manifestation depends more on the intellectual development than the religious sentiment, because every religion implies some conception of the universe—a cosmology and a system of metaphysics. With the first period we have scarcely passed beyond the stage of imagination; with the second, reflection and generalisation, whose upward progress we are about to follow, make their appearance. The intellectual evolution and the emotional evolution must each be studied in turn during this second stage. I. _Intellectual Evolution._—We shall find it useful, moreover, to divide the study of the intellectual element into two questions: (1) the conception of a cosmic order, at first physical, afterwards moral; (2) the progressive march of generalisation from an almost unlimited multiplicity up to unity. These two processes have not always coincided or kept pace with one another.