We may hesitate and the Positivist may hesitate, because, primitive though the feeling of fear may be, the feeling of love is equally original:  on it and in it the family and society have their base and their origin; and to it they owe not only their origin but their continuance.  Love however is not a matter of duty and obedience; it is not subject to commandment or prohibition; nor does it strive by commands or authority to enforce itself.  In the process by which duty—­legal and moral obligation—­evolves out of the primitive feeling of taboo, love is not implicated:  love springs from its own source, the human heart, and runs its own course.  Taboo may have existed from the beginning; but to the end, whatever its form—­duty, obligation, obedience to authority—­it remains in character what it was at first, prohibitive, negative.  Love alone is creative:  without it ‘was not anything made that was made’.

There seems, therefore, no necessity to regard the ‘pre-formation’ theory of evolution, rather than the ’dispersive theory, as essential to Positivism.

Common to all the views about the evolution of religion that have been mentioned in this paper is the belief that, the more religion changes, the more it remains the same thing.  If identified with duty, then duty it was in the beginning, and duty it will remain to the end.  For those who conceive it to be merely magic, magic it was and magic it remains.  Those who define it as belief in a god and communion with him find that belief in the earliest as well as the latest stages.  All would agree in rejecting Bergson’s view of evolution—­that in evolution there is change, but nothing which changes.  All would agree that in the evolution of religion there is something which, change though it may, remains the same thing, and that is religion itself.  But on the question what religion is, there is no agreement:  no definition of religion as yet—­and there have been many attempts to define it—­has gained general acceptance.  We may even surmise, and admit, that no attempt ever will be successful.  Such admission, indeed, may at first to some seem equivalent to admitting that religion is a nullity, and the admission may accordingly be welcomed or rejected.  But a moment’s reflection will show that the admission has no such consequence.  None of our simple feelings can be defined:  pleasure and pain can neither be defined; nor, when experienced, doubted.  And some of our general terms, those at any rate which are ultimate, are beyond our power either to define or doubt:  no one imagines that ‘life’ can be defined, but no one doubts its existence.  And religion both as a term and as a fact of experience is ultimate, and, because ultimate, incapable of definition.  It is not to be defined but only to be felt.  It is an affair not merely of the intellect, but still more of the heart.