This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the present time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world is moving forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant rightness, that I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole into any smaller community, with all the implication of an exclusive possession of right which such a going apart involves.  Put to the test by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex self than its disciplines permitted.  And still less do I want to hamper the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the particularism of a new religion.  Such refuges are well enough when the times threaten to overwhelm one.  The point about the present age, so far as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of thinking instead of assimilating mine.

3.13.  The idea of the church.

Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions generally.  I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a different one altogether.  Not to realize that, to confuse a church with its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and life-wasting errors.

Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral decisions are to be determined by the belief that the individual life guided by its perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and contributory to the undying life of the blood and race.  I have decided for myself that the general business of life is the development of a collective consciousness and will and purpose out of a chaos of individual consciousnesses and wills and purposes, and that the way to that is through the development of the Socialist State, through the socialization of existing State organizations and their merger of pacific association in a World State.  But so far I have not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the form, among others, of religious institutions.

Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated.  Customs are far more enduring things than ideas,—­witness the mistletoe at Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight of the new moon.  And the exact origin of a religious institution is of much less significance to us than its present effect.  The theory of a religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity