prise and is an assurance against the common danger. The fact that religion, such as it issued from the hands of nature, has simultaneously fulfilled, to use the language of the day, the two functions moral and national, appears to us unques- tionable, for these two functions were inevitably undifferenti- ated in rudimentary societies where custom existed alone. But that societies, as they developed, should have carried religion with them in the second direction, will be easily understood by reference to what we have just explained. In fact, the conclusion might have been reached immediately considering that the human societies, at the end of one of the great lines of biological evolution, form the counterpart to the most perfectly developed animal societies, placed at the extremity of the other great line, and that the myth-making function, though not an instinct, plays in human societies a part exactly corresponding to that of instinct in these animal societies. Our second remark, which we might well refrain from making after all we have so often repeated, concerns the mean- ing we give to the "intention of nature", an expression we have used in speaking of "natural religion". As a matter of fact, we were dealing less with this religion itself than with the effect it produced. There is an impetus of life which rushes through matter and wrests from it what it can, for that very reason dispersing itself on its way. At the extremity of the two main lines of evolution thus