ABSTRACT

The religious phenomenon presents itself as a double paradox—psychological and sociological. The first man who threw himself prostrate, but no longer before another man, was the first believer and founder of all religions. In the case of acts of religious propitiation, failure after failure cannot shake the general belief in their utility, a belief which is strengthened by the rare successes due to chance. Religious action contributed to the consolidation of the social edifice by developing in all the members of the same community that sense of psychic communion. Kidd maintains that religion must always be a condition of social survival, in the sense that irreligious societies are doomed to perish in the universal struggle for life in which they come into conflict with societies that remain religious. If religion seems doomed to extinction as a social organ and phenomenon, we cannot judge it in the same way if we consider it as a psychic manifestation and individual fact.