ABSTRACT
A society absolutely addicted to humanitarian irreligion seems well-nigh impossible; the predominance of this creed will be mitigated by various 'substitutes for religion' which in a religious society would not be present or would be present in a less emphatic, a more simply natural form only. For the religious consciousness will, whenever a 'moral attitude' is elicited, experience the divine exemplar, codifier and guarantor of virtue at least as a back ground element of the situation. Hence, a tendency in favor of the 'free will', of responsibility in the strict sense, of a fundamental distinction between formal and merely material defects of human conduct, and of the idea of retaliation: a tendency entirely alien to the humanitarian attitude. An un-spiritual, purely private and 'selfish' outlook on life, for instance, is of fairly common occurrence even in religious ages. Humanitarianism, however, is the standard type of non-religious philosophy.
