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of the old forms of worship to furnish them. The movement beginning in the mysteries thus culminated in the vagaries of religious belief in the time of the empire. Originating in the failure of the old habits and the effort to reconstruct them for more adequate experience, they gradually degenerated into mere thirst for novelty. There is always danger, as has been said, when the impulse to reconstruct is aroused, that the atten- tion will be diverted to the process of reconstruction and that the end for which alone the intermediate activities have signifi- cance will be lost sight of. This is especially apt to be true if the new adjustment is not easily effected. These later religious sects represent, then, the morbid interest in the process of making adjustments rather than the desire to obtain a better life through them.
It was inevitable that forms of worship set up outside the traditional religions should tend to create a certain amount of subjectivity, the more noticeable because of its contrast with the extreme objectivity of the older forms of belief. To anyone who had given up the old worship, the only means of judging the rela- tive value of the new systems would be their efficiency in stirring up emotional responses. If there was nothing in objective prece- dent or tradition to commend one series of rites over another, the subjective criterion must inevitably be set up. Religious practices would be distinguished from one another, not by variety of function in an objective social order, but by the variety of emotional suggestion they were able to afford. The subjective standard would be the only one that would be avail- able under such circumstances. The ascetic mania of many of these sects, and of Christianity as well, is additional proof that the evolution going on was essentially a subjective one. Asceti- cism is one of the directions in which a morbid interest in internal conditions may lead. It is not meant that people have no subjective states in those times when the objective social order keeps the attention fixed on overt ends. The point is that under such circumstances the subjective states have no validity in themselves, they stand for nothing distinct from the objective interests, and thus the conditions of discrimination, as described by James, are not present. The feeling exists, but it
