A whole world of spiritual experience separates the humble little church mouse rising at six every morning to attend a service which she believes to be pleasing to a personal God, from the philosopher who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable armchair; and no one will feel much doubt as to which side the advantage lies.
Here we approach the next point.

The cultus, with its liturgy and its discipline, exists for and promotes the repetition of acts which are primarily the expression of man's instinct for God; and by these--or any other repeated acts--our ductile instinctive life is given a definite trend.

We know from Semon's researches[126] that the performance of any given act by a living creature influences all future performances of similar acts.

That is to say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus to control our reaction to it.

"In the case of living organisms," says Bertrand Russell, "practically everything that is distinctive both of their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent influence of the past": and most actions and responses "can only be brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history of the organism as part of the causes of the present response."[127] The phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general law.