3. Are not some religious experiences in their very nature outside the scope of psychology? So all Catholics and many Protestants hold. What Catholic writers call "mystical theology" devises careful tests for distinguishing the operation of divine or demonic beings within us from the natural ongoings of the mind.1 Benedict XIV, pope from 1740 to 1758, laid down rules,2 which are followed today in the canonization of saints, whereby the church can become officially certain as to what is pathological and what divine in the extraordinary visitations experienced by saints and miracle-workers. A presupposition of all these tests, however, is a theory of the supernatural—a theory authoritatively imposed. The conclusion reached in any given case is not a statement of probabilities based upon observation, but rather a mixture of observation and a priori assumption.

Protestants who hold to a psychical supernatural commonly mix with the assumption of authority two other things a theory of intuition as a source of knowledge in matters of fact—that is, in matters susceptible of regulated observation—and a habit of assuming that what is extraordinarily valuable or satisfying has laws of its own, different from those of nature at large. Scientific method is of course antithetical to all of these positions. What is more significant for our present purpose is that no observed separation between religious

J. Görres, Die christliche Mystik (Regensburg, 1836-42), devotes three of his five volumes to possession and "demonic mysticism." How "mystical theology" undertakes to maintain itself in the presence of scientific psychology can be seen in A. B. Sharpe, Mysticism: Its True Nature and Value (London: Sands & Co.).

2 De servorum Dei beatificatione et canonisatione.

and other mental processes has been pointed out;1 the alleged separateness depends in every case upon an antecedent supernaturalistic assumption. Further, psychology has already succeeded in analyzing many of the supposedly exceptional religious experiences; they are not a scientific terra incognita at all.

What sorts of question, then, does psychology ask with regard to religion? An examination of publications in this field will show that two main types of problem are recognized.

First, religious experience is ordinarily a highly involved psychical complex which needs to be viewed in its elements. Conversion, which is the central topic of Starbuck's pioneer work, is such a complex. Mysticism, to which Leuba and Delacroix have given so much attention, offers a larger problem of the same kind. Stratton, noting that a remarkable crisscross of motives and beliefs appears everywhere in the sacred books of the world, has taken as his task the explanation of this seemingly self-contradictory complexity. Search for the elements of a complex appears again in studies of the genesis and growth of religion in the individual and in the race, as in those of King, Pratt, Durkheim, and Wundt.

Secondly, religion has a peculiar relation to the valuational phase of experience. In pre-eminent degree religion, even more than philosophy, is a wrestling with ¡destiny. It will wring a consciously adequate life out

of the hard conditions of existence. With this value aspect of religious experience in mind we unearth new

This will appear more and more clearly as our analysis of religious experiences proceeds.

facts, and we face a new aspect of all the facts. What is it, Professor James asks, that the devotee fixes his heart upon, and what are the results of his spiritual exercises-results in the current everyday terms of value? Höffding judges that the fundamental axiom of religion is "the conservation of values." King and Ames are chiefly interested in discovering the functions that religion represents in the life of man as a whole, and how these functions originate and grow. Concerning any religious phenomenon-say a sacrifice, a dance, or solitary mystic contemplation—we must ask, not merely what sort of god or what theory of the universe is here involved, and not merely what sensations, emotions, and so on make up the complex, but also what the devotee is after, whether he gets what he is after, and how this particular good is related to other goods in the total self-realizing life of man. This phase of religious life is objectively present not less truly than the parts into which we resolve mental complexes.

The distinction between these two types of investigation involves problems that will occupy much space in succeeding chapters. At this point, however, it will be well to understand clearly that resolving a mental complex into its elements does not answer all the legitimate questions concerning the nature of an experience. Let us imagine ourselves called upon, for example, to give a complete psychological account of a mother fondling her baby. We see right away that we have before us a complex, the mothering process, which must be analyzed into its part processes. Here are touch and sight sensations, ideational activities, emotions, and

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* H. Höffding, Philosophy of Religion (London, 1906), p. 10.

instincts, all connected with corresponding neural processes in nerve endings, transmission tracts, and brain centers. Thus we resolve the complex. Each part of the machinery is discriminated from other parts, and we behold all working together. This is the mothering complex. But something remains still; it is mother-love, of which thus far we have said not a word. In our analysis of the mothering complex the baby is simply a stimulus of touch and sight, an excitant of nerve endings, a part of a mechanism. But within mother love, that is, within the actuality of the experience, what is a baby? What is the baby, that is to say, to the mother, and what is the mother to herself, now that a child of her very own has come?

Heaven's first darling, twin-born with the morning light, you have floated down the stream of the world's life, and at last you have stranded on my heart.

As I gaze on your face, mystery overwhelms me; you who belong to all have become mine.

For fear of losing you I hold you tight to my breast. What magic has snared the world's treasure in these slender arms of mine ?1

We must, indeed, analyze mind process just as we do the movements of the planets, treating the mind as a mechanism; and neither human affection nor religion has any claim to exemption from this taking to pieces. But these personal realizations demand that they be understood also. There is something in poetry that is not metrics, something in music that is not vibrations, something in our social and ethical experience that is not a complex of states of consciousness. Never shall

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Tagore, "The Beginning," from The Crescent Moon.

we understand this something by merely reanalyzing the mechanism. As well might we explain a line of poetry by merely marking the quantity of its syllables. We must go forward to a psychology of values, functions, self-realizations.

A certain distrust of psychology that now and then appears among religionists is not altogether groundless. For there is "something more" to conversion and other religious experiences than the sum of the part processes that have mostly occupied the attention of psychologists. Ordinarily, however, religious critics of the psychology of religion fall into a scientific pitfall. They assume that the "something more" is just another part process co-ordinate with those already recognized by psychology, whereas the missing thing is not another wheel in a machine, or another event in a series, but the individual wholeness of self-realization. Wiser than these objectors are those who say, "Whatever the process or mechanism of conversion or of prayer, the man changes for the better, he has more real life than he had before.'

I purposely refrain from giving a formal definition of religion at the outset of this study, partly because definitions convey so little information as to facts; partly because the history of definitions of religion makes it almost certain that any fresh attempt at definition would unnecessarily complicate these introductory chapters; partly because, in this subject at least, a definition, if it is to have vitality, must be an achievement-it cannot be "given" by one to another. The observant reader will notice, however, that my whole discussion of method and point of view in the psychology of religion (chaps. i and ji) gradually unfolds a definite conception of the nature of religious experience.