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

I 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.

CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MENTAL MECHANISMS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONS

The methods and the points of view of each science have to be worked out within the science itself; they may not be prescribed in advance. Whoever thinks of scientific method as a ready-made sieve that needs only to be shaken vigorously in order to separate the factors in any and every kind of experience that may be poured into it misconstrues the whole history of scientific research. To be thoroughly empirical implies that we look ever for that which cannot be expressed in the old categories. The history of each science reveals not only an increasing body of recorded facts, but also growth in the fundamental conceptions that define the science and its methods. It is not to the disparagement but to the credit of psychology to say that in its short history it has brought forth, alongside of innumerable researches in limited areas, a set of remarkable problems concerning itself. What is "the psychical" which psychology will investigate? What are the objective marks of the presence or absence of the psychical? Can it be meas

1 Psychology is the greatest sufferer, but not the only one, from the tendency to erect a point of view or a method into a dogma. Consider the following not uncommon assumptions: (1) that one who masters the methods in a particular branch of scientific investigation becomes thereby a scientific man; (2) that the irreducible ultimates in physics must suffice for the analysis of living beings; (3) that the really fundamental factors in mind are those which biology takes account of; and in general (4) that the different is not really different!

ured? How is it related to the physical? What part does the psychical play in vital processes?

All these questions are in debate today. Some of them have the utmost interest for the psychology of religion because they involve, in a fundamental way, the contrast that was reached in the last chapter between mental mechanism and personal self-realization. This distinction emerges when we attempt to answer the question, What is the psychical? The commonest answer is that by the psychical (for which consciousness is the more usual term) we mean such facts as sensations, feelings, and impulses to action, and that these are known primarily by introspection. Psychology accordingly has commonly understood itself to be the science of "states of consciousness as such," that is, without regard to their relation to any metaphysical soul or ego. This point of view has justified itself by the fruit it has borne, which is nothing less than the winning of a place for psychology among the empirical sciences. To the objection that there can be no "psychology without a soul,' the effective reply has been successful psychologizing without saying anything about the soul! It is not at all surprising that students, and even professional psychologists, come to think of mental life as compounded of simple elements, after the analogy of chemistry, or as a mechanism of which sensations, feelings, and the like are the ultimate units.

Is this, however, "the" psychological point of view or "a" psychological point of view? A convenient pathway toward an answer is to examine an instance of the assumed psychological elements or facts, say a sensation. It must be so amenable to observation that

you and I can talk about it as a particular object ascertainably present. It is easy to discuss sensations of touch, taste, and so on in general, just as we used to talk about atoms; but what is required is that we point out and identify a particular sensation as actually occurring. Paradoxical as it seems at first, we may have to conclude that sensations as well as atoms are not facts of experience but constructs from experience. For, first, when you offer me an objectively observed case, it turns out to be your sensation. Now, your sensation is a fact for me, not by virtue of my own direct observation, but by virtue of a process of construction from other data. Moreover, in what sense can you say that even you observe this sensation? Not to mention other difficulties of introspection, see what happens when you attempt to count your sensations for a few seconds. You discover that either you are counting objects rather than sensations, or else putting arbitrary bounds to each sensation. No atoms of mental life appear to you at all, but rather a continuous flow which has various aspects, of which the sensational is one. Your sensations are constructs for you as they are also for me. We can now understand, in part, why Professor James, at the conclusion of his brilliant analysis of "states of consciousness as such" declares that, after all, "states of consciousness themselves are not verifiable facts."

When we reach this insight, three courses are open to us: First, we may go on as before analyzing states of consciousness as such, but we must then recognize that the material in which we work (sensations, feelings, etc.) is not mental life in its concreteness, but rather certain

1 Psychology (Briefer Course), p. 467.