Wells's view, as in James's, evidence for God's existence is found in so-called religious experiences, mystical in nature. James expresses it as follows: "There are religious experiences of a specific nature ....They point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment."s "Personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness." And Wells says similarly: "Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God entirely upon experience."10 "This cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself.... The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of battle.... After it has come our lives are changed, God is with us and there is no more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has found a lover.... One is assured that there is a Power that fights with us against the confusion and evil within us and without." In accepting the mystical experience as the basis of religious belief, Wells agrees completely with James. As Wells himself says,12 "So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal salvation.... has little to tell that is not already familiar to the reader of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience."

When God's existence is argued for upon the basis of the religious experience, a crucial question arises regarding the externality and objectivity of the God that is believed in. Here arises what I have called the fallacy of false attribution, "which consists in the erroneous interpretation of an experience whereby the experience is attributed to an external, divine source in cases where a physiological explanation is adequate to account for it."13 With Wells as with James there is no doubt regarding the objectivity of the God evidence for whose existence is thought to be found in mystical experiences. James classifies himself as a "piecemeal supernaturalist."14 Piecemeal supernaturalism "admits miracles and

8 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 299, 300.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 379.

10 Op. cit., p. 20.

11 Ibid., pp. 23, 24.

12 Ibid.,
p. 21.

13 Cf. the author's article "Two Common Fallacies in the Logic of Religion," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. XIV, pp. 653-660. The above quotation is from page 657.

14 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 520.

providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details."15 Nowhere in Wells's writings do we find quite so frank a statement of supernaturalism; but in denying that God is the Collective Mind of Humanity,1 in admitting "help from without," in speaking of an "exterior reference"s of the religious experience, and in insisting that "God is an external reality,"19 Wells commits himself to such a view. And with such a view goes the fallacy of false attribution, which is found in the arguments of both Wells and James20 for the existence of God.

The fallacy of false attribution is committed by Wells, we must agree, so far as it is possible to explain the religious experience in terms of physiological psychology; and there seems to be little difficulty in accounting for the experience as a form of emotionalism, which is interpreted, after the experience, as an experience of communion with God. The mystic believes that he experiences an objective God, a reality which is more permanent than the passing experience, and which is the source of the experience. Such belief is essential in connection with the mystical experience in order to make it a religious experience. But, though the belief in God is present, God need not be real; and, in fact, it is the belief, and not the object of the belief, God, that does the "work" in religion that James and Wells speak of. Thus Wells says:21 "Prayer is a power. Here God can indeed work miracles." And in saying this he is illustrating very clearly the fallacy of false attribution. If a physiologically grounded psychology is to be admitted to the circle of the sciences, then we must say here that it is the psycho-physiological activity of belief that does the "miraculous" work-work which is falsely attributed to God.

Whoever claims that evidence for the existence of God, defined concretely enough to be significant, as Wells's God is defined, is to be found in experiences of a mystical sort, must give reasons for asserting that the mystical experience is anything more than a strongly marked emotional state, in which the sentiment of love is prominent, together with a strong conviction regarding the divine 15 Ibid., pp. 520, 521. 16 Wells, op. cit., P. 61. 19 Ibid., p. 82.

17 Ibid., p. 26.

18 Ibid., p. 78.

20 See the author's article, loc. cit., pp. 657-660, for a discussion of the fallacy of false attribution as found in James's views.

source of the emotion and the divine object of the human sentiment of love. The conviction, or belief, moreover, as to the source of the experience is not derived from the experience, but from tradition, education, and social influences in general. Professor Hocking's claim that "the love of God is the one natural instinct of man” is ungrounded. The biologist and the psychologist fail to discover "love of God" among the instincts. There is no religious instinct. Love of God is a form taken by instinctive love when interpreted in a religious fashion; and the religious interpretation is not instinctive, but is due to social influences. The experience comes from "below," through the sublimation of a very primitive instinct, and is to be explained in naturalistic terms; but it is interpreted by the mystic as coming from "above," and not to be explained naturalistically. In the mystic's interpretation there inheres the fallacy of false attribution.

The mystical solution of the problem of religion, to which Wells resorts, is inadequate except under one condition—that mysticism be made a thorough-going metaphysical doctrine, involving the complete denial of any reality to the world that the sciences study. Only in Nirvana could such a doctrine be consistently maintained.

WESLEY RAYMOND WELLS.

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY.

A PHILOSOPHICAL LITTERATEUR.

Prof. S. P. Sherman's work has been for the last few years one of the features of the New York Nation. Memorable are the vivid character-portrayal of Professor Kittredge (issue of September 11, 1913), the rollicking zest of "The Gaiety of Socrates" (July 15, 1915), and the mordant logic of his dissection of Mr. Roosevelt (November 29, 1917). But chiefly as the upholder of the conservative tradition in literary criticism has Mr. Sherman attained distinction. Most of his reviews of this character have recently been issued in a revised and enlarged form, together with an introduction expounding fully though somewhat loosely the author's Weltanschauung.

The book, entitled On Contemporary Literature (Henry Holt & Co.), makes delightful and stimulating reading. Though the accent is at times academic, the style is often vivid and racy. Take 22 W. E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 577.

this penetrating criticism of Dreiser's realism: "If you expect to gain credence for the notion that your hero can have any woman in Chicago or New York that he puts his paw on, you had probably better lead up to it by a detailed account of the street-railway system in those cities." Or this satirical sketch of Alfred Austin: "While we who live in territorial homes have been asking, Où sont les neiges d'antan?-'Where are the wives who sit on the nest and never stir?', he has sung on imperturbably, celebrating the Lucile, the Dora, the Maud of the mid-Victorian dream-the fair and lissome English maiden blushing and trembling toward her lover and her lord with the reverence implanted in her unsunned bosom by God and Nature."

When, however, Mr. Sherman proceeds to apply philosophical standards to the subjects of his criticism, as he does very often, he shows himself as remote from the modern trend, as much the victim of traditions and formulas as the laureate object of his satire. He modestly disclaims any complex philosophical apparatus, but the fact is that he seems not to have any philosophical apparatus at all beyond what might be gleaned from a sedulous study of belleslettres. He appeals "to the general reason and experience of mankind against the conclusions of the ratiocinative faculty of the individual." The superstition of a solid and homogeneous "general reason" can only be held by those who coolly ignore the thought of the East and arbitrarily suppress the heterodox opinion of the West as voiced by Euripides, Lucretius, Gottfried von Strassburg, Voltaire, and Heine. Only within the realm of science, which nevertheless regards the individual's judgment as the final court of appeal, has there grown up enough real unanimity of opinion to justify an appeal to the "general reason." Mr. Sherman seems reluctant to admit the authority of science, sneering, for instance, at Anatole France's acceptance of the scientific probability that there is a limit to the evolution of life on our planet; yet we propose to test his philosophy by a comparison with the only real approximation we have to a "general reason", the consensus of scientific opinion.

Mr. Sherman's view of man is summed up in these sentences: "On the lowest level is the natural world, which is the plane....of the animal passions or affections....On the middle level is the human world....working upon the natural world; but governed by reason, the special human faculty....On the third level is the

spiritual world, which is the plane of spiritual beings and the home of eternal ideas."

How does this analysis tally with the findings of science? Mr. Sherman seems to say that the passions and affections we share with the animals are not a part of our real humanity. Would he have us regard as unhuman the sex instinct, the creative impulses, tribal loyalty, and individual fidelity? He gravely asserts that “it is of the essence of a man to lay down his life out of reverence for his great-grandfather." Yet what is this essence of a man but the Quixotic outgrowth of a filial devotion observable in many animals? Has Mr. Sherman never felt inclined to regard even our noblest instincts as rather typically animal than human, to exclaim with the cynic, "The more I see of men, the more I like dogs?" Elsewhere he remarks that "the impulse to refrain we can find nowhere in nature. It is part of the pattern design of human society that lies in the heart of man." Really it would seem as if he had never seen a squirrel store away a nut, or a trout resist a baited hook, or a mother bird keep a juicy worm for her nestlings. Either the word "refrain" is used in some esoteric sense, or else Mr. Sherman's words are a specious flattery to our nature which it requires no scientist to refute.

Mr. Sherman, however, is not consistent as to what is the vital differentia between man and brute, and perhaps would prefer to have us judge him by his pronouncement that reason (not the impulse to refrain) is "the special human faculty." I wonder if he has consulted the opinions of psychologists on this point? Holmes says: "If we define reason as the derivation of conclusions through the comparison of concepts, it is not improbable that no animal below man employs this faculty. But this is far from implying that animals cannot perform mental operations which are essentially inferential in their nature." Hobhouse declares that, "If we allow reason to the human species in general, and yet restrict it to that species, it must be by identifying the term reason arbitrarily with a certain grade in the development of analysis." Apparently the Jesuit Father Wasmann is almost alone among comparative psychologists in holding the animal and human minds utterly distinct.

Again we must quarrel with Mr. Sherman when he speaks of reason as a power by which the natural world, including our own desires, is "governed." For him the human ideal is attained "when Ariel, the lawless imagination longing for liberty, and Caliban, the