RELIGION AND THE OTHER SCIENCES 265 



rather found to be rooted in the moral nature of man. This is the 

 consciousness of obligation of the practical reason or of the con- 

 science, which raises man to a faith in the moral government of the 

 world, in immortality and God. With the reduction of religion 

 from all external forms, doctrines, and ceremonies and the finding 

 of the real essence of religion in the human mind and spirit, the way 

 was opened to a knowledge of religion free from all external authority. 

 Those philosophers who came after Kant followed essentially this 

 course, though here and there they may separate in their opinions 

 according to their thought of the psychological function of religion. 

 When Kant had emphasized the close connection between religion 

 and the moral obligation, then came Schleiermacher, who empha- 

 sized the feeling of our dependence upon the Eternal, and who sought 

 to find the explanation of all religious thoughts and conceptions 

 in the many relations of the feeling to religious experience. Hegel 

 on the other hand sought the truth of religion in the thought of the 

 absolute spirit as found in the finite spirit. Thus Hegel made reli- 

 gion a sort of popular philosophy. 



At present all agree that all sides of the soul-life have part in 

 religion; now one side may be the more prominent, now another, 

 according to the peculiarity of certain religions or the individual 

 temperaments. The philosophy of religion has, in common with 

 scientific psychology, the question of the relation of feeling to the 

 intellect and the will, and as yet there may be many views of this 

 question. Altogether the philosophy of religion is looking for im- 

 portant solutions to many of its problems from the realm of the 

 present scientific .psychology. Experiences, such as religious con- 

 versions, appear under this point of view as ethical changes in which 

 the aim of a personal life is changed from a carnal and selfish end to 

 that of a spiritual and altruistic purpose. These are extraordinary 

 and seemingly supernatural processes; nevertheless in them there 

 can still be found a certain development of the soul-life according 

 to law. Modern psychology especially has thrown light upon the 

 abnormal conditions of consciousness which have so often been made 

 manifest in the religious experience of all times. That which religious 

 history records concerning inspiration, visions, ecstasy, and revelation, 

 we now classify with the well-known appearances of hypnotism, 

 the induction of conceptions and motives of the will through foreign 

 suggestion or through self-suggestion, of the division of conscious- 

 ness in different egos, and in the union of several consciousnesses 

 into one common mediumistic fusion of thought and will. The explan- 

 ation of these experiences may not yet be satisfactory, but never- 

 theless we do not doubt the possibility of a future explanation from 

 the general laws controlling the life of the soul. The fact that we can 

 through psychological experiments produce such abnormal conditions 



