276 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



present to the widest extent : on the one side by anthropologists and 

 archaeologists, who investigate the life of the soul in primitive peoples 

 and thus indicate the particular function and condition of religion 

 in these states; on the other side, by the modern experimental 

 psychologists and psychological empiricists, who, by self-observa- 

 tion, and especially by the collection of observations by others and of 

 personal testimony, study religion, and then, from the point of view 

 of the concepts of experimental psychology, examine the main 

 phenomena thus found. 



Now, such an empirical psychology of religion has been constructed 

 with considerable success. In this German literature, it is true, has 

 cooperated to a slight degree only. The German theologians have 

 held to the older statements of the psychology of Kant, of Schleier- 

 macher, of Hegel, and of Fries, alone, which, in principle, were on 

 the right path, but which combined the purely psychological with 

 metaphysical and epistemological problems to such a degree that it 

 was impossible to reach a really unprejudiced attitude. German 

 psychologists remain, furthermore, under the spell of psycho-physio- 

 logy and of quantitative statements of measure, and have, conse- 

 quently, not liked to advance into this field, which is inaccessible 

 to such statements. More productive than the German psychology 

 for this subject is the French, which has attacked the complex facts 

 far more courageously. Here, however, under the predominance of 

 positivism, there prevails, on the whole, the tendency to regard 

 religion, in its essence, anthropologically or medically and patho- 

 logically in connection with bodily conditions. This is the confusion 

 of conditions and origins with the essence of the thing itself, which 

 can be determined only by the thing, and is, by no means, bound 

 exclusively to these conditions. Notwithstanding, the works of 

 Marillier, Murisier, and Flournoy have considerably aided the 

 problem. More impartially than all of these, the English and Ameri- 

 can psychology has investigated our subject. Here we have a master- 

 piece in the Gifford Lectures of William James, which collects into 

 a single reservoir similar investigations such as have been carried on 

 by Coe and Starbuck. There is here no tendency to a mechanism of 

 consciousness, or to the dogma of the causal and necessary structure 

 of consciousness. And to just this is due the freshness and impartial- 

 ity of the analyses which James gives out of his enviable knowledge of 

 characteristic cases. James rightly emphasizes the endlessly different 

 intensity of religious experiences, and the great number of points 

 of view and of judgments which thereby results. He also rightly 

 emphasizes the connection of this different intensity with irreducible 

 typical constitutions of the soul's life, with the optimistic and the 

 melancholy disposition; hence there arise constantly, even within 

 the same religion, essentially different types of religiousness. Limit- 



