PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 277 



ing himself, then, to the most intense experiences, he decides that 

 the characteristic of religious states is the sense of presence of the 

 divine, which one might perhaps describe in other terms, but which 

 still continues the specifically divine, with the opposed emotional 

 effects of a solemn sense of contrast and of enthusiastic exaltation. 

 He pictures these senses of presence, and illustrates them by vision- 

 ary and hallucinatory representations of the abstract. With this are 

 connected impulsive and inhibitive conditions for the appearance of 

 these senses of presence and of reality, descriptions of the effects 

 upon the emotional life and action, and, above all, the analysis of 

 the event usually called conversion, in which the religious experi- 

 ence out of subconscious antecedents becomes, in various ways, the 

 centre of the soul's life. All this is description, but it is based upon 

 a mass of examples and explained by general psychological cate- 

 gories which, by the occurrence of the religious event only, receive 

 a thoroughly specific coloring. It is a description after the manner 

 of Kirchhoff's mechanics; permanent and similar types, and, like- 

 wise, similar conditions for their relations to the rest of the soul's 

 life are sought out everywhere, without maintaining to have proven 

 at the same time, in this way, an intellectual necessity for the con- 

 nection. But the characteristic peculiarity of religious phenomena 

 is thus conceived as in no other previous analysis. 



All this is still, however, nothing more than psychologic. For the 

 science of religion it accomplishes nothing more than the psycho- 

 logical determination of the peculiarity of the phenomenon, of its 

 environment, its relations and consequences. It is evident that the 

 phenomenon occurs in an indefinite number of varieties; and the 

 chosen point of departure, in unusual and excessive cases, frequently 

 diffuses over religion itself the character of the bizarre and abnor- 

 mal. Consequently nothing whatever is said about the amount of 

 truth or of reality in these cases. This, by the very principles of 

 such a psychology, is impossible. It analyzes, produces types and 

 categories, points out comparatively constant connections and inter- 

 actions. But this cannot be the last word for the science of religion. 

 It demands, above all, empirical knowledge of the phenomenon; but 

 it demands this only in order, on the basis of this knowledge, to be 

 able to answer the question of the amount of truth. But this leads 

 to an entirely different problem, that of the theory of knowledge, 

 which has its own conditions of solution. It is impossible to stop 

 at a merely empirical psychology. The question is not merely of 

 given facts, but of the amount of knowledge in these facts. But pure 

 empiricism will not succeed in answering this question. The question 

 with regard to the amount of truth is always a question of validity. 

 The question with regard to validity can, however, be decided only 

 by logical and by general, conceptual investigations. Thus we pass 



