222 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



of this property of projection so strong in the hu- 

 man mind. 



On the other hand, an analysis of religious experi- 

 ence as a phenomenon, as something equally worthy 

 of patient and scientific study as the gas-laws or the 

 methods of evolution, shows that the powers which 

 move in the universe, when organized by thought 

 into a God, are apprehended by the majority of the 

 great mystics and those to whom religious experience 

 has been richly granted as in some way personal. 

 Although, if our line of argument is valid, this will 

 be partly due to a projection of the idea of personal- 

 ity into the idea of God, yet it is clearly in part due 

 to the idea of God being organised by our mental ac- 

 tivity to be of the same general type as is a normal 

 personality — as something into which concepts of 

 power, of knowledge, and of feeling and will all enter, 

 with such interconnections between its parts that, 

 like a personality, all of its resources are capable of 

 mobilization at any one point. It will be one of the 

 great constructive tasks of psychology to ascertain 

 just how such a conception is organized, and how it 

 operates to produce the experiences, often of over- 

 powering intensity and lasting value, which as a mat- 

 ter of record it often does.^ 



Put broadly and roughly, there are, then, three 

 main accounts possible, or at any rate actually found 

 in occidental civilization to-day, of the phenomena 



1 See \V. James, Varieties of Religious Experience; E. Under- 

 bill, Essentials of Mysticism. 



