360 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



stamp Plotinus, Boehme, Swedenborg, and many be- 

 sides. Indeed, with the Alexandrine mystics like Plo- 

 tinus, the communion at rare and rapturous moments 

 seemed to amount to actual union with God; a union 

 ineffable, unspeakable, but rarely vouchsafed and quickly 

 lost again. Nor have there ever since been wanting 

 representatives of both types of soul, even up to our 

 own days. It is in this same spirit that an eloquent and 

 thoughtful contemporary writer still speaks when he 

 contends against our modern materialists that "the 

 upper zones of human affection above the clouds of self 

 and passion take us into the spheres of a Divine Com- 

 munion." * Nevertheless, modern psychology, to which, 

 if psychology is a true scientific niap of the mind, the 

 question of the existence and analysis of any mental 

 faculty properly should belong, is chary in her admission 

 or recognition of any such religious sense. Can it be 

 said, in reply, that the fault may lie with psychology, or 

 rather with the psychologists ; that if these regard only 

 the phenomena of the general or vulgar consciousness, it 

 is no marvel if they should miss what only appears in 

 spirits more finely touched, and what in these is only to 

 be read by the possessors themselves, and not by the 

 psychologist, unless similarly endowed ; that, in fact, the 

 mistake lies with psychology in ignoring the mental 

 experience of thfe highest class of minds for the con- 

 sideration of the average experience of common minds ; 

 and if thereafter psychology affirms she can find no trace 

 of a religious sense or faculty, so much the worse for her, 

 the confession only showing the strict limits of her pro- 

 vince, and the small value of her scientific pretensions. 

 Psychology, it is said, as it properly deals not with 

 the minds of children, or savages, or imbeciles, but of 



* Religion as affected ly Modern Materialism, by Rev. J. Martineau; 



