152 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



slowly accumulated tradition, especially the tradition 

 of language; and the biological and social utility of 

 these powers are very high. The exercise and devel- 

 opment of them was, no doubt, both the ground and 

 the essential condition of the rise of man's ancestry 

 above the animal plane. 



Four forms of experience and human capacity alone 

 seem to me to afford some direct support to the the- 

 istic hypothesis. 



First, the experiences of some mystics. I need not 

 cite again examples of what I refer to. Since William 

 James published his Varieties of Religious Experience 

 the polite world has been well acquainted, in third- 

 hand fashion, with the facts. It does not seem to me 

 that the mystic experience of union or communion 

 with God or with the All, as reported by any one per- 

 son, no matter how utterly convincing to him, can be 

 accepted as evidence of appreciable weight in support 

 of Theism or of Pantheism. It is the comparative 

 study of such reports that seems to me to yield evi- 

 dence that cannot be lightly brushed aside. Edmund 

 Buck, in his Cosmic Consciousness (recently repub- 

 lished) made such a comparative study. The most 

 striking fact which he brought out was the close simi- 

 larity in detail of the mystic experiences reported by 

 a number of persons widely separated in time and 

 place and having no knowledge of one another. For 

 example, a number of these persons report that they 

 suddenly and unexpectedly fell into, or were thrust or 

 drawn into, a state of being entirely novel and strange, 

 of which a leading feature was an impression of vivid 

 illumination, illumination not metaphorical or intellec- 



