274 Science Religion and Reality 



does not deny that this objective reference belongs essentially to 

 it, but it denies all reality to the reference, and professes to explain, 

 from the mind itself, how this peculiar kind of illusion has arisen, 

 and to make psychology in consequence sole arbiter. 



On this point all forms of the theories seem to agree. But it 

 is precisely on this point that all need to be questioned. Illusion 

 is not confined to religion. Therefore, if all religious beliefs were 

 proved to be illusions, this would not, in any case, make illusion a 

 distinctive mark of religion, but the distinctive mark would still 

 be in the objects about which the illusion exists. And, further, 

 the reality or unreality of its objects can no more be determined 

 purely psychologically in religion than, say, in commerce. For 

 psychology an object is real when it is regarded as existing outside 

 of the mind ; and the determination of whether it is actually real 

 or not is a matter of evidence and not of psychology. The judge- 

 ment that the object of religion is an illusion is merely a negative 

 conclusion about the existence of an outside reality, and must go 

 as much beyond mere consideration of purely mental states as the 

 most positive. 



As a matter of fact, there is no psychological difference between 

 the theories of religion as concerned with illusion and the theories 

 of it as concerned with ultimate reality, for we can divide them in 

 exactly the same way. Thus we have (i) theories of the Hegelian 

 type, theories which ascribe religion to intellectual aberration ; 

 (2) theories of the type of Schleiermacher's, theories which con- 

 sider religion a delusion of feeling ; (3) theories of the Kantian 

 type, theories which regard it as a practical prepossession. The 

 sole difference concerns validity, which quite clearly is not a matter 

 of psychology : and, in point of fact, the actual reasons for the 

 different judgement about reality are not psychological, but are 

 drawn from physical science or empirical philosophy. 



(i) Of the theories of the Hegelian type, that most akin to 

 Hegel's is one which regards religion as an illusion due to a peculiar 

 mechanism of the human mind, because it is just the process of 

 mind that Hegel makes the measure of the universe. 



This theory of religion as illusion from a necessary mechanism 

 of mind is taken to be the most radical way of determining religion 

 by psychology. But that is quite obviously itself an illusion, 

 because, just as Hegel's postulate that the process of mind is the 

 form of the process of reality is not psychology but metaphysics, 



