Religion and Psychology 305 



themselves involving beauty, but merely sensations of pleasure 

 and displeasure. Such an approach to the problem of religion is 

 inadequate, if not positively misleading. In considering the 

 subject, we need to take a broader view^. At the commencement, 

 at any rate, we must start from a philosophical outlook rather than 

 a merely psychological one. What is first in philosophy is last in 

 science. 



For the merely psychologically minded, progress in the science of 

 knowledge, and in the other mental sciences too, might be presumed 

 to mean a greater and greater restriction of the field of religion, 

 and to some minds, at any rate, an ultimate explaining away of 

 religious experience. It was fear that in the beginning of things 

 created the gods, and through knowledge the scope of that fear has 

 been ever more and more reduced. But what has really happened 

 is rather this. Starting with a general attitude towards life, in 

 which these various values of experience were not distinct from one 

 another, where science and religion, ethics and aesthetics, were all 

 mingled together, the development of knowledge and civilisation 

 has brought about a gradual separating out of these attitudes — each 

 attitude, as I said at the beginning, has achieved its own general 

 sphere of reference and of fact — and yet we find, after the claims 

 of what may be called the profane sciences have been met, that 

 there is something left over — namely, the distinctively religious 

 experience itself. 



It is true that this religious experience has been specially closely 

 associated with ethical experience in the course of mental develop- 

 ment in the individual as well as in the race ; forms of worship 

 and religious appreciation have been linked up more and more 

 closely with moral valuations, so that in the higher religions it is 

 impossible to think away moral predicates from the conception of 

 the Divine. Yet there remain non-rational in addition to these 

 rational moral predicates, characteristics of the Divine; which we 

 can merely indicate in words — non-rational types of feeling, such 

 as the feeling of dependence, of otherness, of the mysterious, the 

 tremendous, etc., already referred to. These have their lower as 

 well as their higher forms. In lower forms they appear in various 

 species of superstition, fear of ghosts, the feeling of uncanhiness, 

 the otherness of the miraculous or the supernatural. ■ These feel- 

 ings gradually alter under the influence of increased knowledge, but 

 do not disappear entirely. They are purified and pass from a lower 



