308 Science Religion and Reality 



treat knowledge psychologically, we describe what goes on in the 

 individual mind as a sequence of individual processes which if taken 

 by itself would actually explain away knowledge. It would leave 

 us without that conviction of the validity of our knowledge which 

 is such an essential part of it. And so it is with religious experience. 

 Psychologically, in the very effort that we make to describe 

 religious experience as a sequence of mental processes in the 

 individual's mind, we are invalidating that experience. We 

 might, indeed, say that we are making an experiment, we are 

 seeing how far we can explain the religious experience of the 

 individual in terms of that individual's own antecedent ex- 

 perience without reference to anything beyond, that we are 

 for the time being putting aside transcendence, because directly 

 we assume that the individual is in touch with an existence out- 

 side him, we are passing beyond psychology. All that psychology 

 does is to describe as accurately and fully as possible what goes 

 on in his mind. 



Moreover, psychology, like other sciences, is committed to the 

 principle of parsimony, the principle of " Occam's razor," to use 

 as few hypotheses as possible and to explain experience as fully as 

 possible in terms of the most general hypotheses ; and this brings 

 me to the use made of the doctrine of the subconscious or subliminal 

 self, and in more recent years to the doctrine of the unconscious, 

 to explain or explain away religious experience. Following up the 

 hints of resemblance of certain startling religious experiences to 

 certain pathological experiences, the attempt was made by James to 

 fill up the gap, or to soften down the suddenness of the transition 

 in the individual mind from the state of depression and sinfulness 

 to a state of redemption, by an appeal to processes assumed to go on 

 below the threshold of consciousness, in the subliminal. In the 

 case of sudden conversion, for example, the theory was that the 

 individual's consciousness seemed to remain on a merely naturalistic 

 plane of existence, with a naturalistic outlook on life ; in the depths 

 of his mind, however, a change was going on, other considerations 

 were being weighed, other motives were getting their way, a sub- 

 sidiary self was being developed, a set of mental tendencies which 

 gained in strength and at last broke through into consciousness, 

 and just before breaking through produced a feeling of intense 

 strain and depression. When, however, it had broken through, 

 it was able to combine with what it found there, modifying it. 



