Religion and Psychology 309 



transforming it entirely, so that the individual felt a new man, as 

 if he were born again. Jaines himself goes further, and suggests 

 that it may well be that the individual conscious mind comes 

 into relation with the Deity through the intermediation of the 

 subconscious mind. The changes in the conscious mind, in the 

 direction of a more satisfactory religious attitude, may be produced 

 through the intermediation of the subconscious, and in this way 

 prayer may receive its answer. Influences may reach us through 

 the dreamy subliminal which in the hubbub of waking life might 

 pass us by. 



From the scientific point of view, one would criticise such a 

 theory as this, because it is not thorough-going enough. If you 

 bring in the conception of the subliminal, and use it as an hypothesis, 

 it is your duty as scientists to press that hypothesis to the utmost. 

 Although James did not do this, it has been done by later writers, 

 and in modern times we find a number of enthusiastic psycholo- 

 gists who look to the unconscious for an explanation of all these 

 phenomena, but who, one cannot help feeling, have at the back of 

 their minds the idea that they can only truly rely upon religious 

 experience if it proves recalcitrant to this method. On the one 

 hand, they will reject the supernatural, in the sense of the belief 

 in a spiritual universe as distinct from the ordinary universe in 

 space and time, because all the possibilities of explanation in terms 

 of what goes on in the individual mind have not been exhausted, 

 and yet, on the other hand, they are quite certain that these possi- 

 bilities of explanation will never be exhausted. To all intents and 

 purposes they are sceptics with regard to the validity of religious 

 experience. The present situation of the psychology of religion 

 is very similar to the situation as regards knowledge at the time 

 when Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were writing. They were 

 endeavouring to get to know what knowledge meant, their aim 

 was to understand knowledge, to know about human understanding, 

 but they used a predominantly psychological method, and although 

 that psychological method increased their knowledge of psychology, 

 it only made the central problem of knowledge more apparent, and 

 it remained for Kant to show how completely they had failed to 

 do justice to the science of knowledge. In the same way, at the 

 present day and during the last twenty years, psychologists have 

 approached the question of the validity of religious experience 

 along psychological lines, not always realising that, by the very 



