3 I o Science Religion and Reality 



method they have adopted, they are challenging or denying that 

 validity. In other words, just as psychology as such cannot do 

 justice to the validity of knowledge, psychology cannot do justice 

 to the validity of religion. Of course, it is open to every one 

 to pass beyond the psychological to the philosophical line of 

 explanation, and it is just as essential to do that in the problem 

 of religion as it is in the problems of ethics, aesthetics, and 

 epistemology. 



Having emphasised this side of the question, we can with a 

 clearer conscience proceed to apply psychological methods and 

 observations to religious experience, although at every step in our 

 argument we shall find it necessary to supplement psychology with 

 philosophy. I am thinking at the moment of the attempts made by 

 certain members of the psycho-analytic school to explain away the 

 main facts of the Christian religion in terms of concepts borrowed 

 from pathological psychology. One continental writer, who does 

 not himself belong to the Christian faith, explains the central or 

 main tenets of the Christian doctrine in terms of " projection " 

 and " regression." He contends that the Christian attitude 

 towards life is an infantile attitude that arises as a result of the 

 individual's complete failure to grapple with the mystery of exist- 

 ence. The individual tries to face the facts of reality, fails, and 

 regresses towards more infantile modes of adaptation. Not being 

 able to see adequate security among the forces of nature around 

 him, he steps back to the mental attitude he had when a young 

 child, of implicit faith in the power and goodness of his parents, in 

 the modified form of a belief in a beneficent Deity. His belief in 

 the Divine is simply this infantile feeling, which may surge up 

 even in spite of himself. Again, his intense desire to conserve or 

 preserve his values, logical, ethical, and aesthetical, all those things 

 that make life for him worth living, may be so strong that it pro- 

 duces a sort of hallucinatory fulfilment. It produces a feeling in 

 him that it is fulfilled, that everything is all right, that we are safe 

 in God's hands. Just to illustrate the kind of explanation proffered 

 nowadays, we may mention that another psycho-analyst undertakes 

 to explain the feeling of original sin in terms of the Oedipus 

 complex. The individual has a bad conscience because in his 

 childhood he felt a strong affection for one of his parents, and 

 hatred and jealousy towards the other, which he repressed, and, 

 as a result of repression, there arose feelings of sympathy and 



