h God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is
really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a
transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell
us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.

We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system
of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
which they will be attached.

Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
seems as though