ogy or
psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on
primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious
functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from
religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the
discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and
baffles all plumb-lines, and which _can draw out of itself more than it
contains_, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality
which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension
than those available to science.

In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn
in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the
horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the
horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he
tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as
he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic
with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very
ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion
is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with
his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it
is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of
his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be
adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this
wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may
be.

The interior insight, the appreciation of religion, the rich and
concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain,
the primary way to the _secret_ of religion--religion in its "first
intention"--as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way
to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many
quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this
appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that
here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This
conclusion, however, is as narrow and as unwarranted as is the
truncation of religion at the hands of science. The mystical element
in religion is only one element in a vastly richer complex, and it must
not be given undue emphasis and imperial sway in the appreciation of
the complete whole of "spiritual religion." We must, too, carefully