] The perfect case of this unity is _belief_. The
believing experience is cognitive in intent, but practical and emotional
as well in content. I believe what I take for granted; and the object of
my belief is not merely known, but also felt and acted upon. _What I
believe expresses itself in my total experience._

There is some hope, then, of an adequate definition of the religious
experience, if it be regarded as belonging to the psychological type of
belief.[58:3] Belief, however, is a broader category than religion.
There must be some _religious type_ of believing. An account of religion
in terms of believing, and the particular type of it here in question,
would, then, constitute the central stem of a psychology of religion,
and affords the proper conceptions for a description of the religious
experience. Even here the reservation must be made that belief is always
more than the believing _state_, in that it means to be _true_.[59:4]
Hence to complete an account of religion one should consider its object,
or its cognitive implications. But this direct treatment of the relation
between religion and philosophy must be deferred until in the present
chapter we shall have come to appreciate the inwardness of the religious
consciousness. To this end we must permit ourselves to be enlightened by
the experience of religious people as viewed from within. It is not our
opinion of a man's religion that is here in question, but the content
and meaning which it has for him.

"I would have you," says Fielding, in his "Hearts of Men," "go
and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset
hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that
will surely come. . . . I would have you go to the hillman
smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to
the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the
boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you
go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the
hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the
world, you will hear always the same song."[59:5]

[Sidenote: Religion as Belief.]

Sect. 18. The general identification of religion with belief is made
without serious difficulty. The essential factor in belief, is, as we
have seen, the reaction of the whole personality to a fixed object or
accepted situation. A similar principle underlies common judgments about
a man's