feel hot or cold, angry or pleased, think one thing ugly or another
beautiful, my feelings are as much 'facts' as anything else that exists.
Nay, if I fancy I see a ghost, or a vision, these also are 'facts' so
far as my mental state at the time is concerned. So also are my beliefs
about all manner of things, and often the most important facts with
which I am connected. Facts may be objective or subjective. They may
exist in relation to all minds normally constituted, or they may exist
in relation to my own mind only; or, yet again, they may exist only in
relation to certain states of mind, but they do not, nevertheless, cease
to be facts.

Now the business of science is to collect facts--all facts--classify
them, and frame generalisations that will explain their groupings and
modes of operation. It talks of the facts of the physical world, the
facts of the biological world, the facts of the psychological world, and
so forth. This last group comprises all sorts of feelings and ideas,
beliefs and experiences. Some of these facts it calls false, others it
calls true--that is, they are true when they hold good of all men and
women normally constituted, they are not true when they hold good of
isolated individuals only, and can be seen to be the product of
misinterpreted experience, or arise from a derangement--permanent or
temporary--of the nervous system. But true or false they remain facts of
the mental life. They must be collected, grouped, and explained exactly
as other facts are collected, grouped, and explained. They fall within
the scope of science, to be dealt with by scientific methods.

There is really no escape from the position that so far as religious
'facts' are parts of mental life, religion becomes logically a
department of psychology. The substantial identity of all mental facts
is quite unaffected by their being directed to this or that special
object. As mental facts they are part of the material that it is the
work of science to reduce to order. And as mental facts religious
phenomena are seen to follow the same 'laws' that govern mental
phenomena in general. It is perfectly true that we cannot test and
measure the material of psychology with the same definiteness and
accuracy that the chemist applies to the subject-matter of his
department; but that may be due to want of knowledge, or to the extreme
complexity and variability of the matter with which we are dealing. And
if it were true that the same t