ether the peasant girl of Lourdes experienced a vision of the
Madonna, but we do need to ask whether there was anything in her mental
history, social surroundings, or nervous state that would account for
the vision. All the "facts" of the religious life may be admitted; the
sole question at issue is whether an adequate interpretation of at least
some of them may not be found in terms of a purely scientific
psychology.

Taking, then, the religious idea as already existing, the following
pages will be devoted to an examination of the extent to which this idea
has been associated with forces and conditions that were plainly
pathological. In very many individual cases it will not be difficult to
trace a vivid sense of the supernatural to the presence of abnormal
nervous states, sometimes deliberately induced, at other times arising
of themselves. And it is a matter of mere historical observation that
such individual cases have operated most powerfully to strengthen the
belief in the supernatural with others. The example of Lourdes is a case
in point. All Protestants will agree that the peasant girl's vision was
a sheer hallucination. And yet there can be no question that this vision
has served to strengthen the faith of many thousands of others in the
nearness of the supernatural. And it needs but little effort of the
imagination to realise how powerful such examples must have been in ages
when medical science was in its infancy, and the more subtle operations
of the nervous system completely unknown.

This question, I repeat, is distinct from the much larger and wider
enquiry of the origin of religion. A fairly lengthy experience of the
capacity of the general mind for missing the real point at issue
prevents my being too sanguine as to the efficiency of the most explicit
avowal of one's purpose, but the duty of taking precautions nevertheless
remains. And in elaborating an unfamiliar view of the nature of much of
the world's so-called religious phenomena, the possibility of
misconception is multiplied enormously. Still, a writer must do what he
can to guard against misunderstanding, and in the most emphatic manner
it must be said that it is not my purpose to prove, nor is it my belief,
that religion springs from perverted sexuality, nor that the study of
religion is no more than an exercise in pathology. Nothing is further
from the writer's mind than so essentially preposterous a claim. Neither
sexuality, no matter how p