on the subject by various writers,
the enquiry has never been exhaustively or systematically pursued. This
is not due to any lack of material; that is abundant among both savage
and civilised peoples. Perhaps it is because, while it has been
considered permissible to point out that certain individuals have
mistaken their own morbid states for evidence of divine illumination,
too much ill-will would have been aroused had the powerful part played
by this factor in religious development as a whole been pointed out.
Still less admissible would it have been to point out, as will be done
in succeeding chapters, that the deliberate culture of abnormal states
of mind has been a part of the ritual of religions from the most
primitive to the most recent times. In this connection it is worth
noting that a very clear and shrewd essay on the connection between love
and religious devotion by Isaac d'Israeli, which appeared in the first
issue of the _Miscellanies of Literature_, was quietly eliminated from
subsequent editions.

My purpose, therefore, is to give Professor James's query--"Under just
what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their
contributions to the holy volume? and what had they exactly in their
several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances?"[8]--a
wider scope. What are the conditions, biographic and social, under which
certain persons have imagined themselves, and have been believed by
others, to be specially favoured with divine illumination? The majority
of people, it may safely be said, are conscious of no such experience.
In what respect, then, do the favoured few differ from their fellows?
Must we assume that by some rare quality of natural endowment, or by
some unusual development of faculty, they are brought into touch with a
wider and deeper reality? Or are we to seek a less romantic explanation
with the aid of known tendencies and forces in human nature? And,
further, as this minority are not conscious of divine illumination all
the time, what is it that differentiates their normal state from their
abnormal condition?

These are pertinent questions, and demand answer. But no answer of real
value will be found in ordinary religious writings. Rhapsodical eulogies
of religion tell us nothing; less than nothing that is useful, since
theories that obtain in such quarters are based upon the absolute
veracity of the phenomena under consideration. We may gather from this
direct