us
sense, consequent on over-absorption in scientific pursuits, and who
also argue that the "religious faculty," like a physiological structure,
increases in efficiency with use and atrophies with disuse. There is no
reason for believing that, had Darwin been profoundly religious, his
mental qualities would have been different to what they were. They would
have been expressed in a different form, that is all. As I have already
said, there are no such things as specifically religious qualities of
the mind. There may be hope or fear or love or hatred or terror or
devotion or wonder in relation to religion, but they are precisely the
same mental qualities that meet us in relation to other things. The old
"faculty" psychology is dead, and the religious faculty must go with
it.[9] Mental qualities may be roused to activity in connection with a
belief in the supernatural, or they may be expressed in connection with
mundane associations. Even the belief in the supernatural is only an
expression of the same qualities of mind that with fuller knowledge
result in a scientific generalisation. Whatever be the exciting cause,
mental qualities themselves remain unchanged.

In the present enquiry we are not concerned with a disproval of the
religious idea, but with an examination of the conditions of its
expression; less with the varieties of religious experience than with
the nature of its manifestations. How far may religious experience be
explained as a misinterpretation of normal non-religious life? To what
extent have pathological nervous states influenced the building up of
the religious consciousness? There can be no question that the
last-named factor is an important one. This is admitted by Professor
James in the following passage:--

"You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in
whose life there is no record of automatisms. I speak not merely of
savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard automatic utterance
and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I speak of leaders of
thought and subjects of intellectualised experience. St. Paul had his
visions, his ecstasies, his gifts of tongues, small as was the
importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian
saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the
Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices,
rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and 'openings.' They had these
things b