owed, but always implied, to cover the whole of life,
to forego so large a territory as that of religion. For there can be no
reasonable question that religion has played, and still plays a large
part in the life of the race. Whatever be the nature of religion,
science is bound either to deal with it or confess its main task to be
hopeless.

Whether or not it is possible to apply known scientific principles to
the whole of religion will be a matter of opinion; but the attempt is at
least worth making. So much that appeared to be beyond the reach of
science has been ultimately brought within its ken, so many things that
seemed to stand in a class by themselves have been finally brought under
some more comprehensive generalisation, and so become part of the
'cosmic machine,' that one is impelled to believe that given time and
industry the same will result here. And it should never be forgotten
that one aspect of scientific progress has been the taking over of large
tracts of territory that religion once regarded as peculiarly its own;
and just as psychology and pathology were found to hold the key to an
understanding of such a phenomenon as witchcraft, so we may yet realise
that a true explanation of religious phenomena is to be found, not in
some supernatural world, but in the workings of natural forces
imperfectly understood.

The defences set up by theologians against the scientific advance may be
summarised under two heads. It is claimed that the 'facts' of the
religious life belong to a world of inner experience, to a state of
spiritual development which brings the subject into touch with a
super-sensuous world not open to the normal human being, and with which
science, as ordinarily understood, is incompetent to deal. In essence
this is a very old position, and contains the kernel of 'mysticism' in
all ages, from the savage state onward. This position involves a very
obvious begging of the question at issue. It assumes that all attempts
to correlate religious phenomena with phenomena in general have failed,
and that all future attempts are similarly doomed to failure. Of course
nothing of the kind has been shown. On the contrary, the aim of the
present work is to show that no dividing line can be drawn between those
states of mind that have been and are classed as religious, and those
that are admittedly non-religious. For various reasons I have dealt
almost entirely with those conditions that are admittedly pathol