nsistent character of the knowledge claimed.
An attempt may be made to extract from all these immediate certainties a
residual element which is said to be common to all of them. The attempt
has been made by Professor James in that rather painful work, the
_Varieties of Religious Experience_. And the residuum turns out to be
something so vague that, if not {110} absolutely worthless, it is almost
incapable of being expressed in articulate language, and constitutes a
very precarious foundation for a working religious creed.

The truth is that the uneducated--or rather the unanalytical, perhaps I
ought to say the metaphysically untrained--human mind has a tendency to
regard as an immediate certainty any truth which it strongly believes and
regards as very important. Such minds do not know the psychological
causes which have led to their own belief, when they are due to
psychological causes: they have not analysed the processes of thought by
which they have been led to those beliefs which are really due to the
working of their own minds. Most uncultivated persons would probably be
very much surprised to hear that the existence of the friend with whose
body they are in physical contact is after all only an inference.[9] But
surely, in the man who has discovered that such is the case, the warmth
of friendship was never dimmed by the reflection that his knowledge of
his friend is not immediate but mediate. It is a mere prejudice to
suppose that mediate knowledge is in any {111} way less certain, less
intimate, less trustworthy or less satisfying than immediate knowledge.
If we claim for man the possibility of just such a knowledge of God as a
man may possess of his brother man, surely that is all that is wanted to
make possible the closest religious communion. It is from the existence
of my own self that I infer the existence of other selves, whom I observe
to behave in a manner resembling my own behaviour. It is by an only
slightly more difficult and complicated inference from my own
consciousness that I rise to that conception of a universal Consciousness
which supplies me with at once the simplest and the most natural
explanation both of my own existence and of the existence of the Nature
which I see around me.

(6) _Religion and Psychology_. I do not deny that the study of religious
history, by exhibiting the naturalness and universality of religious
ideas and religious emotions, may rationally create a pre-dispos