ition to
find some measure of truth in every form of religious belief. But I
would venture to add a word of caution against the tendency fashionable
in many quarters to talk of basing religious belief upon Psychology. The
business of Psychology is to tell us what actually goes on in the human
mind. It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which are found
there are true or false. An erroneous {112} belief is as much a
psychological fact as a true one. A theory which goes on, by inference
from what we observe in our own minds, to construct a theory of the
Universe necessarily involves a Metaphysic, conscious or unconscious. It
may be urged that the reality of religious experience is unaffected by
the question whether the beliefs associated with it are true or false.
That is the case, so long as the beliefs are supposed to be true by the
person in question. But, when once the spirit of enquiry is aroused, a
man cannot be--and I venture to think ought not to be--satisfied as to
the truth of his belief simply by being told that the beliefs are
actually there.

It may be contended, no doubt, that religious experience does not mean
merely a state of intellectual belief, but certain emotions, aspirations,
perhaps (to take one particular type of religious experience) a
consciousness of love met by answering love. To many who undergo such
experiences, they seem to carry with them an immediate assurance of the
existence of the Being with whom they feel themselves to be in communion.
That, on the intellectual presuppositions of the particular person, seems
to be the natural--it may be the only possible--way of explaining the
feeling. But even there the belief is not really immediate: it is an
inference from what is actually matter of experience. And it is,
unhappily, no less a matter of well-ascertained {113} psychological fact
that, when intellectual doubt is once aroused, such experiences no longer
carry with them this conviction of their own objective basis. The person
was really under the influence of an intellectual theory all along,
whether the theory was acquired by hereditary tradition, by the influence
of another's mind, or by personal thought and reflection. When the
intellectual theory alters, the same kind of experience is no longer
possible. I will not attempt to say how far it is desirable that persons
who are perfectly satisfied with a creed which they have never examined
should (as it were) pull u