uneasiness and a deliverance; description of
the deliverance-- Question of the reality of the higher power-- The
author's hypotheses: 1. The subconscious self as intermediating between
nature and the higher region-- 2. The higher region, or "God"-- 3. He
produces real effects in nature.

POSTSCRIPT

Philosophic position of the present work defined as piecemeal
supernaturalism-- Criticism of universalistic supernaturalism--
Different principles must occasion differences in fact-- What
differences in fact can God's existence occasion?-- The question of
immortality-- Question of God's uniqueness and infinity: religious
experience does not settle this question in the affirmative-- The
pluralistic hypothesis is more conformed to common sense.

PREFACE

This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an
appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University
of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of
ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me
that the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's
Religious Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one on "Their
Satisfaction through Philosophy." But the unexpected growth of the
psychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the
second subject being postponed entirely, and the description of man's
religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I
have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and
the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to pages
501-509, and to the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some
later day to express them in more explicit form.

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us
wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have
loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these
among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some
readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of
the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of
piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the
patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression
will disappear; for I there combine the religious impulses with other
principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration,
and allow the individual reader to draw as mo