elf promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the
time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these
illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much
as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt
that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its
heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words.
Let me say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen,
has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so.
As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to
lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen
lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in
all these higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar
philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament,
that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade and
influence the world.

As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this
lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the
history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only
branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the
psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as
interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental
constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the
natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of
those religious propensities.

If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I
must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena
recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious
men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins
and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly
for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely
evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents
that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most
accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an
intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course,
are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as
have become religious classics. The documents humains which we shall
find mos