t of departure for the study of the
actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest
psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the
experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most
men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity
for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is
broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their
own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also
that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery
and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put
in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the
religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either
actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and
obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the
world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.
This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's
book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian
theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to
lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in
1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.

When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed
investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but
imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true
worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as
to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part
from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living,
thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is
not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of
the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from
earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is
perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which
never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.
Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by
later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience
which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always
claimed. The modern man is not to be converted