to the unusual. Without understanding what has been
accomplished in the way of investigation, and with little accurate
knowledge of what has actually been tested out, there is amongst us a
widespread feeling that almost anything is possible. Here also we may
end in a sentence by saying that present-day psychology with its wide
sweep of law, its recognition of the abnormal, its acceptance of and
insistence upon the power of suggestion, its recognition of the
subconscious and its tendency to assign thereto a great force of
personal action, has broken down old certainties and given a free field
to imagination. It has, more positively, taught us how to apply the laws
of mental action to the more fruitful conduct of life, and so supplied
the basis for the cults which make much of efficiency and
self-development. It has also lent new meaning to religion all along the
line.

_The Influence of Philosophy and the Social Situation_

How far contemporaneous philosophy has affected inherited faith or
supplied a basis for new religious development, is more difficult to
say. Beyond debate philosophic materialism has greatly influenced the
religious attitude of multitudes of people just as the reactions against
it have supplied the basis for new religious movements. Pragmatism,
affirming that whatever works is true, has tended to supply a
philosophic justification for whatever seems to work, whether it be true
or not, and it has beside tended to give us a world where little islands
of understandings have taken, as it were, the place of a continuous
continent of truth. The tendencies of the leaders of new cults have been
to take the material which science and psychology have supplied and
build them into philosophies of their own; they have not generally been
able or willing to test themselves by the conclusions of more
disciplined thinkers.

New Thought has undoubtedly been affected by the older
idealisms--Berkeley's for example--while James and Royce have supplied
congenial material. The movements are generally selective. New Thought
uses James' applied psychology and possibly Royce's Absolute, but does
not consistently confine itself to any one system. Philosophy also has
been itself of late working in a pretty rarified region. Its problems
have not been the problems of the common mind. It has been trying to
find out how we know, to relate the inner and the outer world, and in
general to account for things which the average man