"to
determine what influences have led theologians to anchor their beliefs
upon the proposition that religious experience differs from other forms
of consciousness in that it gives one an _immediate_ knowledge of the
external existence of certain objects of belief, although they do not
fall under the senses, and an immediate knowledge of the truth of
certain historical facts."[20] This is, indeed, an interesting problem,
and, we may add, one of growing importance, since there is a pronounced
tendency on the part of present-day exponents of religion to rest their
case almost entirely upon the immediacy of their religious
consciousness. This conception of a certain order of experience,
however, is not and cannot have always existed. A belief may be so
widely and so generally diffused that it is accepted without resistance,
and, as it would almost seem, in the absence of evidence. But its
intuitive character is only superficial, and disappears on careful
examination. The mere vogue of a belief constitutes in itself a kind of
evidence, and for many people the most powerful kind of evidence. But
the conviction itself has a history, and it is in the unravelling of
that history, in the discovery of the class of facts upon which the
conviction has been built, that the work lies. And when this is done it
will be found that our intuitions are invariably based upon a
continuous--even though partly unconscious--appeal to facts. Sometimes
it will, of course, be found that a renewed and deliberate appeal to the
facts in question will justify the conviction. At other times it will
be found that the facts demand an altogether new interpretation. For
centuries all the observed facts supported a conviction that the earth
was flat. It was a fresh scrutiny of the facts in the light of a new
conception that revolutionised human opinion on the subject.

What, then, is the history, and what are the facts upon which the belief
that religious experience brings man into contact with a kind of
existence not given in ordinary experience, is based? The kind of answer
that will be given to this question has already been indicated.
Religious beliefs are in their origin of the nature of an induction from
an observed order. The induction is not the result of that careful
collection of facts, leading up to an equally careful generalisation and
subsequent verification, which is a characteristic of modern science,
but it is an induction none the less. Th