The psychology of religion : an empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness / by Edwin Diller Starbuck ; with a preface by William James.

  • Edwin Diller Starbuck
Date:
1899
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychology of religion : an empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness / by Edwin Diller Starbuck ; with a preface by William James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of peoples. Typical instances of such studies are Tylor’s Primitive Culture and Spencer’s Sociology. Especially should the article of Dr Daniels/ The New Life: A Study of Regeneration, be mentioned in this connection, as it deals from a sociological standpoint with the same topic which occupies Part I. of this volume. We may turn, however, to the study of the religious instinct in individuals, and discover there its roots and the law of sequence of its elements from childhood to maturity. This is the work of the psychology of re- ligion. The problem is the same, whether studied in the individual or the race; the data in the two fields and the methods of interpretation are different. We may find at some time the same principles of growth in both—discover, as is often at present assumed, that the individual passes through the same stages of religious development as the race, or that the race is but a long- lived individual; but that must be settled by scientific investigation, and not by philosophical speculation. 2. Relation to Psychology.—The psychology of re- ligion and modern experimental psychology are closely related both in method and subject-matter. The method of both is inductive. In point of time one of them represents the next to the last step in the growth of empiricism ; the other, the last. In subjecting the facts of nature to scientific treatment, it was a long step in advance when, recently, it was recognised that every thought or volition or emotion, every expression of con- sciousness, is an index of some law of life ; and that the best way to understand the mental life is to view each of its manifestations as a fact of nature, and to study such expressions objectively. So marked has been the swing away from the rational, introspective stand- point, that no serious modern psychological work exists which does not at least take into account laboratory experimentation. Still, there has been one reserve which has not, until lately, been entered by the well- established methods of science, namely, religion. It is 1 Arthur Daniel, Aiiierican Journal of Psychology, VI., No. i.
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