Psychology of the religious life / by George Malcolm Stratton.

  • Stratton, George Malcolm, 1865-1957.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Psychology of the religious life / by George Malcolm Stratton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/400 (page 2)
    The aim of a psychological study of religion is to explain, after the manner of science; but not to explain away nor to support. Its office is not that of the judge, to condemn or approve religion as a whole, or any special features of religion ; such judgment should be by other laws than science furnishes, laws that must be sought in their own way and place. But it is easier to see the uses of such temperance than to practise it. And the present study will at times, I doubt not, pass from the level of pure causal interest to that of the critic and director. Any such de- partures must be acknowledged as lapses due to infirmity of the flesh, for which the reader will, I hope, have charity. Yet at the close I shall beg a privilege, which most writers have enjoyed, of overstepping bounds and freely pointing out some of the wider bearings of whatever may have been observed. In the main, this will be the strict work in hand: to group broadly the features of religion and to connect them with the acts of mind that give them form. A con- venient and widely accepted division of mental powers into those of feeling and emotion, of will and outer conduct, and of knowledge, may well serve to give order to this in- finitely varied material. We shall then see, if possible, how the emotions of common life, and the common ways of conduct and of thinking, extend into religion and show their influence there. Contrasts within the single mind and in the different temperaments of persons and of races will at once appear, and force one to ask whether contrasts of religious life and ideas may not in the end be due to these. In this way it may be possible to discern some of the intricate mental forces that produce variations of belief with regard to human destiny and the divine character and its relation to men and the world. The endless difficulties of such an undertaking, and yet its inherent interest and promise, put one between despair and hope of a happy outcome. But since our attention will be so long upon the various