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This little book is in a way the culmination of many years of reading, thought, and personal contacts by the author who is Professor of Psychology in the University of Oregon. He has approached the subject with the conviction that it is well to keep the field of psychology distinct from theological and philosophical speculations, and has presented the subject as a study of certain aspects of human behavior, including the conscious accompaniments of such action, but there has been no intention of favoring any kind of religious faith or any sort of antireligious doctrine.
His principal aim has been to assemble facts and various interpretations of religious conduct and to discuss them according to modern psychological thought. His attitude has not been dogmatic and he has recognized the difficulty, inherent in the nature of the material, of evaluating many phenomena of a so-called religious nature. A vast literature, on the psychology of religion has arisen from many sources and has accumulated in an appalling way. From this mass of literature the author has gleaned many things of interest and has been fairly liberal in his footnote references.
There are in all eighteen chapters devoted to numerous subjects including instincts, religious appeals, nature of conversion, emotions, religious sentiments, ecstatic states, mysticism, faith healing, distortions of religious behavior, etc., etc. He has occasionally offered the psychoanalytic viewpoint of certain religious phenomena, but is apt to make qualifications which are not always clear and understandable. He concedes that “Psychoanalytic thinking has in some ways contributed valuably to the interpretetion of religious behavior” and “From this dynamic point of view the individual human being is not thought of as a bundle of central nervous patterns awaiting stimulation—rather is the individual looked upon as a whole and especially as a living, growing, peculiarly dynamic whole—it is the behavior of an individual in the proc