5. The most sensational approach to Pragmatism, however, is that from the side of religion. The Pragmatic method of deciding religious problems, which asserts the legitimacy of a 'Faith' that precedes knowledge, has always been, more or less consciously, practised by the religious. It is brilliantly advocated in the _Thoughts_ of Pascal, and clearly and forcibly defended in that most remarkable essay in unprofessional philosophy, Cardinal Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. This line of reasoning, however, is most familiarly associated with the name of William James; he first illustrated the Pragmatic Method by a famous paper (for a theological audience) on _The Will to Believe,_ and founded the psychological study of religious experience in his Gifford Lectures on _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. 6. This brings us to the last, and historically the most fertile, of the sources of Pragmatism, Psychology. The publication in 1890 of James's great _Principles of Psychology_ opened a new era in the history of that science. More than that, it was destined in the long run to work a transformation in philosophy as a whole, by introducing into it those biological and voluntaristic principles to which he afterwards applied the generic name of Pragmatism, or philosophy of action. We must pass, then, to consider the New Psychology of William James. CHAPTER II THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY Until the year 1890, when James's _Principles_ were published, the psychology of Hume reigned absolutely in philosophy.[A] All empiricists accepted it enthusiastically, as the sum of philosophic wisdom; all apriorists submitted to it, even in supplementing and modifying it by 'transcendental' and metaphysical additions; in either case it remained uncontested _as psychology_, and, by propounding an utterly erroneous analysis of the mind and its experience, entangled philosophy in inextricable difficulties.