some of them may not be found in terms of a purely scientific psychology. Taking, then, the religious idea as already existing, the following pages will be devoted to an examination of the extent to which this idea has been associated with forces and conditions that were plainly pathological. In very many individual cases it will not be difficult to trace a vivid sense of the supernatural to the presence of abnormal nervous states, sometimes deliberately induced, at other times arising of themselves. And it is a matter of mere historical observation that such individual cases have operated most powerfully to strengthen the belief in the supernatural with others. The example of Lourdes is a case in point. All Protestants will agree that the peasant girl's vision was a sheer hallucination. And yet there can be no question that this vision has served to strengthen the faith of many thousands of others in the nearness of the supernatural. And it needs but little effort of the imagination to realise how powerful such examples must have been in ages when medical science was in its infancy, and the more subtle operations of the nervous system completely unknown. This question, I repeat, is distinct from the much larger and wider enquiry of the origin of religion. A fairly lengthy experience of the capacity of the general mind for missing the real point at issue prevents my being too sanguine as to the efficiency of the most explicit avowal of one's purpose, but the duty of taking precautions nevertheless remains. And in elaborating an unfamiliar view of the nature of much of the world's so-called religious phenomena, the possibility of misconception is multiplied enormously. Still, a writer must do what he can to guard against misunderstanding, and in the most emphatic manner it must be said that it is not my purpose to prove, nor is it my belief, that religion springs from perverted sexuality, nor that the study of religion is no more than an exercise in pathology. Nothing is further from the writer's mind than so essentially preposterous a claim. Neither sexuality, no matter how powerful, nor disease, no matter how pronounced, can account for the religious idea. That has an entirely separate and independent origin. This should be plain to anyone who has but a merely casual acquaintance with the history of religion. It is, however, a very different thing to enquire as to the part played in the history of religion by morbid nervous states or perverted sexual feeling. That is an enquiry both legitimate and desirable; and it is one that promises to shed light on aspects of the subject otherwise very obscure. And certainly, if so-called religious feelings do not admit of explanation in terms of a scientific psychology, nothing remains but to recognise religion as something quite apart from normal life, to hand it over to the custody of word-spinning "Mystics," and so surrender all possibility of a rational understanding of either its nature or its