least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary. CHAPTER X PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE I Twenty years ago in _A Dynamic Faith_, after reviewing the new questions which the great sciences had raised for religion, I said: “There are still harder problems than any of these. Psychology has opened a series of questions which make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless life or in any spiritual reality.” The twenty years that have intervened have made my point much more clear. It is now pretty generally recognized that the deepest issues of the faith are to be settled in this field. The problem of the real nature of the human soul is at the present moment probably the most important religious question before us, for upon the answer to it all our vital spiritual interests depend. If man has no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit of that vast system of naturalism in which every curve of process and development is rigidly determined by antecedent causes, then “spiritual” is only a high-sounding word with a metaphorical significance, but with no basis of reality in the nature of things. There is certainly no “place” in the external world of space where we can expect to find spiritual realities. They are not to be found by going “somewhere.” Olympus has been climbed, and it was as naturalistic as any other mountain peak. Eden is only a defined area of Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no miracles for us now. The dome of the sky is only an optical illusion. It is no supersensuous realm on which we can build our hopes. The beyond as a spiritual reality is within, or it is nowhere. Psychology, however, has not been very encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone the way of the other sciences and has taken an ever increasing slant toward naturalism. The result is that most so-called “psychologies of religion” reduce religion either to a naturalistic or to a subjective basis, which means in either case that religion as a way to some objective spiritual reality has eluded us and has disappeared as a constructive power. Many a modern psychologist can say with Browning’s Cleon: “And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again.”