As a matter of fact no writer on the psychology of religious experience really confines himself within strictly empirical limits. Metaphysical inferences are in fact drawn, or very plainly suggested, and the important question becomes what inferences of this nature, whether positive or negative, are proper and legitimate. Religious experience is at any rate not self-explanatory, but points to something beyond itself, whether that something be merely a disordered nervous system, or a natural impulse such as that of sex, or a department of consciousness outside of the normal, or a Great Beyond, whether conceived as Humanity or as the living God. We may consider then, (1) the physical explanation of religion, including the sexual; (2) the psychological explanation; (3) the social explanation; and (4) the theological explanation. 1. Lowest in the scale is the view of religion which regards it as the result of abnormal physical or psychophysical conditions. This theory is the expression of a robust secularism, which can quote the proverb, "When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be," and would prescribe a dose of physic (as his friends did for George Fox) for those in distress on account of their sins. "For the modern materialist, as for the ancient Manichee, sin is a question of physiology; moral depravity only a manifestation of corporeal disorder."[119] Religion and crime, in this view, both depart from the line of normal existence, and are pathological phenomena. But if religion is a disease, it afflicts men in all sorts of physical and mental states, and is practically a universal disease, taking the world at large. 119: Robert Law: "The Tests of Life," p. 131. Akin to this pathological explanation of religion is that which sees in it either a natural expression, or else a perversion, of the sexual instinct. "In a certain sense the religious life is an irradiation of the reproductive instinct,"[120] says Starbuck; and G. S. Hall says that "in its most fundamental aspect, conversion is a natural, normal, universal, and necessary process at the stage when life pivots over from an autocentric to a heterocentric basis."[121] This view is popular with those who would give a naturalistic account of the religious life, especially of conversion. 120: "Psychology of Religion," p. 401. 121: "Adolescence," Vol. II, p. 301.