Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/571

555 of Education at Leland Stanford Junior University. London, Walter Scott, 1899. pp. xx, 423.

From the standpoint of the older dogmatics, the assumption that religious experiences conform to natural law is more revolutionary than either modern geology or the theory of evolution. Yet, unless all signs fail, the religious world will assimilate, without first combating, the psychology of religion that has been in process of birth during the present decade. Certainly this first volume on the subject contains very little that can irritate any theologian who has outgrown the eighteenth century notion of the mutual exclusiveness of the natural and the supernatural. Beyond an unguarded reference to the "irresistible" sequence of cause and effect, and to the "control" of law, at no point does the discussion deviate from fact to metaphysic, or indulge in either positive or negative dogmatism.

The scope of the investigation is limited to the religious consciousness of the individual, and specifically to its development. Of the sources of religion in the individual or in the race, or of what constitutes religious consciousness, or of the interrelations of religion with the other factors of life, of all this there is no word. The religion of childhood receives only a seven-page discussion, and this is merely a descriptive summary. The almost exclusive interest is in the adolescent period, and in its relations to childhood and maturity. More strictly still, it is the adolescent development of American Protestants, though many of the processes are given universal significance by being traced down to their biological and physiological roots. The book is, in fact, an expansion of the author's well-known articles in the American Journal of Psychology (VIII, 2, and IX, 1), which established the fact of a definite correlation between conversion and other adolescent religious phenomena on the one hand, and physiological adolescence on the other. The same view is here reinforced with many improvements and additions in matters of detail. The favorable age for conversion no longer appears to coincide with the age of puberty, but to follow, as though supplementing the physical change.

The most important new contribution is an organized view of the differences between the religion of childhood and that of maturity, and a careful analysis of the various ways in which adolescence mediates between the two. Between childhood and maturity a self-centered and chiefly receptive life changes to social consciousness, independent activity, the demand for personal insight. This process is well described as the birth of a new self. Adolescence marks the breaking up of the old self, and the gradual organization of the new. First, a new life of emotion and will bursts forth, and later comes the impulse to make rational readjustments. This transformation takes different forms, according to training, temperament, suggestibility, and physical state, but all the processes converge at the same point at the conclusion of adolescence. The author rightly expects a new religious pedagogy to grow out of this insight into the formative years.

With this mere hint of the contents, let us turn to the method. This is