Page:Psychology of Religion.djvu/62

Rh religion, and sometimes about other matters. The zeal is the same.

Two or three small special classes alone call for any particular psychological treatment, but to build a "psychology of religion" on these very small groups is like building a psychology of human nature on a few hundred gunmen or drug-takers. One very select class is that studied by Professor W. James in his  èèVarieties of Religious Experience ++. Realist as James generally was, he had in that work to cover such a vast world of biography that he has the facts wrong over and over again. He takes stories of famous "conversions" at their current value in religious literature and finds in them mystic factors which are totally unnecessary when one has the facts correctly. To take two of the most famous cases, I have shown in my St. Augustine and His Age that his conversion was a quite normal progress, innocently misrepresented by himself in later years, and in my Candid History of the Jesuits I have shown the same in regard to the "conversion" of St. Ignatius Loyola. In all these cases there is no specific emotion, but a rare intensity of ordinary religious emotions; that is to say, ordinary emotions directed to religious ideas.

A second rare class are what is called "mystics." Writers on religion often forget that what the mystic, like the occultist, claims is a special intellectual, not emotional, outfit. A mystic is not a man or woman of exceptional ability, but a man or woman who claims to