Author Description

Excerpt from The Spiritual Life: Studies in the Science of Religion The studies here presented have been undertaken in response to a conviction that, in the interest of both science and religion, a new intellectual attitude is necessary with respect to the facts of the spiritual life. The religious processes taking place around us and within us must be observed with all the precision that modern psychological methods and tools render possible. For, whatever else religion may or may not be, it is at least a mass of ascertainable states of consciousness; and in the absence of information to the contrary we must presume that such states can be analyzed and described, and that their relations to one another and to the recognized laws of the mental and bodily life can be to some extent determined. What is needed is an examination of the facts as such, without reference to their possible bearing upon theology or philosophy. Until this work is done there will remain an important gap in the scientific knowledge of man. For, clearly, it is the humanity that now is that gives us our problems concerning mans origin and development, and that necessarily controls and tests our hypotheses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.