ABSTRACT
In 1896, the same year when the first article on the psychology of conversion appeared in the US, the American author John F. McCoy published a book called A Prophetic Romance: Mars to Earth, a sort of utopian sci-fi account of a Martian’s visit to Earth in a future when mankind’s problems had been largely resolved. Like the mysterious tree in the story, the psychology of religion grew on a tomb—not of one, but of several notable figures. These were not artists like Michelangelo, but practitioners of comparative religion: Müller, Tiele, Tylor. The problem had been there from the very beginning. Flournoy himself had consciously excluded from his review the contributions that did not measure up to his own standard of ‘science’—i.e. the double principle of an ‘exclusion of transcendence’ and a ‘biological interpretation of religious phenomena’.
