ABSTRACT
For the scope of philosophy must always be universal, while an adequate psychology must survey the whole of conscious life. This chapter emphases, in the case of every human being, the ceaseless influence of a “universe” which extends far beyond the content of his usual experience and affects all sides and elements of his ordinary personality; it is indeed this essential inclusiveness and pervasiveness that constitute it into a “universe.” Myths and cosmologies, fables and folklore, elaborated and cherished by one generation only to be discarded by its successors, all alike express man’s unified consciousness of that “universe” to whose unceasing pressure upon his life and spirit he responds in his religion. From the psychological standpoint, then, it is essential to regard religion as a mode of experience whose complexity is of a still higher order than that of aesthetics or science or practice.
