The psychology of religion : an empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness / by Edwin Diller Starbuck ; with a preface by William James.

  • Starbuck, Edwin Diller, 1866-1947.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychology of religion : an empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness / by Edwin Diller Starbuck ; with a preface by William James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/476
    collect it in this burdensome, inductive fashion. I think I said to Dr Starbuck that I expected the chief result of his circulars would be a certain number of individual answers relating peculiar experiences and ideas in a way that might be held as typical. The sorting and extract- ing of percentages and reducing to averages, I thought, would give results of comparatively little significance. But Dr Starbuck kept all the more resolutely at his task, which has involved an almost incredible amount of drudging labour. I have handled and read a large proportion of his raw material, and I have just finished reading the revised proofs of the book. I must say that the results amply justify his own confidence in his methods, and that I feel somewhat ashamed at present of the littleness of my own faith. The material, quite apart from the many acutely interesting individual confessions which it contains, is evidently sincere in its general mass. The Volksgeist of course dictates its special phraseology and most of its conceptions, which are almost without exception Protestant, and predominantly of the Evangelical sort; and for comparative purposes similar collections ought yet to be made from Catholic, Jewish, Mohammedan, Buddhist and Hindoo sources. But it has been Dr Starbuck’s express aim to dis- engage the general from the specific and local in his critical discussion, and to reduce the reports to their most universal psychological value. It seems to me that here the statistical method has held its own, and that its percentages and averages have proved to possess