Synthesized answer
The book's structure, in addressing the psychology of religion, engages with "psychological matter" by considering religious feelings and impulses as its subject [1]. The inquiry focuses on more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature, particularly from individuals accomplished in the religious life [1]. The passages indicate that a "neurotic constitution" and a "dual nature" of man, connected to different spheres of thought, are relevant to understanding religious experience [3, 4].
Furthermore, the book acknowledges and discusses the materialistic perspective that links mental states to bodily conditions [2, 5]. This perspective suggests that religious experiences, like other mental states, have organic processes as their condition [5]. The structure, therefore, involves examining how these psycho-physical connections are understood and whether they can fully explain or undermine the spiritual significance of religious phenomena [2, 5]. The passages suggest that the book intends to touch upon the psychology of religion by examining these deeply personal and sometimes pathological experiences [3].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities. If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its…
ontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ‐tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro‐duodenal catarrh. All such mental over‐tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto‐ intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.(2) Let us ourselves look at the matter in…
ly is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in…
eas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who _can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.(46) To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations,…
hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto‐intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the…