Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE PROVINCE OF A SCIENCE OF RELIGION. The positions taken in the preceding chapter oblige us to regard religion as a phenomenon of conscious experience. Our knowledge of religion is thus a knowledge of certain mental phenomena. And since science is knowledge generalised and verified by recurrence to particular facts, the science of religion is such a knowledge of those phenomena. That is to say, the science of religion is simply the science of religious sentiments as existing in the human mind. It is thus obviously and characteristically a concrete science, because those sentiments exist as concrete facts of mental life, and whatever may be the inferences from them, these facts must always be the basis of the science, furnishing its data and supplying its criteria. The different forms which religious sentiments take will be the subject of observation, and their common characters will be related and associated in the processes of generalisation. There is no limit, however, to the number of sciences. For a science may be created with respect to any group of natural phenomena which presents similarities enough to admit of scientific coordination. Since science is only systematised knowledge, we may separate and define our knowledge of any aspect of mind, and erect that knowledge into a scientific system. Thus, if we choose, we may have a science of feeling, or a science of sensations, or, again, a science of sensations of sight, making the assemblages of phenomena which constitute the data of the science as minute as possible, and yet preserve the right to use the title of science if only we pursue with fidelity the method of science respecting the data with which we deal. On the other hand, we may widen the limits of science so as to include very large aggrega... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.