We shall find ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic conceptions and activities.

We shall therefore be much concerned with those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed examples of religious mono-ideism.

To place all those intuitions and perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is really to beg the question from the start.

The psychic mechanisms involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a transcendent objective.

And further we must ever keep in mind, since we are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them, and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.
We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system of reference.