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Author Starbuck, Edwin Diller, 1866-1947.

Title The psychology of religion: an empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness, by Edwin Diller Starbuck ... With a preface by William James ..
Published London, W. Scott; New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1901

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Description 1 online resource (xx, 423 pages) including tables, diagrams
Series The Contemporary science series
Contemporary science series.
Summary "In 1890 I read a paper before the Indiana College Association, which was the first crystallisation of vague ideas which had been forming, that religion might be studied in the more careful ways we call scientific, with profit to both science and religion. This was elaborated still further, on the basis of empirical data, in two lectures, in 1894 and 1895, before the Harvard Religious Union. These were expanded later into two articles in the American Journal of Psychology--the first, "A Study of Conversion," in January, 1897; and the other, "Some Aspects of Religious Growth," in October, 1897. The interest shown in the articles, and the fact that the subject has since then been steadily growing, seem to warrant the presentation of the results in a more permanent and generally accessible form. It has been Dr Starbuck's express aim to disengage 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 genuine significance. Dr Starbuck's conclusion, for example, that 'conversion' is not a unique experience, but has its correspondences in the common events of moral and religious development, emerges from the general parallelism of ages, sexes, and symptoms shown by statistical comparison of different types of personal evolution, in some of which conversion, technically so called, was present, whilst it was absent in others. Such statistical arguments are not mathematical proofs, but they support presumptions and establish probabilities, and in spite of the lack of precision in many of their data, they yield results not to be got at in any less clumsy way. Rightly interpreted, the whole tendency of Dr. Starbuck's patient labour is to bring compromise and conciliation into the long standing feud of Science and Religion. The book groups together a mass of hitherto unpublished facts, forming a most interesting contribution both to individual and to collective psychology. They interpret these facts with rare discriminatingness and liberality--broad-mindedness being indeed their most striking characteristic. They explain two extremes of opinion to each other in so sympathetic a way that, although either may think the last word has yet to be said, neither will be left with that sense of irremediable misunderstanding which is so common after disputes between scientific and religious persons. And, finally, they draw sagacious educational inferences"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
In PsycBOOKS (EBSCO) EBSCO
Subject Psychology, Religious.
Conversion.
Adolescence.
Experience (Religion)
Psychology and religion.
Religion and Psychology
Adolescent
psychology of religion.
adolescence.
Psychology and religion
Adolescence
Conversion
Experience (Religion)
Psychology, Religious
Religieus bewustzijn.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0837091713
9780837091716