"demonstrations" which had lost all intellectual respectability. Very well, they said, we will leave the material universe to science and the Bible to the Higher Critic. We will urge people to rely upon their own feelings about religion, and we will assure them that these are the pronouncements of a faculty, the religious sense, which is in its way as normal and authoritative as reason itself.
This idea grew out of the older psychology which is now entirely discarded. Instinct was supposed to be a "faculty" in the animal, and more feebly in man, just as reason, memory, will, etc., were "faculties." The word never meant more than a capability. If we can remember, desire, and reason, we obviously have, in a sense, the "faculties" to do these things. But the older philosophers and psychologists tended to take the abstract word in a more or less substantial sense. The "soul" was a spiritual substance, and its "faculties" were as real and distinct as the five senses. Today the soul and its faculties are regarded as relics of pre-scientific thought, and the idea that man has a special "faculty" for seeing religious truth has no meaning. The only real differences we can assign, are different regions of the brain for separate mental acts. Even Mrs.
