This book would never have been written had I not been honored
with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the
University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two
courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it
seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on
"Man's Religious Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one
on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy." But the
unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came to write it out
has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the
description of man's religious constitution now fills the twenty
lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own
philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know
them should turn to pages 511-519, and to the "Postscript" of
the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more
explicit form...