Theories about religion, he was sure, were “once removed from the vital springs
of conduct and valuation”; historical records and sociological statements about
religion were “thrice removed, and consist for all we know of only congealed,
discoloured, and distorted semblances of real experience. One must,” Starbuck
But (what) tool could one use? At some point Starbuck decided to investigate these elusive
facts in questionnaires that asked for details about “the feelings of divine presence,”
“actual feelings of the sense of communion during the ceremony of communion”
and, above all, what people experienced during conversion episodes.

When Starbuck’s mentor William James got a copy of the
survey he was full of hesitation. “This is New England,” he warned, and “people
here will not reply to an inquisitional document of that sort.”10 Starbuck assured
James that his plan would work. “I wheedle them; I explain that this is the beginning
of a new science in the world—the psychology of religion, and we must have the
acts.”11 But at least initially, James appeared to be right. Starbuck received several
etters of complaint and recrimination...

charts on religious development; graphs correlating conversion with age, gender,
body growth, emotion and temperament; tables measuring the frequency of post-
conversion anxiety, religious doubt and the intensity of certain beliefs. Starbuck was
mapping inner vectors of doubt and depravity, anxiety and ecstasy, taking inventory
of mysterious mental things that had confounded him. He found that there were
many ways to use empirical methods to bring “a little coherency and constancy into
contexts, to use science to “make it possible to comprehend new regions in the

Starbuck, this procedure yielded some crucial gains. It had the effect of making the
divine force behind religious experiences not a terrifying and unpredictable agent
of sudden conversion events but an architect of an orderly universe who might be
admired and understood better by plotting his earthly irruptions and manifestations

The “feeling life,” Starbuck continued, “draws directly from experience, and
not through the mediation of the cognitive processes; that is, it is itself a source
of knowledge.”32 The immediate bodily feeling was constitutive of every mental
act; it was the foundation for thinking, believing, reasoning, and forming opinions.
Religious wisdom, then, was “direct and immediate,” and reports of experience
should not be “blurred and distorted by an over-degree of rationality.”33
Starbuck learned these facts about sensation and perception from James himself,