THE FOUNDER OF QUAKERISM.*
THIS book—" A Psychological Study of the Mysticism of
George Fox" is its sub-title—was written by a leader among the younger members of the Society of Friends in America and one who, at the time of her death in 1921, at the age of forty-three, was Professor of Psychology at the State College of South Dakota. The psychology of religion is a difficult and still to a large extent unexplored science, and one of its chief dangers is that it may fall into a too narrowly scientific analysis of what is, above all others, a complex, delicate, and intensely personal problem. By the fact that she was not only a psychologist, but also herself a Quaker, Dr. Knight escapes this pitfall. Her study is, in fact, entirely sympathetic, even though she interprets the apparently miraculous elements in Fox's life-history in terms of the new psychology. There is, it is true, a tendency here and there in her book to fall more than is necessary into modern psychological jargon, but this is a superficial and not a fundamental fault, for the actual thing said is often profoundly true.
Fox, as Dr. Knight reminds us, was the best and healthiest type of mystic. "He found no need in his life," she writes,
"of many imprisonments for ascetic intoxicating self-torture as did Suso. . . . He was active, positive, practical, rather than passive, negative, theoretical ; intuitional, rather than contem- plative. He was emotional with his periods of ecstasy, but not merely so. He was intellectual—using in his arguments with opposers and oppressors the Scriptural authority most conclusive to them to back his more intuitive statements—but never primarily so. He was volitional, strenuously forging his way through any opposition to the goal he saw before him, and striving to know the will of God, yet doing so through an intense passivity, an opening up of all the channels of his being in an intense awareness, and waiting in the silence of the meeting for the personal and corporate uprush of spiritual power that makes of normal daily living an abundant life of 'normal joyous correspondence with the present God Who . . . floods every act and impulse with constructive energy.'"
There is an interesting chapter on Fox's hypersensitivity.
Dr. Knight believes that his life was "in full accordance with Locke's dictum that there is nothing in the life that is not in
the senses," and explains his extraordinary powers of what appeared to be second sight and premonition as "either a combined reading of complex perceptions or . . . the 'sum- mation of sensations so slight as to be independently
imperceptible."
Later in the book Dr. Knight again speaks of this side of
Fox's character in a sentence which is noticeable, not only for its accuracy, but also for that defect of over-technicality • The Pounder of Quakerism. By Rachel Knight. London: The Swarthmore Pres& 112s. IAA which we mentioned before. "His mystical insight," she writes, "arises out of the hyperaesthesia of his normal senses and their subliminal 'ramifications, out of the immediacy values from the intimate senses, out of the non-cognizable factors of valuation, though probably with the aid of the clarifying effects of the reason."
Like many recent psychology-books this study contains several diagrams which are likely to do little else than bam- boozle the average reader ; but for the book as a whole we have little else but praise. Its interest is not only psycho- logical but strongly human.
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