The history of religion has long and with some justification been under the tutelage of the positivists who have been content to line up witnesses, to catalogue rites and to compile an index of divine epithets—all this with great patience. But it is now being taken away from them, for it seems that it can no longer be confined to description; it must also make an effort to understand.

The subject is therefore evolving along several lines. Sometimes “the religious” is treated as a separate category and subjected to a kind of morphological analysis; sometimes it is viewed in the perspective of other social sciences like psychology and sociology. Each of these points of view is justified by itself to the extent that it agrees with the facts of the matter. But it also exposes the student of religion to the dangers of systematic exclusiveness and excessive generalization.