Thus there are certain emotional states which are most favourable for a peculiar concentration on topics of religious interest, just as other states facilitate the apprehension of arithmetical truths. Also, emotional states are related to states of the body. Most people are more likely to make arithmetical slips when they are tired in the evening. But we still believe that arithmetic holds good from sundown to cockcrow.
Again, it is not true that all people are on a level in respect to their perceptive powers. Some people appear to realize continuously, and at a higher level, types of emotional and perceptive experience, which we recognize as corresponding to those periods of our own lives most worthy of confidence for that sort of experience. In so far as what they say interprets our own best moments, it is reasonable to trust to the evidential force of their experience.
These considerations are all commonplaces, but it is necessary to keep them clearly in
