A TAXONOMY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.

The study of religious experience provides an example of those strange discontinuities which seem to beset the social sciences. The present paper Is intended as a beginning of this conceptual task. There is an attempt to develop some basic sub-types and ordering dimensions for organizing the variety of experiences to which men attach religious definitions. The conceptual scheme has been informed by data from a sample of Protestant and Roman Catholic church members residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. These data include both quantifiable and qualitative information on the religious experiences of respondents. Where appropriate, these data will be introduced both to indicate the relative frequency of different forms of religious experience and to illustrate how people perceive such experiences. Following many previous writers, it has been suggested that the essential element characterizing religious experience, and distinguishing it from all other human experience, is some sense of contact with a supernatural agency.