3 Review(s)

About The Book : I am neither a Sanskritist nor a missionary nor a convert to some Oriental cult; and that perhaps constitutes my chief qualification for writing on India. For I have had no axe to grind, and my interest has been centered on existing conditions, on present-day ideas and their significance, and on the methods used by the different communities of India for religious education and religious reform. In spite, therefore, of the many excellent works that have been written on India, I conceive that there is still a place for a book whose author's preparation for his task has been, not in Sanskrit or missionary literature, but in the study of the general problems of the psychology and philosophy of religion, and who seeks to present Indian religious life as it is today,without partisanship or antecedent bias. When I started for India it was with no thought of writing a book on the land and its faiths, but to gain fresh light on the psychology of religion—a subject that had interested me for a dozen years. Before I had been long in the country, however, I found I had collected, from observation and from conversation with all sorts of people, a considerable amount of information concerning the religions of India which seemed to me most interesting and which I, at least, had not found in books. About The Author : James Bissett Pratt (1875-1944) held the Mark Hopkins Chair of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Williams College. He was president of the American Theological Society from 1934 to 1935. Born in Elmira, New York, Pratt was the only child of Daniel Ransom Pratt and Katharine Graham Murdoch. He had an early appreciation of being read to by his mother, and particularly admired the idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his youth. Pratt graduated from Elmira Free Academy in 1893, then attended Williams College, graduating in 1898.He subsequently studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard University, earning his doctorate through his mentor William James in 1905. He returned to Williams to teach and write on philosophy thereafter. Pratt began teaching at Williams College in 1905 as Instructor of Philosophy. In 1906, he was promoted to Assistant Professor.