I have one more remark to make before ending my paper. To me the occurrence of mystical experience at all times and places, and the similarities between the statements of so many mystics all the world over, seems to be a significant fact. Prima facie it suggests that there is an aspect of reality with which these persons come in contact in their mystical experiences, and which they afterwards strive and largely fail to describe in the language of daily life. I should say that this prima facie appearance of objectivity ought to be accepted at its face value unless and until some reasonably satisfactory alternative explanation of the agreement can be given. Now I am well aware that certain psycho-analysts would give one explanation of it, and that certain Marxian theorists would give another. Such explanations do satisfy some people who have studied them, and they form the staple diet of a great many more who have not done so, but have swallowed them whole in order to be in the vanguard of culture.
Now I think that each of these two types of theory contains some interesting speculations which may turn out to be true, and may cover some of the facts. But each of them seems to me to suffer very obviously from two defects. The first is that they are plainly constructed by persons who have very little first-hand or even second-hand experience of religion, and are strongly antipathetic to it from one cause or another. I should feel some hesitation in accepting theories about the nature of music and its function in human life, excogitated by a tone-deaf psychologist whose wife had recently eloped with a musician. The psycho-analytic and the Marxian theories of religion seem to me to wear too jaundiced a complexion to inspire complete confidence. The second defect is this. Although the exponents of these theories make a tremendous parade of being "scientific," it is perfectly plain to anyone who has studied any genuine science that they have no idea of the general difficulty of proving any far-reaching explanatory hypothesis, or of the special difficulties which exist in a field where experiment is impossible, and even the "observations" consist largely of hearsay and tradition. The degree of their confidence is a measure of their scientific incompetence. They seem to have no notion of the importance of confronting their theories with negative instances, or of considering whether half a dozen rival hypotheses would not explain the facts equally well.
(C. D. Broad, "The Present Relations of Science and Religion," Philosophy 14 [April 1939]: 131-54, at 153-4 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 