In this, his first book, Collingwood attempts to rescue the philosophy of religion from the efforts of psychologists to explain the human mind by empirical techniques. Here he contends that the mind can be interpreted only by introspection, and not by the methods of natural science, and tries to establish the characteristics of religion that make it unamenable to scientific analysis. This he does by asserting that religion has its closest affinity with philosophy. He believes religion and philosophy both involve an aspiration to grasp the totality of experience, whereas scientific psychology can focus only on particular motives and acts.