 In this way, a person’s emotional experience can mark out certain matters as deserving of closer attention, and thereby this experience can prepare the way for a deepening of religious understanding. Here, the phenomenology of the experience has, once again, a crucial part to play in constituting the relevant pattern of salience. But in this case, the experience is not directly or indirectly of God, but in the first instance of the condition of one’s soul. William James takes a similar line when he says of “dogmatic or idealistic theology” that “these speculations must … be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feelings originally supplied the hint,” giving as an example of such feelings “inner unhappiness and the need of deliverance” (1902, p. 431). (For the importance of emotional responses in framing rational thought, see also Damasio 1995, pp. 193–194.)