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Iqbal asks what method is adequate to the study of religious experience and finds modern psychology badly placed to answer. He cites Jung's own admission that the essential nature of religion lies beyond analytic psychology, then notes — with pointed irony — that Jung repeatedly violates his own principle, producing a functionalist reduction in which religion becomes a mere biological device for restraining instincts and Christianity itself is declared obsolete for civilised man.
Section 6 defended the cognitive status of religious experience against the pathological objection, arguing that the transformative power of prophetic experience — its capacity to reshape individuals, communities, and civilisations — constitutes evidence for its contact with objective reality. Section 7 now takes up a related but distinct question: what method of inquiry is adequate to the study of religious experience? Iqbal surveys the available psychological approaches and finds them all inadequate — not because psychology as a discipline is irrelevant, but because modern psychology has systematically misunderstood the nature of what it is trying to explain.
The section advances through three movements. First, Iqbal traces a brief genealogy of the psychological study of religious experience: Ibn Khaldūn as the pioneer who 'reached what we now call the idea of the subliminal self,' followed by Sir William Hamilton and Leibniz. Second, he cites Jung's own admission that 'the essential nature of religion is beyond the province of analytic psychology' — a concession from within the discipline itself — and then notes, with pointed irony, that 'Jung has violated his own principle more than once in his writings.' Third, Iqbal diagnoses the consequence of this violation: modern psychology, instead of illuminating the essential nature of religion, has produced 'a plethora of new theories which proceed on a complete misunderstanding' — theories whose collective implication is that religion is merely 'a kind of well-meaning biological device' for restraining instincts, and that Christianity (as Jung's quoted passage argues) has already 'fulfilled its biological mission' and is no longer necessary for civilised man.
The section is strategically important because it clears the ground for Section 8's positive alternative. If modern psychology cannot study the essential nature of religious experience (only its emotional and symbolical surface), then the study of religion's inner reality must proceed by a different method — the method of the religious practitioners themselves, whose introspective techniques Iqbal will illustrate through Shaikh Aḥmad Sirhindī. The section thus serves as a negative prolegomenon: demonstrating the failure of the external, analytical approach in order to justify the turn to the internal, experiential one.