SOURCE: "The Author's Mentality," in The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr., Dodd, Mead & Company, 1902, pp. 141-73.

In the following excerpt, Riley presents a psychological sketch of Joseph Smith based on his writings in the Book of Mormon, a work Riley suggests is more useful when regarded as biographical rather than historical or literary.

Without further quotation or digression, it remains to get at a psychological estimate of the Book of Mormon. As literature it is not worth reading,—the educated Mormons fight shy of it; as history it merely casts a side light on a frontier settlement in the twenties; but as biography it has value, it gives, as it were, a cross section of the author's brain. The subject may be most inclusively studied from the standpoint of the constructive imagination, its materials and range, its phases aesthetic and intellective, its aspects...