part in the history of the religious consciousness, and

we must look at it later with some care. But we need — not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical con- ditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up ina higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and 1 exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.
The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important _currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. “In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our \ professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We ‘divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies with- out end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recog- nize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.*
1“ AsI go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing ; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated,
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The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory - of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbid+’ ness with which the old hell-fire theology was more har- moniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousnes: of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist or the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and ‘muscular’ attitude, which to our fore fathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theologi- eal elements. But in that ‘theory of evolution’ which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years swept so rapidly over Hurope and Amer- ica, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely. displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of gen- eral meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find ‘ evolutionism’ interpreted thus optimistically and
polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic — or mzenadic — foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.” R. Le Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.
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embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born
in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading pop- ular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As exam- ples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck’s circular of ques- tions. The writer’s state of mind may by courtesy be éalled a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recog- nize in him, coarse-meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type.
Q. What does Religion mean to you?
A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. JI am sixty-seven years of age and have re- sided in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are asa rule those most lacking in uprightness and mo- rality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and ser- monizing are pernicious — they teach us to rely on some super- natural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I teetotally disbelieve in a God. The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both men- tally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die—there being no immortality in either case.
Q. What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc. ?
A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh.
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Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared provi- dential ?
A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintend- ing kind. A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince any one of this fact.
Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions ?
A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfeliow, especially Shake- speare, etc., etc. Of songs, the Star-spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy- washy hymns are my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence.
Q. What is your notion of sin?
A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, inciden- tal to man’s development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin.
Q. What is your temperament ?
A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all.
If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His content- ment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science.
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To my mind a current far more important and inter esting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day, —I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain, — and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the ‘ Mind-cure movement.’ There are various sects of this ‘ New Thought,’ to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so pro- found that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.
It is a deliberately optimistic schome of life, au both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual develop- ment during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers, —a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings.
One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England tran- scendentalism ; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of ‘law’ and ‘ progress’ and ‘ development’ ; another the optimistic popular sci- ence evolutionism of which I have recently spoken ; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power
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of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously pre- cautionary states of mind.’ Their belief has in a gen- eral way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples ; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.
‘The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliber- ate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved pos- sible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the * Gospel of Relaxation,’ of the ‘ Don’t Worry Movement,’ of people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good | even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the
1 ‘Cantionary Verses for Children’: this title of a much used work, pub. lished early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England sad America.
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innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost im- possible to read it at all.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the move- ment has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and pro- testing, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.’ It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind- curers’ ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who can be
-so influenced. They form a psychic type to be tude’ with respect.”
1 T refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the Sormer. Mr. Dresser’s works are published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood’s by Lee & Shepard, Boston.
2 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on “the Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures” is published in the American Jour- nal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind-cure exist, but are in no respect
different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by sug- gestion; and the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological
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To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered fro-
speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes : “In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without suc- cess. People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured. ... We have traced the mental element through primi- tive medicine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is inrpossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argu- ment applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics — Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day ; it is not confined to a few; itis not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds tothe argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, other- wise the failures would have ended the delusion. . . . Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases ; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease. .. . We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch ; would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful . adherence toa truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable ” (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).
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wardness to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of the beast in it is fear ; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion.
“ Fear,” to quote a writer of the school, “ has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deter- rent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a posi- tive deterrent, and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word fearthought to stand for the unprofitable element of fore- thought, and have defined the word ‘ worry’ as fearthought in contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined fear- thought as the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestion of inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable things.” }
The ‘ misery-habit,’ the ‘martyr-habit,’ engendered by the prevalent ‘ fearthought,’ get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers : —
“‘ Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social conventions or customs ana alleged requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children’s diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought that we shall grow
1 Horace Fietcuer : Happiness as found in Forethought minus Feare thought, Menticulture Series, i, Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp 21-25, abridged.
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old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike; while crown- ing all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line of particular fears and trouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the riddidle of the day, and so on through a long list = fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Bradley’s ‘ unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’
“Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumer- able volunteers from daily life, — the fear of accident, the pos- sibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow . . . sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering.” >
“Man,” to quote another writer, “ often ‘das fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification. . . . Think of the millions of sensitive and respon- sive souls among our ancestors who have been under the domin- ion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity.” ?
Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use. Christian terminology, one sees from such quotations
1H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38. ? Henry Woop: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54.
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how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians.’
Their notion of man’s higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind-cure philosophy as partly con- scious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the sub- conscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysti- cism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quota- tion or two will put us at the central point of view : —
“The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infi- nite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what 1 call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipo:
1 Whether it differs so much from Christ’s own notion is for the exeget- ists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind-curers do. ‘“ What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist ?” asks Harnack, and says it is this: “*‘The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.’ That is the ‘coming of the kingdom,’ or rather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work of redemption, but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills ; he never spends time in asking whether the sick one ‘ deserves’ to be eured ; and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful ; it is of the great kingdom of Satan ; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well.” Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39.
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tence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality ; they differ in degree.
“The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for har- mony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery to the power- house of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose ; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward.” !
Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers from corre spondents — the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired.
1 R. W. Terre: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y,, 1899 I have strung scattered passages together.
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“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Naza- rene: ‘I and my Father are one,’ hasno further need of healer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark ?
“ This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are to-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick ? — since ‘Greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against us.’ ”
My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement : —
“ Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always break- ing down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insan- ity ; besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took pos- session of me.
“I think that the one thing which impressed me most was
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learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this con- sciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without.
“T have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health as such, because that comes of itself, as an inci- dental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seek- ing of the kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all ese comes as that which shall be ‘added unto you’ —as quite incidental and as a surprise to us, per- haps ; and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of our being.
“ When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them —I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various de velopment, these being mostly approvec by the masses, although they may be unreal, and ever unhealthy superfluities.”
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Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment, —they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying.
“T had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year. [Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker, when one day dur- ing the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: ‘ You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.’ These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: ‘ There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.’ I could not ac- cept all she said, but I translated all that was there for me in this way: ‘There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use ; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience.’ That day I com- menced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself: ‘The Power that cre- ated the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years [the distress-turns had usually recurred about two o’clock in the night]. I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth,
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which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them ; they came about two weeks apart.
“1st. Iam Soul, therefore it is well with me.
“2d. Iam Soul, therefore I am well.
“3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in this form.
“4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.
“Sth. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal. Then came the convic- tion, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and al- ways had been, for I was Soul, an expression of God’s Perfect Thought. That was to me the perfect and completed separa- tion between what I was and what I appeared to be. I suc- ceeded in never losing sight after this of my real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) J expressed health continuously throughout my whole body. _~
*‘In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience I have never known this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my igno- rance I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child.”
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of experience how im- possible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a re- ligious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.’
1 The Cairds, for example. In Epwarp Carrp’s Glasgow Lectures of
1890-92 passages like this abound :— ‘The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that
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But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence-of evil, whereas of the gen eral fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a ‘mystery ’ or ‘ problem,’ or in ‘laying to heart’ the les- son of its experience, after the manner of the Hvangeli- cals. Don’t reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance ! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, tran- scended and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind- cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a he,
‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ passes with searce a break into the announcement that ‘the kingdom of God is among you’ ; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference in kind between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division, and ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be ‘ perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.’ The sense of alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews had continually been grow- ing wider : ‘ As in heaven, so on earth.’ The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost ; but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms ‘Son’ and ‘Father’ at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity, — that can and must become a principle of reconciliation.” The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147.
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and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic . ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good ?
After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the Dititetik der Seele into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism : ‘ Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.’ ‘ Thoughts are things,’ as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writ- ers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages ; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and suc- cess, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind- curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are ‘ forces,’ and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s side by opening one’s own mind to their influx.
On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similar: ity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran
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and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, ‘ What shall J do to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: ‘ You are saved now, if you would but believe it... And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with them; and ‘What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?’ is the form of their question. And the answer is: ‘You are well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.’ “‘ The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, “ God is well, and so are you. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influ- ence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifes- tations *) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day.
But I here fear that I may begin to ‘jar upon the nerves’ of some of the members of this academic audi- ence. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think,
1 Tt remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes _ . more and more the form of mind-cure experience and academic philosophy
mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.
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should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious expe- rience ; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaint- ance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of in- dividual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet — our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conven- tionally ‘ correct’ type, ‘the deadly respectable’ type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of tak- ing part in anything like them ourselves.
Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous per- sons in whom — at any rate at a certain stage in their development — a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by offi- cial moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise / us never to relax our strenuousness. “ Be vigilant, day and night,” they adjure us; “hold your passive tenden- cies in check ; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.” But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure
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and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two fold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impos- sible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narra- vions, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the ‘ surrender ’ of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity ; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward re- lief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. ‘This is the sal- vation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Some- thing must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human expe- rience. Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They know ; for they have actually felt the higher powers, in giving — up the tension of their personal will.
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A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had te loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.
The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandon- ment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealis- tic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.’
1 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheis- tic explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own ‘subconscious’ seif), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though
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When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic con. version, we shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind-curer’s methods.
They are of course largely suggestive. The sugges- tive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the word ‘ suggestion,’ having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. ‘Suggestion’ is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct. Ideas efficacious over some people prove ineffi- cacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word ‘suggestion’ as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will do any- thing for us that can be done.” And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does abso-
in this instance not spiritually) ‘higher’ ones which, seeking te regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results. — Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here.
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lutely nothing, or did nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.’
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. »
1 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sicke ness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastise- ment, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catho- lic Church, of earning ‘merit.’ “Illness,” says a good Catholic writer (P. LxsEuneE : Introd. & la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), “is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one’s self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gay says, ‘ this one is of gold ; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (iike all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is! . . . I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.’” According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away.
Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the here- sies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt’s Life by Ziindel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi, and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine inter- position. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical char- acter, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly ‘ Leaves of Healing’ were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as ‘diabolical counterfeits’ of his own exclusively ‘Divine Healing,’ must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms.
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In what can the originality of any religious movententé consist, save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings ?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. “ We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards, “concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead.” ?
The next condition of success is the apparent exist- ence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthy- mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that
1 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.
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it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world.
Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subcon- scious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like rb ke practice. I quote some passages at random : —
*‘The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most strongly insists, — the devel- opment namely from within outward, from small to great.} Consequently one’s thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be literally like a step in the dark.? To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one’s self, preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, this is called ‘entering the silence.’ ” 8
‘“‘ The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wis- dom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer.*| One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, — and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would,
1 H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 46, 2 Dresser : Living by the Spirit, 58. 8 DresseR: Voices of Freedom, 83. 4 Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.
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in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which he expected a certain an- swer, he would remain utterly passive until the reply came, and never once through many years’ experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.” }
Wherein, I'should like to know, does this intrinsically differ from the practice of ‘recollection’ which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline ? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation.
“Tt is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and affection for him. . . . Would you escape from every ill? Never lose this recollection of God, neither in pros- perity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the diffi- culty or the importance of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as familiar with it as pos- sible; and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your soul.” 2
All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in
1 TRINE: p. 117. 2 Quoted by LesEuNE : Introd. & la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.
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both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently ex- perienced in their own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances : —
“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, pro- moted, and strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful.
“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we will, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift our-. selves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum. . . . Whenever the thought is not occupied with one’s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has never made any system- atic effort to lift and control the thought-forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we-are to ourselves. There is soul-
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contact with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.” }
When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinklmg may affect you will have long since passed away — doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down pour encourager les autres. You will then be con- vinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of ‘union’ form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy- mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure re- ligion to scientific method and the scientific life.
In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons to-day —‘ scientists’ or ‘ positivists,’ they are fond of calling themselves — who will tell you that reli- gious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and out- grown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought
1 Henry Woop: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 5), 70 (abridged).
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everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him, even exter- nal nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-phy- sical, which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means sci- ence has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would un- doubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science’s concep- tions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corrobo- rated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them imper- sonal and universal.
But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practi- cally prove you right. That the controlling energies of / nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly re- spond to your individual appeals and needs, are proposi- tions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclama-
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tion and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own pe- culiar methods and weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the delief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts con- firmed, is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is one : — |
“One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): ‘ There is nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.’ Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.”
The next case not only illustrates experiment and veri- fication, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account.
“ T went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feel- ing increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind-cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter
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thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how | felt. Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
“‘T cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.’ I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfect con- fidence that all would be well, that all was well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that pass- eth understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jar- ring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons ; but only of love and happiness and faith.
“Ido not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but when I woke up in the morning, J was well.”
These are exceedingly trivial instances,’ but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of exper- iment and verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to themselves to have been cured by\ the experiments tried was enough to make them converts ) to the system. And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every one can be cured by the first regu- lar practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be _ pedantic and over-scrupulous for those who can get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing veri-
1See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.
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fied in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim ? I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are ail our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (concep- tual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious out- come of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and suc- ceeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of dis- ease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some ‘of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even etter in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the /science and the religion are both of them genuine keys (for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can ‘use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using dif-
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ferent conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each veri- fied in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.’
The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to-day with this very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention.
APPENDIX (See note to p. 121.)
Case I. “ My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of
1 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, each veri- fied in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.
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immediate and great exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, 1 heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it; I had no great hope of getting any good from it—it was a chance I tried, partly because my thought was interested_by the new possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help; the treatment was a silent one ; little was said, and that little car- ried no conviction to my mind ; whatever influence was exerted was that of another person’s thought or feeling silently pro- jected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still together. I believed from the start in the possibility of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the body’s nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play.
“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped _ me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in
THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY -MINDEDNESS 125
it had been the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence in sucha matter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one’s conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the re- sult of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state ; and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the influ- ence of an excited imagination, or a consciously received sug- gestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, 1 believe that this change was the result of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have had of observ- ing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controiling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout ; and I believe that the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres, can exercise a vast influence upon dis- ease of any kind, if it can be brought to bear. In my judg- ment the question is simply how to bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective. That these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane
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of the normally unconscious mind, so the strongest and most effective impressions are those which 7 receives, in some as yet unknown, subtle way, directly from a healthier mind whose state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces.”
Case II. “ At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuc- cessful experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daugh- ter was placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis. This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing. Gradu- ally an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it. All feel- ings of irritability disappeared. Even the expression of my face changed noticeably.
“T had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discus- sion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with confidence and inner calm.
“‘T may say that the growth has all been toward the elimina- tion of selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the direction of a practical, working real- ization of the immanence of God and the Divinity of man’s true, inner self.”
LECTURES VI AND VII THE SICK SOUL
T our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded —
& temperament, the temperament which has a consti- tutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual’s character is / set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world’s life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically de- clining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on / occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a/ disease ; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original com- plaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever * had relations with sin.
Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy-minded- ness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, ac- cording to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an ‘ inade- quate’ knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So Spi-
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noza categorically condemns repentance. When men make mistakes, he says, —
“One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as every one does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a particular kind of sadness ; and the disadvantages of sadness,” he continues, “I have al- ready proved, and shown that we should strive to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since uneasiness of con- science and remorse are of this kind of complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind.” }
‘Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness has always come forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according to such -healthy-minded Christians means getting away from the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of keeping healthy-mindedness on top. By it a man’s accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had some very healthy-minded
1 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.
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ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his conception
of God.
“ When I was a monk,” he says, “I thought that I was ut- terly cast away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in vain, and all thy good works are unpro- fitable. But if then I had rightly understood these sentences of Paul: ‘The flesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would do,’ I should not have so miserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now commonly I do, ‘ Mar- tin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for thou hast flesh ; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.’ I remember that Staupitz was wont to say, ‘I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto me for Christ’s sake, I shall not be able, with all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.’ This (of Staupitz’s) was not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They look unto Christ their recon- ciler, who gave his life for their sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against the flesh, lest they should fulfill the lusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves also do fall sometimes into sin ' through infirmity, yet are they not discouraged, nor think there
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fore that their state and kind of life, and the works which are done according to their calling, displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith.” }
One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, Molinos, the foander of Quietism, so abominabiy condemned was his healtky-minded opinion of repentance : —
“ When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he bea mere fool who, running at tournament with others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use — not to lose time, not to disturb thyself, and reap no good.” 2
- Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimiz- ing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of max-
* Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged). 4 Moxinos : Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged).
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imizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home/ to us when we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like at this pomt to make another philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.
If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load our- selves down with a difficulty that has always proved bur- densome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of abso- lute fact ; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil ; he would only be responsible if it were not finally over- come. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an Individual,
132 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is ; since if any part whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be that individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time ; and although it would be prema- ture to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only obviows escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggre- gate or collection of higher and lower things and princi- ples, rather than an absolutely unitary-fact: For then evil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which _we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.
Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself — / more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialec- tically required, must be pinned in and kept and con- -secrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say any- thing of the sort.’ Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational,
1] say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers ; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the . experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect them- selves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of
things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.
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and not to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-extensive with the whole actual, is a mere extract from the actual, marked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementi- tious stuff.
Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident —so much ‘ dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a perfectly definite conception of the meta- physical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having Picea it pe your attention at such length.
Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil,
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but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence.
/Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are
\ shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of
/ the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in princi- ple at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modi- fying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a mar- riage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something inerad- icably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.’ These comparisons of races are always open to excep- tion, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.
Recent psychology has found great use for the word ‘threshold’ as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we
1 Cf. J. Mmsanp : Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim.
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speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in gen eral, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sen- sitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low ‘ difference-threshold ’ — his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a ‘ pain-thresh- old,’ a ‘ fear-threshold,’ a ‘misery-threshold,’ and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individ- uals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit ; whilst others seem to have been born close _to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry
136 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
out, in spite of all appearances, “ Hurrah for the Uni- verse !— God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more com- plicated key to the meaning of the situation.
To begin with, how can things so insecure as the suc- cessful experiences of this world afford a stable anchor- age? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most pros- perous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed ? Unsuspectedly from the \ bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet ' said, something bitter,rises up: a touch of nausea, a fall- ing dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again ; — and again and again, — at intervals. But with this the healthy- minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident. |
Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy- mindedness as never to have experienced in his own per- son any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflect- ing being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What
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kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, “ Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!” Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy “in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Hither his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can ex- press himself in this wise, how must it be with less suc- cessful men ?
“TT will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “ against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my . 75 years, 1 have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”
What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure.
“T am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest.””— And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added: “ O God, grant that it may come without delay. I would readily eat up - this necklace to-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow.” — The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: “ Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to
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come.” ‘ Madam,” replied he, “rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise.”
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inade- quacy to our vocation. And with what a damning em- phasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world’s de- mands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. ‘The subtlest forms of suffermg known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations inci- dental to these results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. There is indeed one element in human des- tiny,’ Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “ that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed ; failure is the fate allotted.”* And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life’s significance is reached ??
1 He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: “ Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.”
2 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal abidest the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. ‘To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off — our capacity of acknow- ledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life.
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But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human being’s sensitiveness a little greater, earry him a little farther over the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness : —
* What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun? [I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. . . . The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward ; for the memory of them is for- gotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished ; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any- thing that is done under the Sun. . . . Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.”
In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextrica- bly together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre sur- rounds it.
To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contem- plation engenders, the only relief that healthy-minded- aess can give is by saying: ‘Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!’ or ‘Cheer up, old fellow, you ’ll
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be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbid: ness!’ But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one’s brief chance at natural good is but the very conse- cration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrele- vant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of -good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, “ and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.’ And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excita- bility and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiasti- cally it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely posi- tivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be
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thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands re- lated. Its significance and framing give it the chief part ‘ of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidi- ous internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doc- tors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the | satisfaction out of all these functions. They are part-— ners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order ; let our suffering have an immortal significance ; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits ; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in ; — and his days pass by with zest ; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological specula- tions, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The
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merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.
The early Greeks are continually held up to us in lit- erary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks — Homer's flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective pas- sages are cheerless,' and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.” The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of
1 E. g., Iliad, XVII. 446: “ Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.”
2 E.g., Theognis, 425-428 : “ Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun ; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.” See also the almost identical passage in CAdipus in Colonus, 1225. — The Anthology is full of pessimis- tic utterances: “Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground — why then doI vainly toil when I see the end naked before me ?” — “How did I come to be? WhenceamI? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life : once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness ts the whole race of mortals.” — “ For death we are all cherished and fat- tened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered.”
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the oute look of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.
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their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose reli- gion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation.
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that di- rection. The Hpicurean said: “Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disap- pointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret.” The Stoic said: “The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free pos- session of his own soul; all other goods are lies.” Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature’s boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that. freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man’s primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold ; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were _ merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will prob-
ably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world:
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sick soul.!. They mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man — Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoi- cism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may en- joy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.
Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to judge any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.
The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off - from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhap- piness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of
1 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg ‘which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism : “ By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something dif- ferent. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term contentment. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman’s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.”
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life and reflection upon death. ‘The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological mel- ancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’s very existence, so the subject of melan- choly is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal ; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruel- ties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experi- ences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget convention- alities, and dive below the smooth and lying official con- versational surface.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depres- sion. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and drear- iness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition.
“The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia,” he writes, “has been very little studied, but it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which . for some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any affection for her father and mother. She would have played with her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in
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the act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid.” !
Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition of anhedonia. very good, terres- trial or celestial, is imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty charac- ter, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographi- cal recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus describes : —
“T had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start, thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Poly- technie school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intol- erable desolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive
1 RisoT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54,
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of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affec- tion, love — all these words were now devoid of sense. With- out doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the exist- ence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity.” }
So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing ; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation ; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair ;.or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or sub-
1 A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such ex- amples as the following : —
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. ‘To her parents she writes : —
‘ Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come. . . . It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head.” To her brother she writes: ‘“Good-by for- ever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone for-
_ever. I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do. . . . Lam tired of living, so am willing to die. . . . Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter.” §. A. K. Srrawan; Suicide and Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131,
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mit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifi- cations with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases that connect them- selves with the religious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.
“ IT suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and mor- ally. Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by night mares, dreadful visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear, presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Lat, drink, lie awake all night, suffer with- out interruption — such is the fine legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoher- 2nt enough — I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I ask pity? I am defenseless against the invis- ible enemy who is tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed against him even if I saw him, or had seen
him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death,
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death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God! what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning ; and how true and right I was when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed the cud of bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness —it is one long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many more years!” }
This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irre- ligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left us,in his book called My Con- fession, a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life’s values; and second, it shows how the altered and es- tranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy’s intellect to a gnawing, cark- ing questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean
1 Rovsrnovitcn Et Tounouse: La Mélancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.
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to quote Tolstoy at some length ; but before doing so, | will make a general remark on each of these two points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire en- tirely different feelings in different persons, and at differ- ent times in the same person ; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject’s being. Con- ceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try ‘to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive com- ment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance be- yond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, char- acter, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. ’ The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon
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non-logical, en on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions them- selves gifts, — gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage- setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery. ty
Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indis- tinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experi- ence we call pathological ensues.
In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infre- quent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melan- choliacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. “It is as if I lived in another century,” says one asylum patient.
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— “TI see everything through a cloud, ay eats another, “ things are not as they were, and I am changed: eT see,” says a third, “I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of every- thing.’ — “ Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world.” — “ There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange ; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery ; I can no longer find myseif; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression.” — “I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things.””—Such are expressions that natu- rally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed state.’
Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is con- cealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not ‘ how to live,’ or what to do. It is ob- vious that these were moments in which the excitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead. Things were meaningless whose
1 T cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900.
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- meaning had always been self-evident. The questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?’ began to beset him more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such ques- tions must be answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death.
These questions ‘ Why?’ ‘ Wherefore?’ ‘ What for ?’
found no response.
“T felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
“TJ did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped some- thing from it.
“All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good chil- dren and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and
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acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
“ And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
“‘ Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots.
“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish ; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and
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the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice —I cannot turn my gaze away from them.
“This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should Ido anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inev- itable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
“‘ These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.
“¢ But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘ there may be some- thing I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.’ And I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself, — and I found nothing. I became convinced, more- over, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was lead- ing me to despair— the meaningless absurdity of life — is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.”
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solo- mon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Hither mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice, — “and from such a way,’ he says, “I can learn nothing, after what I now know ;”’ or reflective epicurean- ism, snatching what it can while the day lasts, — which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first;
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or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.
“Yet,” says Tolstoy, “ whilst my intellect was working, some- thing else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed —a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair. . . . During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept ask- ing myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those move- ments of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas, — in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement, — but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dréad that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.” }
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordi- nary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come,
1 My extracts are from the French translation by ‘Zonta.’ In abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.
THE SICK SOUL 157
— and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute, — is not the simple ignorance of ill, but something vastly more com- plex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.
We find a somewhat different type of religious melan- choly enshrined in literature in John Bunyan’s autobio- graphy. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over the condition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of con- science to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scrip- ture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favor- able, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.
“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely upon the Promise.
158 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
[Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in all I did or said! JI found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.
*“ But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, Iam forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some years together.
*“‘ And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken, to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
“JT was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own.” !
' Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached passages continuously.
THE SICK SOUL 159
Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to an- other hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan’s.
“Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their place!” }
Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very wide- spread affection in this type of sadness.
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the
1 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand.
160 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
“ Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asy- lum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian eat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am J, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momen- tary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the inse- curity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never | felt since! It was like a revelation; and although the imme-
1 Compare Bunyan: “There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fear- ful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stom-
THE SICK SOUL 161
diate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympa- thetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It grad- ually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.
“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember won- dering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the sur- face of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful per- son, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a reli- gious bearing.”
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these last words, the answer he wrote was this : —
“T mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like ‘ The eternal God is my refuge,’ etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that laber and are heavy- laden,’ etc., ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ etc., I think I should have grown really insane.” 1
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe ; — and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man’s original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insan-
ach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if
my breast-bone would have split asunder. . . . Thus did I wind, and twine,
and shrink, under the burden that was upon me ; which burden also did
_ 80 oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or uiet.”’
‘ 1 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society
the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.
162 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
ity or delusion about matters of fact; but were we dis- posed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still — desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation ‘able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrele- vantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will havea sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.
ra Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antag- ‘onism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded _ way of viewing life and the way that takes all this expe- _Qience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy- ‘mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With thei grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light ; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is some-
THE SICK SOUL 163
thing almost obscene about these children of wrath and eravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems - to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of avert- ing one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more gener- ally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality ; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual exist- ~ ence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there your- self! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic
164 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
times is hard for our imagination — they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are ; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reac- tion on the situation.’
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it
1 Example: “It was about eleven o’clock at night... but I strolled on still with the people. . . . Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes ; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of aneye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones in his mouth, and his last ery of distress, ‘Ho hai !’ involuntarily reéchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds ; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village. . . . After this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till morning.” — Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.
THE SICK SOUL 165
may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic pre- sumption should be that they have some rational signifi- cance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.
-The completest religions would therefore seem to be \ those in which the pessimistic elements are best devel- | oped. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the. best known to us of these. They are essentially religions \ of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which we have recently been dwelling on.
LECTURE VIII
THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION
HE last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did
with evil as a pervasive element of the world we
live in. At the close of it we were brought into full
‘view of the contrast between the two ways of looking
' at life which are characteristic respectively of what we | called the healthy-minded, who need to be born only | once, and of the sick-souls, who must be twice-born in \order to be happy. The result is two different con- ceptions of the universe of our experience. In the re-
‘ligion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear _or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one de- nomination, whose parts have just the values which natu-
rally they appear to have, and of which a simple alge-
braic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth.
Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the
/plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice- ' born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition
of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural
good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient,
there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it
all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final
balance, and can never be the thing intended for our last-
ing worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather;
and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in
the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the nat
THE DIVIDED SELF 167
ural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure ) salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted ;/ though here as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are inter- mediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you understand, for ex- ample, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist ; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God’s truth.’
The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely uni- fied moral and intellectual constitution.
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dra- ‘matically, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘ How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ JI was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflec- tion. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This
1 E. g., “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never . presented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the
soul’s mumps, and measles, and whocping-coughs,” etc. EMERSON : ‘Spire itual Laws.’
168 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks !”?
Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this point.? Some persons are | born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are con- sistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight ag to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be in- convenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s autobiography.
“T have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink away from stran- gers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer; when I have been lecturing and debat- ing with no lack of spirit on the platform, I have preferred to ga without what I wanted at the hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good
! Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.
2 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractéres, 1894, who eontrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifi¢s, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés, as so many diverse psychic types.
THE DIVIDED SELF 169
fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty plat- form combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak my best.’ }
This amount of inconsistency will only count as ami- able weakness; but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject’s life. There are per- sons whose existence is little more than a series of zig- zags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance — the traits of character of incom- patible and antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.? This explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs cor- ‘roboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A ‘dégé- néré supérieur’ is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in
1 Annrm Besant: an Autobiography, p. 82.
2 Smita Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893.
170 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
keeping his spiritual house in order and running his fur: row straight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psycho- pathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, “Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” he impulsively said, “Let him go if he will,” and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called, of which we must ere- long speak more directly.
Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us — they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to character- ize the period of order-making and struggle. If the indi- vidual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate. This ig the reli
THE DIVIDED SELF 171
gious melancholy and ‘conviction of sin’ that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man’s interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to _ be two. deadly hostile ‘selves, one actual, the other ideal. — As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say: — “ Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats : Tantot l’homme d’en haut, et tantdt "homme d’en bas ;
Kit le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne.”
Wrong living, impotent aspirations ; “ What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intoler- able burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.
Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy 1 in the form of self-condem- | nation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine’s case is a classic )- example. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Chris- tian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skep- ticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life ; and finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own weak- ness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, “Sume, lege” (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, “not in chambering and wantonness,” etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever. Augustine’s psychological genius has
1 Louis Gourpon (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine’s writings imme- ' diately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the account he gives
in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked a defini- tive conversion from his former life, but it was to the neo-platonic spiritualism
172 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
given an account of the trouble of having a divided self — which has never been surpassed.
“The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthened by long in- dulgence. So these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I understood by. my own experience what I had read, ¢flesh lusteth against spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ It was myself indeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in my- self. Yet it was through myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me, because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled by them.
“Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to surrender to thy love than to yield te my own lusts, yet, though the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, ‘ Awake, thou sleeper,’ but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘ Presently ; yes, presently ; wait a little while.’ But the ‘presently’ had no ‘present,’ and the ‘little while’ grew long. ... For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my dis- ease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see extin- guished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to offer. . . . I said within myself: ‘Come, let it be done now,’ and as I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it, yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it, hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to which
and only a halfway stage toward Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraced until four years more had passed.
THE DIVIDED SELF 173
I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not tried.” 1
There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last |
acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamo- genic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies for- ever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this ‘higher excitability.
I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth’s sins were, as you will see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.
“‘T was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of gon- science. I now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of my mind all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for I soon began to be fond of caenal mirth, though I still flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I thought God would indulge young people with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation. J still kept a round of duties, and would not suffer myself to ryn into any open vices, and so got along very well in time of health
and prosperity, but when I was distressed or threatened by
sickness, death, or heavy storms of thunder, my religion would
not do, and I found there was something wanting, and would
begin to repent my going so much to frolics, but when the
distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart, with the
solicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young coms 1 Cenfessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi. abridged.
pez
174 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
pany, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and thus I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God, not will- ing I should destroy myself, still followed me with his calls, and moved with such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy myself with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would have such a sense of my lost and undone con-. dition, that I would wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I went home, would make many promises that I would attend no more on these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no sooner would I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I would find my mind elevated and soon proceed to any sort of merriment or diver- sion, that I thought was not debauched or openly vicious ; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as guilty as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy creatures on earth.
‘Sometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the fiddler to cease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and walk about crying and praying, as if my very heart would break, and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me up to hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore away! When I met sometimes with merry vompanions, and my heart was ready to sink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenance as possible, that they might not distrust anything, and sometimes would begin some dis- course with young men or young women on purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I would then rather have been in a wilderness in exile, than with them or any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many months when I was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart, but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was! Everything I did, and wherever I went, I was still in a storm, and yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ring-
. _ THE DIVIDED SELF 176
leader of the frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that, and bear this and bear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep my credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates: and all this while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went: for I did not think there was any sin in my conduct, when I was among carnal company, because. I did not take any satisfaction there, but pies followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.
“ But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar night and day.”
Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner unity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of the peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action ; or it may come through new intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to desig- nate as ‘mystical.’ However it come, it brings a char- acteristic sort of rélief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift. asily, permanently, and successfully, it often transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most enduring happiness.
But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In judging of the religious types of
176 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
regeneration which we are about to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new ', birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license ; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individ- ual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have precisely the same psychological form of event, —a firmness, stability, and equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or suddenly.
The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own ‘ counter-conversion,’ as the transi- tion from orthodoxy to infidelity has been well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy’s doubts had long harassed him; but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the illusions he had lost.
“T shall never forget that night of December,” writes Jouf- froy, “in which the veil that concealed from me my own in- credulity was torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of the night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts, | as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
“Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel ; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them
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cowards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too strong, — parents, family, memory, beliefs, it foreed me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obsti- nate and more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was leit that stood erect.
“ This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morn- ing I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life.” 1
1 Tu. Jourrroy: Nouveaux Mélanges philosophiques, 2me édition, p. 83. J add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection, and the nar- rator is a woman.
“ Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or less skeptical about ‘God;’ skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional ele- ments in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied ‘ Yes,’ as was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, ‘ No, you do not.’ I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in some terrible way. ... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife down- stairs, and then continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: ‘I have no use for a God who permits such things.’ This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might bea God. If so he would probably damn me, but I:should have to stand it. I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any personal relations with him since this painful experience.”
The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will over- throw the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of prepa- ration and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden, or that touch of a needle which
178 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
In John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote : —
A young man, it appears, “ wasted, in two or three years, large patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion, He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined to seize the first opportu- nity, of however humble a kind, to gain any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not to
makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly begin to crystallize out.
Tolstoy writes: “S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows how he ceased to believe : —
“ He was twenty-six years old when one day on a hunting expedition, the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to the custom he had held from childhood.
“ His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked at him. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said, ‘Do you still keep up that thing?’ Nothing more was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has never prayed again ; he never takes communion, and does not go to church. All this, not be- cause he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which he then and there adopted ; not because he made any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These words but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were ac- tions with no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no longer keep them up.”” Ma Confession, p. 8.
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spend, if he could help it, a farthing of whatever he might obtain. The first thing that drew his attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into the place where they were to be laid, and was employed. He received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of the saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity of meat and drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through a succession of servile employments in different places, of longer and shorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly seized every opportunity which could advance his design, without re- garding the meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase in order to sell again a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to understand the value. He speedily but. cau- tiously turned his first gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an inveterate miser, worth £60,000.” 1
! Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.
I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of ‘ falling in love,’ falling out of love, may be so termed. Falling in love also conforms frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awaken- ing to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives it a sincerity that speaks for itself.
“For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience, which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a regular fever, could think of nothing else ; whenever I was alone, pictured her attractions, and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the last
180 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religious ~ case, namely, that immediately concerns us. Here is one of
degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me no de- cided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that whilst pursu- ing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she was unfit to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes. Although for a year we took our meals at the same boarding-house, so that I saw her continually and familiarly, our closer relations had to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that I really thought I should become insane. I under- stand well those young men murdering their sweethearts, which appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it.
“The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I possessed, includ- ing some hair, all her notes and letters, and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have never had a single mo- ment of loving thought towards one who for so many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I regained possession of my own proper soul, and have never since fallen into any similar trap.”
This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord and dissatisfaction, At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is re- solved, and this happens so unexpectedly that it-is as if, to use the writer’s words, ‘‘some outside power laid hold.”
Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p. 141. Com- pare the other highly curious instances which he gives on pp. 137-144, of sudden non-religious alterations of habit or character. He seems right in conceiving all such sudden changes as results of special cerebral functions unconsciously developing until they are ready to play a controlling part, when they make irruption into the conscious life. When we treat of sud- den ‘conversion,’ I shall make as much use as I can of this hypothesis of subconscious incubation.
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the simplest possible type, an account of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy-mindedness of a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy- minded type. It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall.
Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menti- culture, relates that a friend with whom he was talking of the self-control attained by the Japanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said : — 4
“¢You must first get rid of anger and worry.’ ‘ But,’ said I, ‘is that possible?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he; ‘it is possible to the Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.’
“Qn my way back I could think of nothing else but the words ‘ get rid, get rid’; and the idea must have continued to possess me during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the morning brought back the same thought, with the revela- tion of a discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, ‘ If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all?’ I felt the strength of the argument, and at once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.
“ From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an entirely different aspect.
“ Although from that moment the possibility and desirability of freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position; but, as the usual occasions for worry and anger have presented themselves over and over again, and I have been unable to feel them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread or guard against them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind; at my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition to love and appreciate everything.
‘“*T have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, con- ductor, hotel-waiter, peddler, book-agent, cabman, and others
182 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
who were formerly a source of annoyance and irritation have been met, but I am not conscious of a single incivility. All at once the whole world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive only to the rays of good.
“IT could recount many experiences which prove a brand-new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me, because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding, and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable to get out. When he had finished, I said to him: ‘It doesn’t matter at all, you could n’t help it, so we will try again to-morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in earning it.’ The look of surprise that came over his face was so filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the spot for the delay in my departure. Next day he would not accept a cent for the service, and he and I are friends for life.
“ During the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only against worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the absence of the other depressing and dwarfing pas- sions, I began to trace a relationship, until I was convinced that they are all growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the freedom now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation toward it; and I could no more harbor any of the thieving and depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage of humanity than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.
“There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not yield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is the result. I feel such an increased
THE DIVIDED SELF 483
desire to do something useful that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy for play had returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It can’t, since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the absence of timidity in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning, and received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption until I had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then, lightning and thunder have been encountered under conditions which would formerly have caused great depression and discomfort, without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by unexpected sights or noises.
“‘ As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition may be. I have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by Christian Science may be one of the possibilities, for I note a marked improvement in the way my stomach does its duty in assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works better to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown. Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating an idea of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have within myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in misguiding it.” 1
The older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis \ and crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which. one might recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual / realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the other | sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Taleban? and Bunyan may again serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradual way, though it must be con- fessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these wind-
1 H. Frercuer : Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, New York and Chicago, 1899, pp. 26-36, abridged.
184 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
ings of the hearts of others, and one feels that theif words do not reveal their total secret.
Howe’er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending ques- tioning, seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was mean- ingless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of an- other, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with O=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows possible again.
“‘ Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for some- thing, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God — these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which I myself,” said Tolstoy, “‘ would not exist. I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual rea- soning and neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only answers to the question.”
Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible, — but yet their life! their life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question !
Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction —he says it took him two years to arrive there — that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had
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personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of con- ventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve com- mon wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.
“‘T remember,” he says, “one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with—the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?
“And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspi- rations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning. ... Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live, seek God, and there will be no life without him... .
“ After this, things cleared up within me and about me bet- ter than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be Getter. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recog- nizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,” — and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.!
As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubt- less also that. It was logically called for by the clash
1 I have considerably abridged Tolstoy’s words in my translation.
186 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruel- ties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous per- sonality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan’s recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ.
“My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; com- fort now and trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold.” When a good text comes home to him, ‘‘ This,” he writes, “ gave me good encouragement for the space of two or three hours ” ; or “ This was a good day to me, I hope I shall not forget it” ; or “ The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace”’; or “ This made a strange seizure on my spirit ; it brought light with it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous thoughts that before did ase, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.’
Such periods accumulate until he can Asso : “ And now
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remained only the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, orly some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon me” ; — and at last: ‘“‘ Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed ; I was loosed from my afflic- tions and irons; my temptations also fled away ; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me ; now went I| also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God. . . . Now could I see myself in Heaven and Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteous- ness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person... . Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.”
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as that by which men live ; for that is ex- actly what it 1s, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made hfe seem unbearable. For Tolstoy’s perceptions of evil
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appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole sys- tem of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life ; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution-of this world. To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent ministry of death. Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.
“TI must first pass a sentence of death,” he says, “upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoy- ments, and all, as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through Christ, as touching the world to come ; and as touching this world, to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and sister. .. . The parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you.” }
The ‘ hue of resolution ’ is there, but the full flood of ecstatic liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan’s soul.
These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the phenomenon technically called ‘ Conver- sion.” In the next lecture I shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.
1 In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening pore tions of the text.
LECTURE IX CONVERSION
O be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, X
to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so | many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sud. den, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously | wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and con- sciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring} such a moral change about.
Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint case of an unlet- tered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related in a scarce American pamphlet.’
I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of character lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence we have no premonitory knowledge.
Bradley thought that he had been already fully con- verted at the age of fourteen.
“JT thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing
1 A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to twenty-four years, including his remarkable experience of the power of the Holy Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison, Con necticut, 1830,
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to say to me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die; this world had no place in my affections, as 1 knew of, and every day appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire that all mankind might feel as I did; I wanted to have them all love God supremely. Previous to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul.” _ Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of
religion that had begun in his neighborhood. “Many of the young converts,” he says, ‘“‘ would come to me when in meeting and ask me if I had religion, and my reply generally was, 1 hope I have. This did not appear to satisfy them; they said they knew they had it. I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would be answered in my behalf.
“One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Acad- emy. He spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard before. The scene of that day ap- peared to be taking place, and so awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him again. He took his text from Revelation: ‘ And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.’ And he represented the terrors of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old gentleman turned to me and said, ‘This is what I call preaching.’ I thought the same; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did.
“J will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit which took place on the same night. Had any person
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told me previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed it, and should have thought the person de- luded that told me so. I went directly home after the meet- ing, and when I got home I wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after I got home, and felt indif- ferent to the things of religion until I began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about five minutes after, in the following manner :— ~ ‘ “At first, | began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. 1 began to feel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out, which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was unutterably full of the love and grace of God. Inthe mean time while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became exceedingly clear, and it ap- peared to me just as if the New Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the 26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: ‘ The Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be uttered.’ And all the time that my heart was a-beating, it made me groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop, though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in
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another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep my- self, I was so happy, fearing I should lose it — thinking within myself
‘ My willing soul would stay In such a frame as this.’
And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating, feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, — saying, ‘O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our own.’ After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for more, which was given to me as quick as thought. I then got up to dress myself, and found to my sur- prise that I could but just stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth. My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the eighth chap- ter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared so tome. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influ- enced similar to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of having power to give it to others, and doing
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what they did). After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion, which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in public before.
“T now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth, and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ.”
So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon his later life we gain no informa- tion. Now for a minuter survey of the constituent ele- ments of the conversion process.
If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each ‘aim’ which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have little m common. When one group is present and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from the mental field. The President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely ; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not ‘know him for the same person’ if they saw him as the camper.
If now he should never go back, and never again
194 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a perma- nently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the re- verse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the indi- vidual’s life, we tend to speak of the. phenomenon, and / perhaps to wonder at it, as a ‘ transformation.’ “These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine’s aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another would be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it were not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood-chop- per were not the wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspira- tions are mere velleitates, whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more cen- tral to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of Lord Gif- ford’s will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I did not think of being a teacher of philosophy . and what I listened to was as remote from my own life
CONVERSION 195
as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to success- fully identifying myself with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically unreal ob- ject, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.
When I say ‘Soul,’ you need not take me in the ontological sense unless you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts im the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only a succession of fields of con- sciousness: yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excite- ment, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it from the rest, words like ‘ here,’ ‘this,’ ‘ now,’ ‘ mine,’ or ‘me’; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions ‘there,’ ‘ then,’ ‘that,’ ‘his’ or ‘ thine,’ ‘it,’ ‘not me.’ But a ‘here’ can change to a ‘there,’ and a ‘there’ become a ‘here,’ and what was ‘mine’ and what was ‘not mine’ change their places.
What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters. Things hot and vital to us to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies. They are in short the centres of our dy- namic energy, whereas the cold parts leave us indiffer- ent and passive in proportion to their coldness.
Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no importance. It is exact enough, if you
196 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
recognize from your own experience the facts which | seek to designate by it.
Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excite- ment and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain sys- tem ; and then, if the change be a religious one, we call it a conversion, especially if it be by crisis, or sudden.
Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man’s consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works, call it the habitual centre of his personal energy. It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or an- other, be the centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set of ideas which he may pos- sess, whether they become central or remain peripheral in him.’ To say that a man is ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his con- _ sciousness, now take a central place, and that religious | aims form the habitual-eentre of his energy.
Now if you ask of psychology just how the excitement shifts in a man’s mental system, and why aims that were peripheral become at a certain moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a general de- scription of what happens, she is unable in a given case to account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who under- - goes the process can explain fully how particular expe- riences are able to change one’s centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act,
SEE
CONVERSION 197
repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one _ grows hot and alive within us, everything | ee to re-crystal- lize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only the ‘ motor efficacy,’ long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but such talk itself is only cir- cumlocution, for whence the sudden motor efficacy ? And our explanations then get so vague and general
that one realizes all the more the intense individuality _
py 4 OD
of the whole phenomenon. «ce {riineg” » VE VAS
In the end we fall back on ‘the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibri ¢ A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or rein- force one another. The collection of ideas alters by sub- traction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together ; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent.
Formed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardation in such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired, plays an accelerating