It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this
desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving
instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars,
is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without
its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German
representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom
we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing
as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst
the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen,
we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a
certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must
this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh.
The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed
on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy, then just
published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember
the awe-struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's class-room
therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic writings
I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart
and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and
I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be
actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these
illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.
But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it
would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations,
so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that
now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east,
I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen
may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen
lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in all these
higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,
as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English speech
may more and more pervade and influence the world.
As regards the manner in
which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I am neither a theologian,
nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology
is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist
the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other
of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore,
that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a
descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If the inquiry be psychological,
not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses
must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective
phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious
men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early
stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance,
one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows
from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men
who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible
account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively
modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The
documents humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought
for in the haunts of special erudition- they lie along the beaten highway; and
this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem,
suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I may
take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession, from books
that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this
will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more
adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from
the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious
entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily,
by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the
essence of the matter in hand.
The question, What are the
religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance?
are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view;
and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish
to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and materials
to which I have referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between
two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how
did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The
answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition.
The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil,
or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment
can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual
preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately,
and then adding them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly
easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has
its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called
the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential
point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic
conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the
holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when
they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical
fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still
further question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming
into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer
this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory
as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes
of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual
judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another
spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value
were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically
or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific
and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would
probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow
that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate
human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled
persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much
more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient
for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly
never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions
of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of the Bible's value
as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the foundation of
values differs. -
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment,
because there are many religious persons- some of you now present, possibly, are
among them- who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may
therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential point of view
from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must
be considered. When I handle them biologically and psychologically as if they
were mere curious facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation
of so sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully
expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a
prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of what
I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point.
There
can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued,
does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your
ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country,
whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for
him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by
imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand
religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which
were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.
These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not
as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are 'geniuses'
in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits
effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses
have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other
kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations.
Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they
have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career.
They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently
they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts
of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover,
these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious
authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no
better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion
which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of
shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return
to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England.
So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply
reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago
assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and
capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Every one who confronted him personally, from
Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged
his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox
was a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries
of this sort:-
"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head,
and saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what
place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to
me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished
the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to
go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and
ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds
were keeping their sheep. Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes.
I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in
me. So I put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds
trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I
was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo
to the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with
a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I went
into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands,
crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on
me. As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel
of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of
blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went out
of the town in peace: and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and
took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all
over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether
I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do: then, after I had
washed my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this a deep consideration came
upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it
The bloody city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and the
king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between
them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards
I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand Christians
were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the channel
of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the market-place, that I might
raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above
a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood
was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord." -
Bent as we are on studying
religion's existential conditions, we cannot possibly ignore these pathological
aspects of the subject. We must describe and name them just as if they occurred
in non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object
to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as
any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object
is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important
to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and
unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it
could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose
of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone." -
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing
originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as
if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks
that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with
which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections
flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of
a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly
M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:
"Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their
causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for
digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol
and sugar." When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the
existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel- quite apart from our
legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view
of what the authors are actually able to perform- menaced and negated in the springs
of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining
their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them
appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M.
Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption
that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments
which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances.
Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional.
Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated
nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion- probably
his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical
constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more
exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind
of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising
the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life.
Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints,
and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct
of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life,
Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection.
And the like. *
* As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time,
this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only
partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive
than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one,
so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation
may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther's wish
to marry a nun:- the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and
for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of
religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory- e.g., sex-deities and obscene
rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few
Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the
digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres,
or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious
language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole
organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression.
Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature
as is language drawn from the sexual life. We 'hunger and thirst' after righteousness;
we 'find the Lord a sweet savor;' we 'taste and see that he is good.' 'Spiritual
milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,' is a sub-title
of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed
quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but
of the greedy babe.
Saint Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describes
the 'orison of quietude': "In this state the soul is like a little child still
at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes
her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here....
Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which
His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without
even knowing that it cometh from the Lord." And again: "Consider the little infants,
united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from
time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure
of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God
oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses
closer upon the divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de
Dieu, vii. ch. i.
In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as
a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of
respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not
hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with
my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so
my soul panteth after thee, O my God." God's Breath in Man is the title of the
chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain
non-Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in
regulation of the inspiration and expiration.
These arguments are as good
as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions
of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere.
The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will
say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with
the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the
asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not
only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence.
One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics,
chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent
years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual
instinct:- but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony
is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age par excellence
would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past?
The
plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate
content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how
wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness.
Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned,
and acts impelled to. Any general assimilation is simply impossible: what we find
most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory
say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions
which the sex-organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as
to carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true;
but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences
from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value. In this sense
the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the
kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in
evaporating into a vague, general assertion of the dependence, somehow, of the
mind upon the body.
We are surely all familiar in a general
way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy.
We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard
as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights
by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel
outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities,
our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth;
and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded
system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint
Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the
occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric,
Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with
the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom
of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal
catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom
of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due
to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined. * -
* For a first-rate example of medical-materialist
reasoning, see an article on 'les Varietes du Type devot,' by Dr. Binet-Sangle,
in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
Let us ourselves look at the matter
in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical
connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence
of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If
we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must
be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once
an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate;
Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,-
and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts
of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?
According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not
a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not
some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned
just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately
enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy
atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious
about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get
the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all
our rapturer, and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and
beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious
content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state
of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value,
is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance
some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate
sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not
even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value
as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from
the state of their possessor's body at the time.
It is needless to say that
medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion.
It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly
superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use
of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production
of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to
discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves
and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether
illogical and inconsistent.
Let us play fair in this whole
matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain
states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning
their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons.
It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because
we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we speak
disparagingly of 'feverish fancies,' surely the fever-process as such is not the
ground of our disesteem- for aught we know to the contrary, 103 degrees or 104
degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate
and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either
the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms
of the convalescent hour. When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health's
peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment.
We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of
inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consistency
with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them
pass for true in our esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of
these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability
do not always agree. What immediately feels most 'good' is not always most 'true,'
when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between
Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely
'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into
an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence
of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails
over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and
mystical experience- we shall hereafter hear much of them- that carry an enormous
sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come
seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life makes either no
connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them.
Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to
be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the
spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home
to us acutely enough before these lectures end.
It is, however, a discordancy
that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility
of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological
causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau,
"is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr.
Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety,
and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet,
"is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to
be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category....
And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater
the unsoundness." * -
* J.F. NISBET: The Insanity of Genius, 3d. ed., London,
1893, pp. xvi, xxiv.
Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing
to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently
proceed thereupon to impugn the value of the fruits? Do they deduce a new spiritual
judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid
us to admire the productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that
no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No! their immediate spiritual
instincts are too strong for them here, and hold their own against inferences
which, in mere love of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only
too glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the
value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely,
as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments.
* But for the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical
line of attack either confines itself to such secular productions as every one
admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to
religious manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations
have been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual
grounds.
* MAX NORDAU, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration. -
In the
natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute
opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are
invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's
neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value
can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments
based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain
of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we
hold as true.
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness,
and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have
had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology,
if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible.
And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference
how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she
was with us here below.
You see that at bottom we are thrown
back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always
contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies
have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the
future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and
absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake- such has been the darling dream
of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the origin of the truth would be an
admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated
from one another from this point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion
shows that origin has always been a favorite test. Origin in immediate intuition;
origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision,
hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a higher
spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance
generally,- these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion
after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical materialists
are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their
predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive
way.
They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long
as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument
from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been
used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the
cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet
he finds himself forced to write:-
"What right have we to believe Nature under
any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an
incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the
work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is
alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if
in other qualities of character he was singularly defective- if indeed he were
hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then, to the
old and last resort of certitude,- namely the common assent of mankind, or of
the competent by instruction and training among mankind." * -
* H. MAUDSLEY:
Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 257, 256.
In other words,
not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley's
final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion
the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in
the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly,
among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct
and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In
the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such
messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the
demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person
twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one
to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience.
In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall
know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections
is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible
to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is
the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians. -
"In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, "we should certainly
adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come
to stand before him at the last day.... There is not one grace of the Spirit of
God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice
is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive
of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine."
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a vision,
or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks
by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. Says
Saint Teresa:- -
"Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength
to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations
of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy
she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields
to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily
strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of
being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination.... I showed
them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me:- they were my actual dispositions.
All those who knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the
fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from being hidden, was brilliantly
evident to all men. As for myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon
were its author, he could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell,
an expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices, and
filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead, for I saw clearly
that a single one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all that wealth."
*
* Autobiography, ch. xxviii.
I fear I may have made a longer excursus
than was necessary, and that fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which
may have arisen among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At
any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results
exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize
your piety no more.
Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground
of our final spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at
all with so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave pathological
questions out?
To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity
imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a better
understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions,
its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may
thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior
congeners, but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in
what its merits consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers
of corruption it may also be exposed.
Insane conditions have
this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the mental life, and enable
us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings. They play the part
in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of
the body. To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment
and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The
study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their
comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to the right
comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, 'fixed
ideas,' so called, have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal
will; and obsessions and delusions have performed the same service for that of
the normal faculty of belief.
Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated
by the attempts, of which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical
phenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental
balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which
it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined
with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that
he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic.
There is of course no special affinity between crankiness as such and superior
intellect, * for most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects
more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament, whatever
be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor
and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility.
He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately
into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims
it, or in some way 'works it off.' "What shall I think of it?" a common person
says to himself about a vexed question but in a 'cranky' mind "What must I do
about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the autobiography of that
high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following passage: "Plenty of
people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help
it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it,
but why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some
one ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man,
eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences
lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these two sentences
lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic
man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce-
as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound
to coalesce often enough- in the same individual, we have the best possible condition
for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their
ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions
or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso, Nisbet, and others
invoke statistics to defend their paradox. -
* Superior intellect, as Professor
Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development
of the faculty of association by similarity. -
To pass now to
religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall see, constitutes an
essential moment in every complete religious evolution. Take the happiness which
achieved religious belief confers. Take the trance-like states of insight into
truth which all religious mystics report. * These are each and all of them special
cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy,
whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious
happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the moment we renounce
the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with
others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimental results
and inner quality, in judging of values,- who does not see that we are likely
to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness,
or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we
can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing
to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they
were outside of nature's order altogether? -
* I may refer to a criticism
of the insanity theory of genius in the Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).
I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this supposition.
As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena, that would
not be in the least surprising or disconcerting, even were such phenomena certified
from on high to be the most precious of human experiences. No one organism can
possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some
way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In
the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non
of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are
the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and
mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world.
What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to
regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine
type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast,
and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would
be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
If there were
such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic
temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And
having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism
drop.
The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the
various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them better,
forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed 'the apperceiving mass' by which
we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures
to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass. I may succeed in discussing
religious experiences in a wider context than has been usual in university courses.