If
we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief concern?' one of
the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to
keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret
motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school
in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and
unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious
life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round
which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom
I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need
we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent
enjoyment may produce the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration
of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more
complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness,
wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift
of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be. With
such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that
men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of
its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it.
Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true- such, rightly or wrongly,
is one of the 'immediate inferences' of the religious logic used by ordinary men.
"The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer, * "may be experienced
in its reality- indeed only experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence
and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience
is the utterly incomparable feeling of happiness which is connected with the nearness,
and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us
to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality.
No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from
which every efficacious new theology should start."
* C. HILTY: Gluck, dritter
Theil, 1900, p. 18.
In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you
to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex
sorts to be treated on a later day.
In many persons, happiness is congenital
and irreclaimable. 'Cosmic emotion' inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm
and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who,
when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it,
as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately
flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the
hardships of their own condition, and is spite of the sinister theologies into
which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the
divine. The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the
church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused
of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been
a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized
by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all
natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac,-
if you but love [God], you may do as you incline,- is morally one of the profoundest
of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the
bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters they have been
refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to
constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom,
and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples
were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite
varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint
Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-christian movement
were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness
in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely
good.
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps
more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this
sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting
innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God,
and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no
deliverance from any antecedent burden.
"God has two families of children
on this earth," says Francis W. Newman, * "the once-born and the twice-born,"
and the once-born he describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict Judge,
not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious
world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally
have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence
they are not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd to
call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves at all. This childlike
quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for
they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent
trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which
the severer Majesty of God consists. *(2) He is to them the impersonation of Kindness
and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in
romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their
own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them
to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and
without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic
sense of excitement in their simple worship."
* The Soul; its Sorrows and
its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.
*(2) I once heard a lady describe
the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up to God."
In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than
in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly
pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and
in its recent 'liberal' developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally,
minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive
parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,- here
are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence. *
*
JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.
"Orthodox scholars say: 'In
the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true- God be
thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness,
lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the
deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit
down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. I have done wrong things enough
in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am
not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much
'health in me'; and in any body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite
of consumption and Saint Paul." In another letter Parker writes: "I have swum
in clear sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and
the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted
and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through
the grass,... up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has
left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight, When
I recall the years... I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such
little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the
chiefest of all my delights is still the religious."
Another good expression
of the 'once-born' type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with
no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr.
Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr.
Starbuck's circulars. I quote a part of it:
"I observe, with profound regret,
the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential
to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has
an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where
the religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion,
so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles
are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world
he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive
his suggestions to me.... I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood,
the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men
and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what
the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn
where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend
a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life
because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to
enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live
and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength
at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and
probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child
of wrath and wholly incapable of good." *
* STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion,
pp. 305, 306.
One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence
of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden
to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of
the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The
capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from
them as by a kind of congenital anaesthesia. *
* "I know not to what physical
laws philosophers will some day refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself,
I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre,
and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs
de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude-
each of them more optimistic than the last.
This finding of a luxury in woe
is very common during adolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses
it well:
"In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't
condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it?
I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping,
I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were
so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It
would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and
at the same time I am pleased- no, not exactly that- I know not how to express
it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the
very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable.
It is not I who undergo all this- my body weeps and cries; but something inside
of me which is above me is glad of it all." Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i.
67.
The supreme contemporary example of such an inability
to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.
"His favorite occupation," writes
his disciple, Dr. Bucke, seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by
himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the
varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree
frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things
gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew
the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive
so much absolute happiness from these things as be did. He was very fond of flowers,
either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers
just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things
and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm
for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and
I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never
knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked
him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute,
and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes
quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often
thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew
[him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue
to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It
did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him.
After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness
was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of
men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations- not
even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of
nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and
death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or
anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in
anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe
he ever felt it." *
* R.M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.
Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion
from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed
himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the
first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express
them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological
emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women,
life and death, and all things are divinely good.
Thus it has come about that
many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural
religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness
that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical
organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy
are already beginning to be drawn; * hymns are written by others in his peculiar
prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian
religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
* I refer to The
Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.
Whitman is often spoken of as a 'pagan.' The word nowadays
means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes
it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither
of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal
man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin
for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride
in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the
first sense of the word would never show.
"I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake
in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented
with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind
that lived thousands of years ago
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the
whole earth." *
* Song of Myself, 32.
No natural pagan could have written
these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or
Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of
the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman
resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon,
Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:
"Ah, friend,
thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better
far than thou.... Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn
or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether
with spear he smite, or arrow from the string." *
* Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's
translation.
Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword,
heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river
to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each
ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and
Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive
good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit
of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of us insist, that what immediately
appears as evil must be 'good in the making,' or something equally ingenious.
Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the
ills of nature,- Walt Whitman's verse, 'What is called good is perfect and what
is called bad is just as perfect,' would have been mere silliness to them,- nor
did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent 'another and a better world'
of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense
would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom
from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan
feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is
too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,
* and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards
optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman
is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.
* "God is afraid of me!" remarked
such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling
particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that
a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast.
If,
then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on
all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between
a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded.
In its involuntary variety, healthy mindedness is a way of feeling happy about
things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving
things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect
of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.
Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal
aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although,
when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one
who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection
shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional
state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive
weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in
possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than
the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively
happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his
eyes to it and hush it up.
But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in
a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or
parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the
phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple
change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its
sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun
it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound
in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert
his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise
their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so
far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist,
their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your
own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be
your principal concern.
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind
thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its
lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection
by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words
to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter
by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others?
What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates
the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation.
At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout
it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible
to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing
the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things
at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning
at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought
the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to
be congenial with its needs.
In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight
or persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical
persuasion plays an enormous 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 conditions 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 in a 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 I 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
without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned,
so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic
fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is. *
* "As I 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, polite surface of life,
and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic- or monadic foundations, form a spectacle
to which no habit reconciles me." R.L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355.
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
morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related.
We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness
of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny,
eternal punishment, and insist on 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 forefathers 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 theological elements. But in that 'theory of evolution'
which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years
swept so rapidly over Europe and America, 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 general 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 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 popular 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 examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received
in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of
mind may by courtesy be called 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 recognize 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. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided
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 as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and
morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are
the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious- they teach
us to rely on some supernatural 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 mentally 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.
Q. Have you had any experience which appeared providential?
A. None whatever.
There is no agency of the superintending 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, Longfellow, especially
Shakespeare, 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, incidental 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 contentment 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.
To my mind a current far
more important and interesting 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 profound 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 scheme of life, with both
a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development 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 transcendentalism;
another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of 'law'
and 'progress' and 'development'; another the optimistic popular science 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 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 precautionary states of mind. * Their belief has in a general
way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this
experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.
* 'Cautionary Verses for
Children': this title of a much used work, published 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-care 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 and America.
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 deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude
has proved possible 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 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 impossible to read it at all.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement 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 protesting, 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 studied with respect. *(2)
* I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr.
Henry Wood, especially the former. 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 Journal 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 suggestion; and the end of his essay contains an interesting
physiological 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 success. 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
primitive medicine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and witchcraft.
We are convinced that it is impossible 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 argument 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; it is
not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the
argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures,
otherwise 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 to a 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).
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 frowardness 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 deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive 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 forethought,
and have defined the word 'worry' as fearthought in contradistinction to forethought.
I have also defined fearthought 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." *
* HORACE
FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought minus Fearthought, Menticulture Series,
ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged.
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 and 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 old, lose our faculties, and again
become childlike; while crowning 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 middle of the day, and so on through a long list of
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 innumerable volunteers from daily life,-
the fear of accident, the possibility 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." *
* H.W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York,
1899, p. 38.
"Man," to quote another writer, "often has 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 responsive souls
among our ancestors who have been under the dominion 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." *
* HENRY
WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54.
Although
the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from
such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that
of ordinary Christians. *
* Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion
is for the exegetists 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 cured; 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.
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 conscious, but chiefly subconscious;
and through the subconscious 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 mysticism, of
transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal
self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view:
"The great
central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite 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 I call God. I care not what term you
may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, 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 harmony, 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." *
* R.W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand,
N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered passages together.
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 correspondents-
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.
"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 Nazarene:
'I and my Father are one,' has no 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 breaking down, and
had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia,
being on the verge of insanity; 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 possession of me.
"I think that the one thing which impressed me most
was 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 consciously, 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.
"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily
health as such, because that comes of itself, as an incidental 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 seeking of the
kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all else comes
as that which shall be 'added unto you'- as quite incidental and as a surprise
to us, perhaps; 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
development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal
and even unhealthy superfluities."
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.
"I 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 during 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 accept 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 commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family,
constantly saying to myself: 'The Power that created 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, which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few
of them; they came about two weeks apart.
"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is
well with me.
"2d. I am 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.
"5th. Once more
the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal.
Then came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and
always had been, for I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That
was to me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared
to be. I succeeded 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) I 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 ignorance 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 impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a religious
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. *
* The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD'S Glasgow Lectures
of 1890-92 passages like this abound:
"The declaration made in the beginning
of the ministry of Jesus that 'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven
is at hand,' passes with scarce 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 must 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 thought all the history of the Jews had
continually been growing 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.
But
philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence
of evil, whereas of the general 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 lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. 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, transcended 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 lie, 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 Diatetik
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 writers prints in bold type at the bottom
of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success,
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 similarity between the mind-cure
movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism
and works, with his anxious query, 'What shall I 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 influence, 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 manifestations) * 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.
* It 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.
But I here fear that I may begin to 'jar upon the nerves' of some of
the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think,
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 experience; and, seeking in these
lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where
we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual 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 conventionally '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 taking
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 persons 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 official 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 tendencies 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 and vexation
in their hands, and only make them twofold more the children of hell they were
before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible 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 narrations, 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 relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods
you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation 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. Something 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 experience. 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.
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 to
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 abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no
matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic
view of their ultimate causal explanation. *
* The theistic explanation is
by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature
is sincerely given up. The pantheistic 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' self), 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 in this
instance not spiritually) 'higher' ones which, seeking to 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.
When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic
conversion, 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 suggestive 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 inefficacious 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 anything for us that can be done." And this
in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely nothing,
or did nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue. *
* Within the churches
a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something
sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity
for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning 'merit.' "Illness,"
says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. a 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 (like 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 heresies
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 Zundel (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 character, 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 cares 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.
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. In what can the originality of any
religious movement 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." *
* 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.
The next condition of success is the apparent existence,
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 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 subconscious 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 hypnotic 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 development 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. *(2) 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.'" *(3)
* H.W.
DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.
*(2) DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58.
*(3) DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33.
"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, Wisdom, 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, 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 answer, he would remain utterly
passive until the reply came, and never once through many years' experience did
he find himself disappointed or misled." *(2)
* TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite,
p. 214.
*(2) TRINE: p. 117.
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.
"It 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 prosperity nor
in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse yourself
from this duty, either the difficulty 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 possible; 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." *
* Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p.
66.
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 both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write
with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that
whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances:
"High, healthful,
pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, 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 ourselves 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 systematic 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-contact with
the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from
the Inexhaustible Fountain." *
* HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental
Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged).
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 sprinkling 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 convinced, 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 religion 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 religious 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 outgrown. If you
ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive
thought 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 external 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-physical, 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 science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal
way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict
use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science's conceptions
practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether,
and you will always be corroborated. 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 impersonal 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 practically 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 respond to your individual
appeals and needs, are propositions 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 proclamation 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 peculiar
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 belief, not only not impugned, but
corroborated by its observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts
confirmed, 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 verification, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile
ago I made such account.
"I went into town to do some shopping one morning,
and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling increased
rapidly, until I had pains in an 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 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 I felt. Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
"I 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 confidence 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 passeth understanding.
There was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time
or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and faith.
"I do not know
how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but when I woke up in the
morning, I was well."
These are exceedingly trivial instances, * but in them,
if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment 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 regular 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 verified 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?
* See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.
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 all our verifications but experiences
that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual 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 outcome 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 succeeds in preventing and curing a certain
amount of disease. 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 better 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 different 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 verified 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. *
* 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 verified in some degree, each leaving out some part
of real experience.
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.
LECT_IV_&_V|APP
LECTURES
IV AND V
APPENDIX
CASE 1. "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 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, I 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 carried no conviction to my mind;
whatever influence was exerted was that of another person's thought or feeling
silently projected 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 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 such a 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 result 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 influence of
an excited imagination, or a consciously received suggestion of an hypnotic sort.
Lastly, I 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 observing,
I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an
arbitrary one, the nerves controlling 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 disease of any
kind, if it can be brought to bear. In my judgment 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 of the normally unconscious mind, so the strongest and most effective
impressions are those which it 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 unsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist),
our little daughter 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. Gradually an inner peace and tranquility 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 feelings of irritability disappeared. Even the expression
of my face changed noticeably.
"I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant
in discussion, 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.
"I may
say that the growth has all been toward the elimination 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 realization of the immanence of
God and the Divinity of man's true, inner self."