I CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY BY THB RBV. JAMES STALKER, D.D., AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF CHRIST," "THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL," &C, THIRD EDITION HODDER AND STOUGHTON NEW YORK AND LONDON TO W. W. M. 357396 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/christianpsycholOOstalrich THE JAMES SPRUNT LECTURES In 1911 Mr. James Sprunt, of Wilmington, North Carolina, gave to the Trustees of Union Theological Seminary, in Virginia, the sum of thirty thousand dolla/rs, for the purpose of establishing a perpetual lectureship, which would enable the institution to secure from time to time the services of distinguished ministers and authoritative scholars, outside the regular Faculty, as special lecturers on subjects connected with various departments of Christian thought and Christian work. The lecturers are chosen by the Faculty of the Seminary and a committee of the Board of Trustees, and the lectures are published after their delivery in accordance with a contract between the lecturer and these repre- sentatives of the institution. The third series of lectures on this foundation is presented in this volume. W. W. MOOBE, President, PEEFACE It has long been a conviction of the author that much more use than is common might be made by preachers of the materials furnished to them at college. From Church History, for example, endless illustrations might be derived; and the womanly heroism of a Blandina or the manly achievement of a Basil or an Ambrose might be a welcome change to hearers rather tired of the rope thrown to a drowning man or the rescue by a fireman from a burning house. Not less fruit- ful for the same purpose might be some of the studies pursued at the university, and especially those of the philosophical classes, such as Psy- chology and Ethics. In these studies many who become divinity students have excelled ; and no doubt their minds are permanently enriched, adorned and fertilised thereby; but few ever think of utilising these acquisitions systematically in their ordinary work. Yet such fruit from the tree of knowledge would, be welcomed by the 10 PREFACE people. I have myself, both in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow, taught Psychology in its religious aspects to a Bible Class ; and no other subject I ever tried either drew so large a class or kept it so well together to the end of the session. The circumstances in which these chapters came together, as lectures delivered at Richmond and Auburn Seminaries in the United States of America, necessitated the adoption of a popular style, because the audience consisted half of students and half of the general public. I do not, however, regret this; because the unintel- ligibility of philosophical writing is a reproach ; and, in my opinion, if one makes an idea perfectly clear to oneself, it is generally possible to make it intelligible to others. As the attendance of the public, when the lectures were delivered, did not abate to the end, I presume I was under- stood ; and this renders me hopeful that, in print, the course may still be able to secure a non- professional as well as a professional audience. At not a few points I have felt how much better the work might have been done by a psychologist intensely interested in religion than by a theologian intensely interested in psychology. PREFACE 11 But in all attempts to bring together different domains of knowledge there must be more or less of such onesidedness ; and I hope I have not made many serious mistakes. At all events my psychology has not been got up for the occasion ; and, though there are multitudes of books on Psychology which I should like to have read but have not been able, I believe I have read the best. In the notes will be found the names of the authors to whom I am most indebted; and I here acknowledge with gratitude that there is hardly a page that does not betray the influence of Sir William Hamilton and Professor James. Amidst the perplexities and uncertainties inci- dental to the study of theology, I have always felt it tranquillising to return to the kingdom that is within ; and the glamour of the adage, inscribed on a prominent spot in the philosophical classroom of my Alma Mater, has never left my mind, that "the proper study of mankind is man ". Early in the present year, it was mentioned in the public prints that a young minister in Eng- land, called to a university-city from a sphere in which he had been exceptionally useful, assigned, 12 PREFACE as his reason for complying, a desire to be in an academic centre, where he would have opportuni- ties of studying Psychology in its bearing on religion and theology. This is a straw indicat- ing in which direction scholarly minds are being borne at present. This young scholar may find, indeed, that the subject has already been more cultivated than he is aware. Yet there will be plenty of room for his contribution ; because it will only be through the labours of many inquirers that the wealth hidden in this field will be brought to light for the benefit of both pew and pulpit. To two of my students I have to express hearty thanks — to the Eev. R. J. Bain, M.A., for carefully reading the proofs, and to Mr. James McLeod for preparing the Index. Aberdeen, 1 September^ 1914. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOB I. From Individuality to Personality ... 16 t^ II. Body, Soul and Spirit 45 III. The Five Senses . *" 67 IV. The Memory 101 V. The Imagination " 123 VI. Habit 145 VII. The Reason < 165 VIII. The Heart y. 189 IX. The Will 211 X. The Oonscienoe . ...... 233 APPENDICES A. The Temperaments 257 B. Psychology and Evangelism 269 13 CHAPTER I FEOM INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY CHAPTER I FEOM INDIVIDUALITY TO PEESONALITY A GENERATION ago, when psychology was men- tioned in connexion with religion, it was Biblical Psychology that was thought of. It was the time when Biblical Theology — that is, the science of the succession and growth of ideas first in the Old Testament and then in the New — was assert- ing its right to a place among the theological sciences ; and those who were captured by this new study seemed to themselves to discern in the Old Testament, but especially in the New, in- dications of the presence of a Biblical Psycho- logy. That this should be found in the books of the Bible need occasion no surprise ; because, if the first subject about which the Bible speaks is God, the second is undoubtedly man, and it can scarcely speak as much as it does on this theme without bodying forth some connected system of ideas in relation to man's constitution and destiny. In the very first chapter of the Bible occurs the great saying : " God created (17) 2 18 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY man in His own image, in the image of God created He him ; male and female created He them/' and in the second chapter appears the equally suggestive statement : " And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul ". We have not pro- ceeded far when we come upon the great com- mandment : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,"' where "soul," "heart" and " might " seem to indicate a primitive effort to distinguish the different parts of the inner man ; and to distinguish these is always the purpose of psychology. When we come down to the New Testament, writers on Biblical Theo- logy are quite in the way of assuming that cer- tain psychological principles lie at the back of the teaching of Jesus Himself ; and they are still more confident that they can discern such in the writings of St. Paul. Delitzsch's " Bib- lical Psychology" was a work much read in those days, as was also the smaller but not less penetrative book of Beck on the same sub- ject. A scholar of our own time, Mr. Fletcher, in a work recently published under the same 1 Deut. VI. 5. INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 19 title, has admirably reproduced the substance of these older treatises, besides noticing what- ever of importance has been contributed by more recent speculation. It is not pretended that there is anywhere in the Bible a doctrine on the constitution of the human mind carrying the same authority as attaches to what is there said on the method of human salvation. When speaking on this subject the writers of the Bible made use of the conceptions and the phraseology current in their own times ; and St. Paul especi- ally may have employed such ideas as were taught in the schools where he received his education ; but these ideas could not be used as extensively as they are in the sacred text without deriving a colouring from the context ; ^ and an acquaintance with them forms a kind of grammar for the comprehension of not a little of the writing in which they occur. This must, in fact, always remain one of the keys for the inter- pretation of the Scriptures ; and we shall regard it as open to ourselves to revert to anything in Biblical Psychology which may help in the at- tainment of the object of which we are in pur- suit. In times more recent, when psychology and 20 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY religion have been connected, the object in view has been the Psychology of Religion. This phrase might be supposed to mean an inquiry as to whether there exists a special faculty for religion and, if so, what is its nature — an inquiry much needed to be raised and promising interest- ing results. But it has been limited to an inquiry into the phenomena of conversion. This study has been peculiarly congenial to America ; ^ and it may be traced back at least as far as Jonathan Edwards, who, in his great work on the Religious Affections, nobly led the way in the discussion of the subject, though I do not remember whether he himself made ^ Wobbermin, who has played a conspicuous part in intro- ducing the study of the Psychology of Eeligion into Germany, frankly confesses the indebtedness of this new branch of theological science to America. Thus, in his recent work " Zum Streit um die Eeligionspsychologie," pp. 1, 2, he says; " Auf diesem Gebiet ist unsere deutsche Theologie starker als auf irgend einem andern der Arbeit des Auslandes fiir man- nigfache Anregung und Befruchtung zu aufrichtigstem Dank verpflichtet. Ganz insonderheit gilt dies letztere gegeniiber der religionspsychologischen Arbeit Nordamerikas. Es ist das in dem Masze der Fall, dass bei uns vielfach die Ee- ligionspsychologie ausschliesslich und allein nach den Inten- tionen der amerikanischen Eeligionspsychologie beurteilt wird, und dass demgemass der Begriff amerikanische Eeligionspsy- chologie zur Bezeichnung des ganzen Forschungszweiges, um den es sich hier handelt, verwandt wird." INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 21 use of the phrase, Psychology of Keligion. Being both a thoroughly trained metaphysician and an ardent revivalist, he submitted the cases coming within the range of his observation in the revivals at Northampton to searching scrutiny, for the practical purpose of discriminating be- tween those features of the movement which were healthy and those which were the reverse ; but, as a by-product, he supplied the most in- teresting psychological observations on what takes place in the mind under religious excite- ment and under the operation of the Spirit of God. The multitudes of cases which can be studied in a revival tempt the student to close observation ; and, as revivals have been very characteristic elements in American Christianity, the best American preaching has been strongly tinged with this kind of philosophy. Not only, for example, will there be found in Henry Ward Beecher's ^'Lectures on Preaching," the shrewd- est and most penetrating observations on re- vivals, but in his sermons there is a constant element which may be called psychological, and this of a massive and realistic order. However lofty and spiritual might be the religious pheno- mena encountered by Beecher, his first instinctive tendency was always to ask whether they might 22 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY not have their origin in some mental or even physical peculiarity of the person who was their subject ; and he recognised that, in seeking spirit- ual results, a preacher must begin with bodily conditions, sometimes very remote from the ob- ject at which he is aiming. The same realism characterizes the work entitled *' The Psychology of Religion," by E. D. Starbuck. The author published this book in a " Contemporary Science Series," and he accumulated the cases on which his conclusions were based by the issue of cir- culars, addressed to numbers of persons whom he requested to furnish carefully specified par- ticulars of their own conversion. His most interesting conclusion was, that conversion is essentially a phenomenon of adolescence, closely associated with the peculiarities of puberty ; and he believed he could demonstrate that the same tendencies which issued in conversion in persons having a religious turn might manifest themselves in corresponding ethical developments in per- sons otherwise brought up.^ Professor James' 1 There is a close resemblance between the Christian doctrine of conversion and the conviction to which Eucken so often gives expression — it is, indeed, the ground-idea of all his thinking — that the principle which separates between the sheep and the goats is a decisive and ever-repeated choice between ideal and material ends in life. INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 23 work, entitled '' The Varieties of Religious Ex- perience," with its intellectual brilliance and literary skill, carried the ideas of Starbuck to the ends of the earth. An English imitator, Mr. Harold Begbie, in a wonderful collection of conversions made in connexion with the work of the Salvation Army,^ characterized his book as a footnote to the work of Professor James ; whereupon that scholar courteously rejoined, that his own work might as well be called a footnote to Mr. Harold Begbie's — a remark which he might have made with far more truth in reference to Mr. Starbuck ; for, though he introduced this student of his own to the public, by writing a commendatory note to " The Psychology of Re- ligion," his own work follows so closely on the lines of Starbuck as to create the impression that the disciple had captured the master, con- vincing him of the vastness and attractiveness of the field of inquiry into which the celebrated psychologist entered in his Gifibrd Lectures. The most vital question touched upon by James is, how far religious experience guaran- tees the existence and reality of the supernatural world from which it is supposed to descend. But this question had been investigated with 1 "Broken Earthenware," 24 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY great acumen a generation earlier by Von Frank, of Erlangen, in his epochmaking work on Re- ligious Certainty, wherein he strove to prove that religious experience does demand for its produc- tion all the great realities of the Gospel. If it be real — and it is the most unmistakably real of all the things whereof human beings can be certain — then God and Christ and salvation must be real too. In Germany the work of Von Frank has been followed up by likeminded scholars, such as Koestlin and Ihmels ; and at least one scholar belonging to the Ritschlian School,^ has proceeded on the same lines. In France the tendency has found an able representative in Professor Henri Bois, of Montauban, who mani- fested his zeal by visiting Wales during the recent revival and writing a large volume on the cases which he was able to observe on the spot.^ The late Dr. Dale, in his later years, gave expression to his belief in the value of the argument from experience in his highly prized volume entitled **The Living Christ and the Four Gospels " ; and a Scottish scholar. Dr. George Steven, has as- sociated himself with all that is best in these ^ Hebzog, " Der Begriff der Bekehrung ", 2 M. Bois' books are " Le B6veil au Pays de Galles " and " Quelques Beflexions sur la Psychologie des Reveils ". INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 25 American and Continental speculations both in his Cunningham Lectures, entitled "The Psy- chology of the Christian Soul," and in a thrilling narrative of conversion edited by him under the title, " Out of the Abyss ". From these observations it will be gathered how wide is the scope of Religious Psychology in the sense just indicated ; and we shall con- sider ourselves at liberty, wherever it may seem desirable, to advert to the facts included in such experience/ It is not, however, in the sense above assigned to either Biblical Psychology or the Psychology of Religion that Christian Psychology will be used ^ The most succinct and enlightening account I have any- where seen of the scope of ReUgious Psychology, when under- stood in the sense indicated above, is a brief sketch, from the pen of Professor Beckwith, published in the " Register of the Chicago Theological Seminary," to which he belongs. It is the wont of the members of the staff of this seminary to pub- lish from time to time in this Quarterly their several views on some topic of interest. In the number for January of the present year the subject was Evangelism, and each of the professors discussed it from the point of view of his own chair. Professor Beckwith's contribution was entitled " Psychology and Evangelism " ; and it seems to me so masterly that, with the gracious permission of the author, I have reprinted it in its entirety ; and it will be found in Ap- pendix B, p. 269. 26 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY in the following pages. Biblical Psychology is pre- scientific ; the speakers and writers of the Bible found it necessary for their purpose to make use of the conceptions of a primitive knowledge of man ; and it is reasonable to infer that those whose business it is to follow up their work may with advantage make use of the more scientific ideas on the same subject current in modern times. As has been stated above, the Psycho- logy of Religion is at present restricted to the phenomena of conversion. But this is an arbi- trary limitation. There is no reason whatever why the experiences of the religious life following conversion should not be treated in the same way ; and there are religious impressions pre- paratory to conversion of which the same may be said ; so that we might have a Psychology of Sanctification or a Psychology of Evangelization quite as well as a Psychology of Conversion. Besides, the spokesmen of the Psychology of Re- ligion expressly include experiences not specifi- cally Christian. It will be well, therefore, at this point to define more sharply what is in- tended by the use of the title Christian Psycho- logy- First, we begin with a saying of our Lord : " What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 27 world and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul " ? This is not only a saying of our Lord but, one might almost say, the saying ; so fundamental is it, and so numerous are the other sayings of His which cluster round it and expound its scope. It has been noted that the word " soul," found in the most commonly quoted version of this saying, is rendered in other Gospels, or in other nearly equivalent sayings, by the alternatives, "self "and "life V The " self " is what we should in modern lan- guage call the personality.^ It is what a human being is capable of becoming, and what he is bound to grow to. The field of humanity is the garden of God, and the personalities it produces are the flowers in this Eden. They are of every ^ See this more fully developed in the author's "Ethic of Jesus," ch. V. Cf. Matthew xvi. 25, 26; Luke ix. 25. 2 On Personality there are three good and easily accessible books. Momerie's " Personality " is a vigorous defence of the view of this subject taken by the Commonsense Phil- osophy, against Bain and Spencer. Illing worth's " Person- ality Human and Divine " shows how speculation concerning the personality of God and of Christ has widened and deepened the modes of conceiving the personality of man. Temple's "The Nature of Personality" contains an alert analysis of the elements entering into human personality. 28 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY variety, for their Maker is no lover of monotony ; and the glory of each is to attain to the size and beauty which will satisfy the Owner's eye. To miss this development is to be **lost". Even to miss it partially is a grave loss. Hence, on one occasion, when giving utterance to the great say- ing on which we are now commenting, Jesus gave warning not only against the loss but even the *' damage " of the soul.^ Anything which stunts the personality, preventing it from un- folding all the possibilities hidden in its germ, is a calamity of the first order.^ The second alternative translation, *^ life," suggests something different. Not only is there for every human being an individual develop- ment, of which the scope and law are hidden in the personality, but there is a world outside, with a sphere to fill and a work to do for God and man. The late Professor Drummond, in evan- gelizing young men, habitually substituted " life " in this sense for " soul " ; and, whatever may have been the reason, the substitution was singularly effective. He used to tell the students composing his audiences that they had only one 1 Luke IX. 25. 2 A work on Psychology, by Calkins, is significantly en- titled "The Science of Selves ". INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 29 life to live, and that they must make the most of it. They must not waste it on sin or squander it on trifles, but devote it, whole and unbroken, to an object on the accomplishment of which they would be able to look back with satisfaction, when life was coming to an end. Jesus Christ de- manded their life ; He would prize the gift, if they yielded it to Him ; and He would make the very best of it. To make the best use of it by His aid was salvation. It may have been because the salvation of the soul was a phrase which had become hackneyed and overworked that Drummond was led, half unconsciously, to substitute "life" for it; and he had scriptural justification for doing so ; but " the soul " is a term too characteristic of Jesus to be long exchanged for anything else in the preaching of His Gospel. It recalls all the most noble and astonishing things said by Him about the dignity and the destiny of man ; and it re- calls the most characteristic of His parables, such as the three in the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke. It recalls all that He said about the Fatherhood of God ; because the reason why the soul of man is so precious is that it comes from God ; and it recalls all that He said about the world uuseen and the life to come ; because the 30 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY most characteristic thing about the soul is its immortality.^ Justice is not, however, done to the teaching of Jesus on this subject unless it be noted that the greatness attributed to the soul by Him con- sists not only in its own inherent qualities, but also in what it may grow to, when its destiny is linked with His own. His estimate of the worth of humanity was flushed with the foresight of 1 In a work entitled " Essays Philosophical and Psycho- logical, in Honor of William James, Professor in Harvard University, by his Colleagues at Columbia University," there is a chapter by Wendell T. Bush on "A Factor in the Genesis of Idealism," in which the soul is discussed as if it were a relic of a system of ideas ready to vanish over the edge of the world into the inane — "an animistic survival from primitive culture ". The author is able to dignify his attempt with a quotation from Professor James, which seems to favour his own contention and can be paralleled, it must be confessed, by a few rash utterances of the same kind here and there in the same quarter; but it is quite opposed to James' views as a whole. This is not the only contemptuous reference to the soul which has become notorious in America in recent times. Such sneers do little credit to those who have originated them ; yet they may do good, if they be taken as protests against a way of speaking of the soul as if our concern about it belonged exclusively to the future. But, if " the soul " be understood in the wide sense indicated above, as the growing personality and as the life -task on which the powers of the personality are to be expended, to sneer at it is not becoming in any responsible man. INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 31 what the individual man might become in union with Himself. In the germ He saw the perfect flower ; and He intended Himself to make the children of men perfect, if only they would accept Him in the role in which He offered Himself, as the gardener and husbandman of character.^ ^ " The attitude of Christianity to the individual is essen- tially dynamical. It does not merely declare that he has in- trinsic value, as a new factor or aspect of truth may be declared. Still less does it make a sentimental assertion of the value of humanity and leave the assertion standing. Chris- tianity not only proclaims, but creates the fact. In other words its character is redemptive ; and it is in this light that its claim of the worth of the individual soul is to be judged. For the highest attestation of that claim is to be found in the fact that He who made it was willing to suffer even death for those whose value He proclaimed. The value of the souls of men depends on their relation to His work ; and hence that value is asserted less as an accomplished and unalterable fact than as a great possibility. The definiteness with which He distinguished between those who were on the side of the good and those who were its enemies wholly separates Jesus from those who apply the idea of the value of human- ity in an indiscriminate and merely sentimental way to all alike. For Him the human soul had real value only on certain conditions. When this point is grasped, part of the difficulty of the Christian view disappears. It does not de- mand that we should so far disregard the facts which are sternly forced upon us when we look out on the world as to attribute actual moral value to lives which are ranged on the side of evil rather than of good ; nor are we called upon to declare that moral beauty exists where only meanness and deformity can be seen. So far, the Christian doctrine is easier 82 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY This idea of a development, which is the unfold- ing towards beauty and perfection of the seed sown in natural endowment, enters deeply into both philosophical and Christian ethics. It is the central conception in Fichte's popular works ; and it passed from him to such English and American writers as George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Emerson, who preached it as a Gospel of Culture. The possibility of becoming far bigger and better than they at present are is immanent in all human beings ; and, if there be anything which is of absolute and infinite value, it is the attainment of this goal. But Christ is the author and finisher of this development ; He is the perfection to which others aspire ; it is in imitation of Him and in company with Him that the aspiring grow ; and, since He is the resurrec- tion and the life, the path along which He con- ducts is one of unending progress.^ to accept than any attribution of an actual developed value to every human soul ; for it recognises the fact of evil and the present degradation of many lives. But at the same time it asserts that evil may be conquered and that each life may be- come valuable, or, if we choose to put it so, that each life has value in virtue of its hidden possibilities of good." Babbodr, "A Philosophical Study of Christian Ethics," pp. 98, 99. Some sentences omitted. 1 The element of aspiration is prominent in the biblical INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 33 There was published recently, in Transylvania, a little book with a title which attracted me — " From Individuality to Personality "/ By In- dividuality the author meant what is given to everyone at his entrance into this world, and by Personality the image to which he may attain, through discipline and self-control, before the close of life. I am not quite sure about the no- menclature ; because individuality especially is hardly in our common usage limited to the sense here intended. But the conception is an inspir- ing one ; and it would be well to have definite names for both the starting-point and the goal. In another book, published recently in Germany, the same thing was expressed by a different title conception of man at all stages. The statement about man in Paradise, that he was created "in the image of God," must refer to a perfection not only already complete but also still to be achieved ; and to attain to the image of God is still the goal of man fallen, though now the path towards it is more prolonged and roundabout. There are some aspects of the image of God which man has not lost even by the Fall ; and even those which have been lost are not in the same position as if they had never been possessed ; because the recovery of them is now the problem of human salvation. The chapter on the Divine Image and Man's primitive State in the late Dr. Laidlaw's " Bible Doctrine of Man " is the finest chapter in a fine book. 1 By Q. Netoliczka. 3 34 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY — "From Person to Personality " ^ — and I have seen Nature used as the name for the starting- point, in place of either individuality or person. Whatever may be the phraseology employed, it is a most suggestive truth, that we come into the world with a certain quantity and quality of being, received from the hands of Nature, but issue out of life, at the opposite end, with the same transmuted and transfigured. This 1 NiEBERGALL, " Person und Personlichkeit ". The drift of this work is summed up in the following sentences from the closing paragraph : " So haben wir auf alien durchwan- derten Gebieten des Lebens bestatigt gefunden, was der Sinn unserer Zusammenstellung der beiden Worter Person und Personlichkeit sein soUte. Zwei Stufen von Werten stellen sie dar: die Person mit Eigenart und Eigenrecht ist die eine, die Personlichkeit als eigenartiger Besitz der hochsten geistigen Werte ist die andere. Zwei verschiedene — wie soil man sagen? — Welten oder Gebiete der Welt stehen hinter den beiden Werten: die Welt der Natur oder der ersten Schopfung, und die Welt des Geistes oder die hochste und eigentliche Welt Gottes. Wie diese beiden Welten aus einer Hand stammen, der Hand des Schopfers, der zugleich der Hort der Werte ist, so sind Person und Personlichkeit bestimmt, in die engste Beziehung zu einander zu treten: Die Person liefert das Eigene, ohne das eine Personlichkeit nicht sein kann, was sie ist ; aber die Personlichkeit nimmt dies Eigene als gewoUt in sich auf und setzt sich in Verbin- dung mit den hochsten Werten und Idealen des geistigen Lebens. So ist die Person die Grundlage der Personlichkeit, die Personlichkeit aber die Verklarung der Person." INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 35 process is our true history, and its progress our true welfare. It has been objected, indeed, to the philosophy of culture, as expounded by Fichte or Matthew Arnold, that it tends to arrogance and self-ab- sorption. It is a dangerous thing to be too much bound up in self, even if moral attainment be the goal. This, however, is corrected by the con- sideration, that it is in conflict with the world and in performing the common work of mankind that the personality grows. As Goethe has said, A talent ripens best when hid Away from stir and strife ; A character must grow amid The rush and roar of life. But the best guarantee against too much absorp- tion in self is to pursue culture under the inspira- tion of Jesus ; for He will inevitably lead the aspiring soul forth into the service of both God and man, since His will is the coming of the Kingdom of God. The word psyche^ from which psychology is formed, is the very Greek word used by Jesus in speaking about the soul. That is to say, the ob- ject to which He sought to draw the attention of mankind is the same to which psychology directs all its attention. No doubt His aim was 36 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY different from that of this science. Yet what He said about the soul has, in all the Christian cen- turies, been lending assistance to Psychology, as, on the other hand, Psychology is capable of lend- ing significance to His words. ^ Those who have taken in the truth, that their glory and destiny lie in the soul and its salvation, cannot but be interested in knowing what the soul is ; and the science which reveals what are the different parts and functions of the soul, and especially the 1 At this point the writer on Christian Psychology can ap- peal directly to the example of Christ Himself, of whom it is written, "He knew what was in man" (John ii. 25). The science of " what is in man " would be an excellent de- finition of Psychology ; and it would be easy, by going through the Gospels, to prove how often this statement might have been repeated about the Son of Man. In this passage the remark is a severe reflection on human nature ; but in others the implication is of an opposite character. How well, for example, did He know St. Peter, when He first gave him this name, forecasting all his future, overlooking his weak- nesses, and predicting that he who was unstable as water would yet become a man of rock. On my shelves there is a small book, recently published in Germany, with the title, " Jesus as Philosopher " ; and my esteemed and beloved friend of Kirkcaldy days, the Rev. Dr. McHardy, in a choice book entitled " The Higher Powers of the Soul," when interpreting the verse just quoted from the second chapter of St. John, speaks of Jesus as seeing all men with the eye not only of the Philosopher, but of the Poet, of the Prophet, and of the Lover. INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 37 development of which each of these is capable, may, it is evident, be a handmaid to Christianity. I believe myself, that it is possible to interest people of a very humble degree of education in knowledge about the inner man, when once the intellect has experienced a religious awakening ; and those whose vocation it is to kindle aspira- tion in the multitude may find the motives of which they are in search very close at hand. It was a saying of Vinet, that the soul of man and the Gospel of Christ answer to each other like lock and key ; and this maxim might almost be taken as the keynote of all that follows in this book. The Scottish School of philosophy has been honourably connected with the science of psycho- logy, the conclusions of which have penetrated far into the knowledge of the common people of Scotland, begetting in them a taste and facility for such ideas. It is highly characteristic that the lectures on Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton are nothing but a treatise on Psycho- logy. He is the greatest member of the Scottish School ; ^ his writings combining in a singular 1 See Seth : " English Philosophers and Schools of Philo- sophy " ; also McCosH : " The Scottish Philosophy, Biographi- cal, Expository, Critical". President McCosh carried the 38 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY degree knowledge brought from ancient times and foreign parts with a shrewdness and com- mon sense native to his own country. His mantle may perhaps be said to have passed from Scotland to America, where it has been worn by President McCosh and Professor James, as well as by psychologists of eminence still alive. These have, however, extended Hamilton's methods of inquiry by experimental and physio- logical research, carried on with extraordinary expenditure of acumen and patience ; and these new methods have been successfully cultivated also in England, France and Germany. By some, indeed, they have been employed in such a way as to destroy the very foundations of preceding attainment, for these writers would deprive the human subject of all the attributes which give him dignity, and they pretend to construct the science of the soul without a soul. Nietzsche and his disciples, in their passion for the revalu- ation of all values, would like to banish from the Scottish methods to the United States, and exercised a wide influence for many years. I happened to be staying under his hospitable roof at Princeton on his eighty-first birthday, when he received a gift of silver-plate from a large number of professors, who had not only profited from his instruc- tions, but had, largely through his influence, been placed in professorial chairs all over the American Continent. INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 39 mind of man the soul and its salvation and to put in their place the body and its health. This may be a reaction against certain mistakes of the past ; for it cannot be denied that the soul has often been treated as if it were a ghost, not connected in any way with the conditions or the fortunes of its companion, the body. Nothing of the kind can, however, be alleged against Jesus, who, though He spake about the soul as never man spake, yet treated the body with considera- tion and sympathy, throughout His entire minis- try combining the vocation of healer with that of preacher. This example will always recall His followers from the excesses of an overweening spirituality, however these may be indulged for a time; and it will justify Christian thinkers in taking the whole man into account when they speak of Christian Psychology. The above may suffice to prove that there is a close connexion between religion and psychology, and that it may be to the advantage of both to cultivate this connexion. If, on his bodily side, man be nothing but an infinitesimal portion of the physical universe, yet is this speck or atom more interesting than all the rest put together ; and it is, in itself, fearfully and wonderfully made. Therefore, anatomy, the science of the 40 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY parts of which the body is composed, and physio- logy, the science of the functions performed by these several parts, must always hold a place of honour among the physical sciences. But, if there be a part of man which links him up with God, and makes him the child and heir of eter- nity, then to know this must be of all studies the one most worthy of attention. It is not, however, only a speculative but also a practical study. The more the soul is studied, the more, it may be presumed, will its value be realised, and the more exact will the knowledge become of the means appropriate for its cultivation and development.^ ^ In a sprightly little work on Psychology, intended for teachers and entitled "Know your Own Mind," Mr. William Glover compares a person who has no acquaintance with the mechanism of his own mind to the driver of a motor-car totally ignorant of the structure of the machine he has to handle. "Each of us is in possession of a bit of mechanism very much more complex than a motor ; and we have to drive it whether we understand it or not. Happily it is largely self-acting, and gets along somehow, with very little con- scious attention from its owner-and-driver, but, left so much to its own devices, it acts capriciously. Sometimes it runs away with us. Sometimes it jibs, as it were, in a crowded thoroughfare. And, perhaps, it would be no exaggeration to say, that it carries us in a wrong direction oftener than in the right. "Knowing nothing then, or next to nothing, of their own INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 41 Nothing has been commoner, in the books on psychology written in recent times, than the warning not to break up the unity of the soul in studying it or to speak of it as if it were merely a compound of many different faculties. The soul is a unit, the different functions of which are going on together all the time ; it is a stream of consciousness, which is moving forward, every moment, over the entire surface between bank and bank. This may have been forgotten ; al- though, I fancy, warnings to the same effect can be found in philosophical literature ever since the human race began to meditate on this sub- ject. And, indeed, the warning may be repeated too often ; because it may be allowed to play into the hands of those who ignore the personal ele- ment in mind and convert the whole inner life into a mere succession of sensations and associa- tions. Even the student of the body may require to be warned that the body is a unit, every part inner nature, the coming generation grow up ; and failing to make good this deficiency in after-life, they fall into many consequent blunders. They blunder about choosing a profes- sion or trade, a hobby, companions, a husband or wife ; about the regulation and control of the intellect, the emotions, the will ; about dealings with themselves and dealings with their fellows. Every day they make mistakes which even a little knowledge of psychology might have prevented." 42 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY of which is affected by every other part ; yet this does not prevent him from availing himself of the utility to be derived from the separate study of the various members and functions. So, in psy- chology, while the unity of the whole is never to be forgotten, we must not deny ourselves the ad- vantage of the separate study of the parts. It would be to blow out the candle of knowledge for the sake of a whim to cease to recognise the broad distinction between thinking, feeling and willing ; and it would be equally pusillanimous to refrain from speaking, for example, about memory and imagination as separate faculties. For the purpose which we have at present in view, it must be made easy for the hearer in the pew to identify the part of his own experience about which the voice in the pulpit is speaking ; and the preacher must wield a language distinct and concrete, as far removed as possible from the vagueness and featurelessness into which the jargon of philosophy has of late been falling. We have to show not only that the soul is one, but also that it is manifold, and that its progress must be carried forward along various lines of development. The spirit which ought to char- acterize our attempt is that of the Eighth Psalm — INDIVIDUALITY TO PERSONALITY 43 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? For Thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honour — or of the words, almost biblical in their grand- eur : " What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel ! in apprehension like a god ! " CHAPTER II BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT CHAPTER II BODY. SOUL AND SPIEIT In the introductory chapter it has been mentioned that by Christian Psychology we do not mean the same thing as Biblical Psychology. Yet in Bib- lical Psychology a great deal of work has been done that is very relevant to our plan ; and of this we must not fail to take advantage. Indeed, it will be worth our while to linger a little longer at this introductory stage ; because from Biblical Psychology we can obtain a good preliminary glance at the whole subject, and express it in terms familiar to all readers of the Bible. If any person of ordinary intelligence were asked to say of what elements a human being is composed, the likelihood is that he would reply, Body and soul ; for such is the modern and popular view of human nature. The Bible, how- ever, takes a different view : it speaks of man as composed of body, soul and spirit. That is to (47) 48 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY say, while the modern division of human nature is twofold, the biblical is threefold ; or, in learned language, the one is a dichotomy and the other a trichotomy. A still more important point in the biblical view is that, in the individual man, any one of these three factors of which his nature is com- posed may be the predominant one, and that in different human beings these different factors do predominate. Thus, in one man the body may be predominant, in another the soul, in a third the spirit ; and the human race might be divided into different sections on this principle. For the different kinds of human beings so characterized the Greek language has adjectives. Thus, the man in whom the body is predominant would be called avdpcoTTos crcofjiaTLKo^f from crai/xa, the body ; the man in whom the soul is predominant would be called avOpoiiro^ i/zu^ik:©?, from ^v^tj, the soul ; and the man in whom the spirit is predominant av9pQ)7ro<; nvevfiaTLKo^s, from Trpevfiay the spirit. Unfortunately in the English language we do not possess three equivalent adjectives. For ai/Opcono^ croyfiaTLKos we might, indeed, say a "bodily or sensual man," and for avOpcoiro^ irvevfxaTLKos a " spiritual man," but we have no corresponding adjective derived from the word "soul" ; and the BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 49 Latin equivalent, ** animal," will not serve, because it has been degraded to designate the man in whom the body predominates. We must resort, there- fore, to circumlocution and speak of " a man after the body," " a man after the soul," " a man after the spirit," or " a man who minds the things of the body," " a man who minds the things of the soul," " a man who minds the things of the spirit "/ Let us now take a very slight glance from this point of view at the elements into which the Scripture divides human nature. The Body The body is the lowest section of our nature. It not only connects us directly with the animals beneath us, but even with the brute earth on which we tread ; for man was formed out of the dust of the ground, and he is destined ^ Another term similar to these three is avOpmro? o-apKtKos, from adpi, flesh. The noun " flesh " and especially the adjective " fleshly " would suggest a base meaning ; but it may be stated roughly that, in biblical language, flesh is equivalent to body plus soul ; that is to say, it denotes the whole man except the spirit. That it does not necessarily suggest anything evil is most conclusively proven by the statement of Scripture : " The Word was made flesh ". Still, it is perhaps the most difficult of all the psychological terms occurring in the Bible. Wendt, in German, and Dickson, in JBnglish, have written copiously on " Flesh and Spirit ". 4: 50 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY to return to the dust from which he has come. Man's body is, indeed, a noble piece of work. It is of the earth earthy, yet it is the beauty of the world. Man is an animal, but he is the para- gon of animals. In the symmetrical outlines and graceful movements of an athletic youth, or in the rounded contours and delicate colouring of feminine loveliness, it charms and melts the beholder. The anatomist, acquainted with its every part, examines with awe the structure of its tissues ; and the skill with which its hundreds of minute portions are built up into a perfect whole, adapted to the performance of its varied functions, such as the formation and circulation of the blood, fills with similar emotion the reverent physiologist. The glory, however, of the body lies not in its beauty or strength, but in its connexion with the invisible part of man. It is as the servant of a higher nature that the body attains its true des- tiny. It is the medium through which communica- tion is maintained between it and the outer world, transmitting to the mind through the senses the impressions of external things and carrying into effect in the outer world, through its organs of activity, the purposes of the mind. BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 51 In such service the body fulfils the intention of its creation and rises to its true honour. But the servant may become the master. This lowest part of the human constitution may become the ruling part. In this case the higher powers, over which it tyrannizes, are degraded ; the soul, with its strong and noble powers, becoming a shorn Samson in the lap of Delilah, and the spirit — that pure dove, with wings of silver and feathers of yellow gold, which ought to be soaring in the sunshine, near the gate of heaven — being com- pelled to " lie among the pots " and steep her plumage in the muddy stream of sensuality. Even the body itself, displaced from its natural position and deprived of its proper work, be- comes degraded and verges towards brutality. There are many forms which the predomin- ance of the body over the higher elements of human nature may assume, and they change from age to age ; but there have been three master- forms in which it has historically manifested it- self. These correspond to the three principal bodily appetites ; and they are gluttony, drunken- ness and lust. Gluttony is a sin which at certain epochs of history, such as the Decline of the Roman Em- pire, has assumed astounding dimensions ; there 52 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY being few passages in literature more nauseous than the pages of the ancient satirists who de- scribe this form of debauchery. In our day the sin calls for less remark, yet it is not unknown. There are persons to whom the great hour of the day is not the hour of work or the hour devoted to mental cultivation or the hour of prayer, but the hour of dining. Drunkenness has in the present age attained to a portentous diffusion, and Great Britain has, in connexion with it, an unenviable notoriety. This vice has an astonishing capability of sub- duing to itself the whole being. Examples are known to all of persons whose entire powers of mind and body it has absorbed, drink being what they work for, what they are always thinking about, what they scheme for with inexhaustible ingenuity. This is a vice which soon stamps on manhood, and still more quickly on womanhood, its own vile mark ; and it is constantly picking out its victims from every section of society. But perhaps it is the third of this miserable trio — lust — which, both on account of its own native character and the part it has played in history, deserves the bad eminence of being looked upon as the representative of the des- potism of the body over the rest of the human BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 53 constitution. Its power of drenching the whole being with pollution is supreme. It can so people the imagination with its hideous pictures that the mind is unable to think of anything else ; it can override every motive of prudence, as well as every feeling of virtue or benevolence ; till at last, having wrecked body, mind and spirit together, it closes up its victim's miserable career in terror and dishonour. These sins of the body abound in every part of the globe, and the history of the world is, to a not inconsiderable extent, a history of them. They abound even in Protestant countries, and they form the problem of the city. Rare are the homes into which the foul wash of one or other of them has never penetrated. Merely because men are men, having bodies with the appetites on which these vices engraft themselves, all have need to be on their guard, lest the animal nature obtain the mastery. '* Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation." "And let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." The Soul The soul is the intermediate element in man's nature, between the body at the bottom and the spirit at the top. Let it be repeated, that this 54 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY is not modern but scriptural language. Even in the Scripture it is not used scientifically, but popularly ; as is clearly proved by the fact that the Bible does not use it consistently, but some- times speaks of the soul, as we do, as a name for the whole of the inner man, and only now and then speaks of soul and spirit as distinct from each other. Some eminent biblical scholars would, indeed, object to this as too definite a distinction, and would prefer to say that the soul is the whole inner man dealing with the world and time, and the spirit the same entity dealing with God and eternity. On the whole, however, the Bible splits the entity which we call the soul into two parts — soul and spirit — though it is the reverse of easy to say which of the powers recognised by modern psychology as constituting the soul are to be identified with the one division and which with the other. Evi- dently, however, those of the soul are lower and those of the spirit higher. Take it either way — either that the soul con- sists of the powers of the inner man which deal with this world and with time or that it signifies the whole inner man in so far as it occupies itself with the world and time — and it is clear that the man in whom the soul is predominant must BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 55 be the same whom we call a " man of the world ". And what he is like is known to all. The man of the world is not completely the slave of the body, like the drunkard ; but the reason why he does not yield to the bodily ap- petites is not because to do so would be a sin and a shame, but because it would be imprudent. He indulges in occasional excess and enjoys it, but he does not allow it to interfere with busi- ness or with his social standing. He has no tingling sense of self-abasement at the presence in his mind of sensual thoughts ; for what he fears is not sin, but being found out. The man of the world goes to Church, because this is expected of him ; and he gives an occasional subscription for the same reason ; but he has no faith in very earnest religion or in extra- ordinary liberality. He never hears of an ex- ceptionally noble or disinterested action without suspecting that, if only everything were known, it would be found, after all, that selfishness lay at the root of it. It is a keen pleasure to him when anyone who has made a great profession of religion comes to grief and is proved to have been no more a saint than his neighbours. By a sort of instinct the man of the world takes to money-making as the be-all and end-all of 56 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY existence ; and towards this aim he pursues his way by all sorts of underground and circuitous paths, not infrequently missing his object through the over-eagerness of his pursuit. Parallel to this pursuit of gain by the typical worldly man is the pursuit of social advancement by the thor- oughly worldly woman. With tooth and claw she fights for her position. How servile she is to superiors, how jealous of equals, how con- temptuous of inferiors ! I am, however, drawing this portrait too grossly; for, if it be painted so harshly, none will recognise themselves in it, though some may identify their neighbours. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the man in whom the soul is predominant cannot rise higher than this. A man may be suppressing his spirit and living wholly for this world, and yet he may be aiming at objects far above money or social ambition. Such objects as industry, family affection, mental culture and philanthropy belong to this world and to time ; but the pursuit of such objects will form a character very different from the one just sketched ; and it is only fair to sketch this character also. Figure, then, a man who delights in his daily work, doing it not as a drudge or merely for the BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 57 sake of the wages it brings, but for pure love of it and on account of the moral discipline it sup- plies, because industry keeps the mind clear of those birds of evil that are constantly alighting on the field of the indolent ; a man who, when his day's work is over, hurries home to his domestic circle, and is happier there than even at his work, finding a still better moral discipline in the streams of affection which pour over his heart fresh and limpid as the brooks on a hillside ; a man who, as far as his leisure and opportunities permit, keeps up with the movements of the time in literature and art, in science and politics, and dearly enjoys a quiet hour spent over a poem in which there is the true pulse of song or a speech in which there is the true ring of eloquence, or one of those books full of thoughts that breathe and words that burn, which are the most precious intellectual heritage of the race ; a man who takes an in- terest in his fellowmen, in the affairs of the Church and the affairs of the State, and is always willing to lend a helping hand to a brother pull- ing hard against the stream ; and yet a man who never kneels in secret to pray to his Maker and is well aware that, though he may have lingered in the porch, he has never entered the temple of religion. 58 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY Such a man would feel it an infinite degrada- tion to be enslaved to any lust of the body ; yet his spirit, the godward side of his nature, has never been wakened into activity ; and, in short, he is " a man after the soul ". His life is a beautiful one, and a wise Christian teacher would not lay a hand on any of its fine features. Yet there is a deeper secret. The Deity he worships is an unknown God. He requires to let Jesus Christ, with all the influence of His example and companionship and with all the virtue of His life and death, into his life. In short, his spirit, the noblest part of his manhood, needs to be awakened, and the centre of his life transferred into this section of his constitution. The Spirit The third element in the human constitution is the spirit. If the soul be the side of man which turns towards the earth, the spirit is the side which turns towards heaven. It is the throne of God in human nature. In the spirit there are three master-powers, with each of which God can be apprehended in a peculiar way. These are reason, love and con- science. By means of the first we know Him, by means of the second we unite ourselves with BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 59 Him, and by means of the third we obey Him. Of course, these powers may also be exercised about other things and persons ; but God is their supreme object. Humanity can have no higher honour than this — to possess powers on which, as on the outspread wings of the cherubim above the mercy-seat, the presence of God may rest. The spirit, being by nature the highest element in man, is intended by the Creator to rule in the human constitution. It is not, indeed, intended to abolish or overbear the inferior powers. It is not intended, for example, to interfere with such tendencies of the soul, though these are earth- ward, as industry, family affection, culture and philanthropy : on the contrary, it takes these and all similar tendencies under its protection. It does not even destroy the appetites of the body ; for these have essential functions to perform in the human economy. But the spirit takes con- trol of the inferior powers and regulates their action. It imparts dignity to human nature, and it introduces harmony into its activities.^ ^ The body, when surrendered to the control of the spirit, rises into signal honour and has before it a glorious destiny. In this world it becomes a " temple of the Holy Ghost," this dignity binding those who enjoy it to glorify God in their body. Its members, though in time past they may have served as instruments of unrighteousness, can be presented unto 60 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY It is an ancient notion that human nature ought to be like a chariot : the body is the ma- God as " instruments of righteousness ". But the most distinc- tive doctrine of Scripture regarding the body is that it will rise again. This is hinted even in the Old Testament, and it is everywhere clearly intimated in the New. This is to be the crowning act of the redemption of the whole man. It is involved in the work of Christ, and it is to be effected by the same power which raised Jesus from the dead : "If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body by His Spirit that dwelleth in you ", At the same time, however, it is a victory of man's own spirit over the rebellious flesh ; -€bnd St. Paul describes his own pursuit of holiness, as well as his service to God and man, as a ceaseless effort to ** at- tain unto the resurrection of the dead ". To such an extent will the victorious spirit ultimately penetrate the body with its own nature that the latter will itself become spiritual ; for, " if there is a natural body, there is alsoia spiritual body ". Com- pare Laidlaw, " The Bible Doctrine of Man," pp. 250 ff. On the resurrection of the body this author says (p. 256) : " Science at the present day stands in a very different and more friendly attitude towards this belief of man's reappearance in the future world than did the science of one or two generations ago. We are now assured that our present bodies are the same, yet not the same, that we have had from our birth. That there is in the body some principle, law, or specific form, which remains ever the same amid the flux of particles, is now an axiom of knowledge. We may say, in an almost literal sense, that we pass through the process of resurrec- tion constantly ; that we are always dyingan the flesh, always rising anew by virtue of the law of organic identity. Behind BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 61 terial framework ; the powers of the soul are the steeds by which this is wheeled along ; but the spirit is the charioteer by whose keen eye the course is determined and in whose hands the reins are held. Other thinkers have compared human nature, as it ought to be, with the Hebrew temple : the body is the outer court, the soul the holy place, the spirit the holy of holies. But it is the presence of God in the spirit, kept there by active faith and love, which lends dignity and meaning to the whole. Without God human nature is as meaningless as a temple out of which the Deity has departed and in which the altar-fire has been extinguished. The supremacy of the spirit, then, in human nature is the destiny of man. Yet it is not the work of man. In actual men the spirit has been dethroned, and its place has been usurped by the soul or the body. To restore the spirit to its lawful position, there is necessary an agency stronger than itself, and this is the Spirit of God. It is a significant fact that the name in Scripture this, again, lies the greater law of personal identity — that there is a being which thinks, feels, and wills, maintains a con- nected growth from infancy to age in knowledge and moral character. This does not cease at death. The bearing of such ideas on the identity of the future body with the present is obvious." 62 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY for the highest element in human nature is the same as that for one of the divisions in the divine nature : the Third Person of the Trinity is the Spirit, and the highest part of man is the spirit. This is not a chance coincidence. These are akin to each other, and it is only when the Spirit of God enters into the spirit of man and abides in it, purifying, potentiating and sustaining, that the latter is able to recover its lost dignity and exercise over the other elements of human nature its legitiniate and benignant authority. Every human being, then, has these three elements — body, soul, spirit — in his own person, and the centre of his being may lie in any of the three, rendering him ''a man after the body," "a man after the soul," or " a man after the spirit ". But there is a further truth, and perhaps a more solemn one — that this centre is never at rest, but is constantly moving upwards or downwards — upwards in the direction of spirit or downwards in the direction of body. The reason of this is because it is being constantly acted on by two attractions, the one below and the other above, the one being the attraction of temptation and the other that of the Spirit of God. The most solemn question which any man can ask about himself is, whether he is getting better or worse BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 63 — whether he is leaving behind him the inno- cence of childhood and the aspiration of youth, and hardening into worldliness or being besotted with indulgence, or whether, on the contrary, he is leaving behind him the errors of youth and the besetting sins of his disposition, and rising into communion with God and likeness to Christ ; but the answer to this question is decided by the answer that must be given to the other question, whether he is obeying the attraction from be- neath or the attraction from above. To break away from the attraction of temptation and yield to that of the Spirit of God may require a great decision and a prolonged effort ; but there are few motives by which men can be induced to make this choice and maintain this exertion so potent as the consideration of the high destiny to which, by the very constitution of their manhood, they have been obviously called. When a man has read on the fleshy tablets of his own inner- most being the prophecy, inscribed there by the divine finger, of what he is to become, it is not difficult to forget the things which are behind and to press towards the mark. Dr. A. B. D. Alexander, in his work on the Ethics of St. Paul, gives an excellent sum- 64 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY normal mind attaches no value to the dream and regards it merely as a series of disjointed fancies without meaning. In these matter-of-fact times, we have learned to distrust him who claims to interpret dreams, classing him with the witch- doctor and the astrologer who for a considera- tion will cast your horoscope and foretell your future. Nevertheless, the dream is a product of some mental process; it must have some mechanism behind it; it must therefore in some sense or other have a meaning for us, inasmuch as it indicates psychic activity of some nature. Many persons will declare that the dream is merely the remnant of the day's psychic activ- ities expressed in fragmentary fashion, it is but the left-over images of the day's thinking un- controlled by waking intelligence. The dream is in reality far more significant than that. Freud has proved definitely that every dream has significance for the individual's psychic life. A certain t3^e of dream indicates a certain state of mind. The dream is a wish- fulfilment, either in literal or symbolized form. Children, in whom the Conscious is not clearly differentiated from the Unconscious, will dream the literal fulfilment of their desires. The for- bidden excursion, or the forbidden viand, will make its appearance in childish dreams. With the adult, these take on a symbolized form, so highly symbolized that they are difficult or even THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 65 impossible to interpret. By an elaborate mech- anism, which involves displacement, ambiva- lence, and other distortions and elaborations of the dream-work, the dream arrives at its goal, which is the satisfaction of desire. A friend who was forced to leave his abode and hunt another relates the following dream: He found himself in a large building, standing on the edge of a high platform. Some one said that the elevator would be down soon. From somewhere up above a small car descended, shaped like a small house, painted white and suspended by a cable which seemed to be com- posed of strands of gold. It swung out some distance from the platform on which he stood. He put out one foot tentatively to step into the car but drew back as the distance was too great. A stout, fashionably dressed man appeared, pushed him aside, entered the car and descended, leaving the dreamer there isolated. Now it happened that the wife of the dreamer had been house-hunting on the day previous to the night of the dream, and had come home and reported that she had found a small house, painted white, in a fashionable section of the town, some distance away. My friend had thought: "We cannot afford a house in that section with our limited income; its upkeep would cost a great deal, the rent would be high; besides, it is too far from my place of business. Some more opulent person had better take it," CHAPTER III THE FIVE SENSES CHAPTER III THE FIVE SENSES In the foregoing chapter we obtained a prelimin- ary glance of the whole field of psychology from a biblical point of view. Now we proceed to in- dicate how the same field is viewed from the modern and scientific standpoint. While the five senses and their uses are mani- fest to all, it is not so well known that with these is connected a system of nerves which, like the wires of a telegraph-system, carry to the brain the impressions made on them by the objects of the external world. The brain forms the head- quarters to which all the information derived in any way from the outside world is transmitted. Here the self resides ; and all the rest of the organism may be compared to the rooms, passages, gardens and walls surrounding the spot in which this subject has his home. But it is still less generally known that, besides this system of tele- graphy from the senses to the brain, there is in (69) 70 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY the human body a system of nerves incessantly carrying messages in the opposite direction — namely, from the brain to the muscles and the organs of motion, such as the hands and the feet. And, as by the nerves going inwards from the senses to the brain all our knowledge is obtained, so by the nerves proceeding from the brain to the muscles all our actions are performed. These two, knowing and acting, make up two- thirds of life. But there is a third division, which is feeling ; and this has its location at the junc- tion of the nerves which go inwards and those which come outwards. The three are intimately connected ; for it is by the information coming along the pathways of knowledge from the out- side that feeling is excited ; and it is excited feeling which, in its turn, gives rise to action. The nerves proceeding to the brain and those proceeding from it are called respectively the sensory and the motor systems, and they form the physical basis upon which the whole of life is from day to day carried on. If we conceive the double system as an arc, stretching from where impressions are received by the bodily senses to where action issues from the person of the human subject at the organs of motion, all the topics with which Psychology has to deal lie along this arc. THE FIVE SENSES 71 On the left are, first, the powers of know- ing, including such faculties as sensation and perception, memory and imagination, judgment and reasoning. Then, in the middle of the arc, are the feelings, representing such varieties as impulses, emotions, sentiments. Lastly, on the right of the arc are the powers directly con- cerned with action, such as desire, conscience and will. It will be well to bear this image of an arc in mind. It emphasizes the unity of the soul's life, because all parts of it are in motion all the time. Yet it reminds us, also, that there are large obvious divisions of the souFs activity ; be- cause knowledge, feeling and volition, as well as the subdivisions of these, can be clearly dis- tinguished from one another. And, finally, it represents the whole life as a connected system — knowledge giving rise to feeling, and feeling, in its turn, originating action. Thus is life seen as a whole ; and Psychology lets us know what our life consists of, as it goes on from morning to night and from year to year, till our span is ended, and our contribution has been made to the larger life of the world. To anyone familiar, to any extent, with the de- velopment of human knowledge it must have n CHRISTIAN PSVCttOLOGY often been occasion of surprise to note the sub- jects which the ancients knew and those of which they were ignorant — how 'frequently they had studied deeply that which was far away, while neglecting that which was at hand ; knowing not a little, for example, about astronomy but noth- ing whatever of geology. Of this, however, there is no illustration so striking as the extent of their knowledge of the mind and its operations, con- trasted with their ignorance of the brain and the nervous system, without the assistance of which mental work cannot be performed. The notions of the ancients about the invisible parts of human physiology were of the most fantastic descrip- tion ; and it is only in very recent times that accurate knowledge has been obtained. There can be little doubt, however, that the double system of nerves above described furnishes the simplest key to the mysteries of human life, or that it will be by the door which this key opens that the generations of the future will incline to enter this region of knowledge. So promising, indeed, is this mode of approach that some of those making use of it are inclined to ignore or despise any other. But the wiser heads among those employing the experimental method do not forget that there is another door — that of THE FIVE SENSES Ifd introspection — which was used for many cen- turies, admitting many of the greatest thinkers of the race, who did work that is immortal and can never be superseded. This is the at- titude, for example, of Professor Hanna Thom- son, of New York, a scholar of distinction in medical science who, in a book much read on his own side of the Atlantic, entitled "Brain and Personality," furnishes a succinct history both of the notions entertained on this subject in the past and of the freshest discoveries of recent times. Much of his argument has an appear- ance of drifting towards materialism, but his book is, on the contrary, from beginning to end, a skilful exposition of a spiritual view of human nature; and, in the true spirit of science, the author never loses sight of the debt due to the great thinkers of the past, or imagines that, though a certain method of inquiry may be the most congenial to the present age, this forbids the belief that other seekers after truth, follow- ing the only path known to them, may have taken ample possession of the common field. This is also the attitude of the sanest thinkers on our own side of the water ; and it may be held as certain that none can undervalue such stupend- ous structures of human thought as the Ancient 74 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY Logic or the Modern Idealism except those who do so in ignorance. All that follows in this book will be an ex- pansion of what has now been stated. Mean- time, we return to consider the five gateways of knowledge, as the senses have been called, for it is with these that the process of knowing com- mences. On his physical side, man is nothing more than a few pounds of the clay of which all things are composed, enabled by the action of certain forces to stand upright for a certain time and to move about. But, both internally and externally, this little mass of the matter composing the earth is very singularly constituted, so as to serve im- portant purposes. Every soul has under its con- trol a small mass of material called a body, through means of which it obtains a hold on the whole material universe. Inside the body, as has been indicated above there is an immense system of delicate wires, called nerves, extending from the outside surface to the brain ; and outside, in connexion with these, there are the five senses, constantly forag- ing for a supply of knowledge. The senses are peculiar modifications of the external surface of the body, by which different sides of the external THE FIVE SENSES 75 world are discerned. The ear discerns sounds, the eye sights, the touch forms, and so on. Every- one has had the dream that, if we had more senses than the five, we might perceive other sides of nature which are at present a blank to us ; and no doubt it would be rash to assert dog- matically that the qualities of things are limited to our powers of perception. There are indica- tions that other animals possess senses by which they discern some things not perceived by us. For instance, changes of weather appear to be antici- pated by certain animals considerably before they dawn upon the human faculties ; and the marvel- lous power exhibited by carrier-pigeons and lost cats and dogs, to find their way home, suggest something of the same kind. Of course, on the other hand, many animals lack organs which we possess ; and man far surpasses other animals, if not in the keenness of particular senses, at least in the range of objects which the senses bring within his ken. The most general and typical of the senses is that of touch. Indeed, all the other senses may be called modifications of this one. When we hear the sound of a distant waterfall, the object really touches the ear ; because it generates in the atmosphere waves, by the impact of which 76 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY on the organ of hearing we are made aware of its proximity. Even the star which we see in the far-away heavens must touch us in order to be seen ; that is to say, it must propagate in our direction waves of light, and only when these reach their destination and come in contact with the organ of vision does sight take place. Touch proper belongs, in varying degrees, to the whole surface of the body ; for the contact of almost any part of our skin with external substances will inform us whether these are cold or hot, rough or smooth, hard or soft ; but the sensation is intensified in certain parts of the body, such as the lips, the tip of the tongue, and the finger-tips.^ The division of the hand into five long and separ- able fingers, with this peculiar sensitiveness in the tip of each, and the position of the hand, at the extremity of the long and jointed arm, give the sense of touch a wide range ; so that the amount of information conveyed to the mind by the use of this sense is extensive and varied. The senses of taste and smell are usually ^In any surface-area — e.g., the wrist — it may be shown that there are spots, some of which register heat and cold, some pain, etc. These are the temperature-spots, the pressure-spots, etc. And it is possible to cover the wrist with dots, in differently coloured inks, showing where the respective spots are. THE FIVE SENSES 77 spoken of as inferior to the rest in importance, the impressions conveyed through them being less distinct and less easily remembered than those of the other senses. Yet they are the channels of a very considerable amount of plea- sure ; and they ward off a great variety of dangers — a service not perhaps inferior. Located at the entrance of the two passages opening into the body, they may be regarded as sentinels, placed there to give warning lest the citadel of life should receive any detriment. In certain cases, especially where there is defect in other senses, they may attain to abnormal develop- ment. Hearing and seeing are, however, the two im- perial senses ; and it is difficult to say which of them is the more important, or whether the loss of hearing or of sight be the graver calamity. The organs, also, by which they are served are almost equally wonderful products of creative purpose. Everyone, while walking by the seashore, has lifted a shell to his ear ; but not everyone may, in so doing, have noticed how like each other are the two things which he has brought into con- tact. The external ear, with its curious irregular convolutions, bears a remarkable resemblance to 78 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY a shallow, open shell ; and there is an internal ear, which bears a considerable resemblance to one of those elongated, spiral shells, terminating in a point, which may also be picked up on the seashore. The internal ear is sunk in the head ; one of the Psalms speaks of the ear being "planted," and this is an expressive phrase; for it is somewhat like a tapering root thrust into the earth. When the sound is gathered in the outside shell, it passes inwards, till it comes to a membrane stretched across the passage, when this membrane vibrates, as does the top of a drum, when it is struck ; hence its familiar name — the " drum " of the ear. On the inner side of this drum the sound is carried forward by means of three tiny bones, called respectively, from their shapes, the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. The innermost of the three, the stirrup, when thus agitated, knocks or kicks at a kind of window, where the message is taken in. Beyond the window, the new carrier is a tiny pool of water. It is well known how water aids the transmission of sound ; and of this facility ad- vantage is taken in the ear. Still further in, there is the most marvellous of all the parts of the ear — literally, a musical instrument of a hundred strings.^ The strings are nerves, so THE FIVE SENSES 79 slender that a microscope is required to see them ; and the fingers by which this fairy piano is played are the waves of the lakelet just re- ferred to. Finally, the nerves, throbbing with the messages received from the outside, stretch inwards to the brain. Still more marvellous is the structure of the eye ; but the attempt can hardly be made here to describe its wonders — its fourfold protection from external injury by means of the eyebrows, the eyelids, the eyelashes and the stream of liquid pouring every moment, as we wink, over the eyeball ; the eyesocket, so perfectly formed, and the system of pulleys by which the eye is made to move easily and incessantly in it, so that, instead of seeing only in one direction, it sees in every direction ; the rainbow-curtain of the iris, which is constantly being opened or closed, to regulate the quantity of light admitted ; the lens, set, like the jewel-stone of a ring, in a sphere of crystal ; and lastly, the retina, on which, as on the screen of a magic-lantern, the picture of the outside world is always being cast, though in reality the pictures are changing every moment, the displaced photographs being transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain. Long and friendly discussion might be carried 80 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY on over the question, whether ear or eye yields the greater pleasure and profit. The champions of the ear would expatiate on the delights of music — the music of instruments of all kinds, the music of the human voice, the music of the songsters of the woods — on the sublimity of the voice of the thunder, of the stormy wind, of the ocean ; on the infinite variety of the voices of nature ; on the charming sounds of love, friend- ship and human intercourse ; and, above all, on the boundless utility of language, by which to our own stores may be added the experiences of our fellow-creatures. The champions of the eye, on the other hand, would place over against the musical scale the spectrum of colours ; over against the arts of song and eloquence the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture ; over against the profit of conversation the utility of the printed page ; over against the sound of nature its infinitely varied forms ; over against the voice of love the face of the beloved ; and they would specially insist on the vast range of this sense ; for, whereas the loudest sound can only be heard at the distance of a few miles, the eye can obtain distinct impressions from as far away as the fixed stars. It is not necessary to decide this controversy ; it is enough to feel THE FIVE SENSES 81 gratitude to the Creator for endowing us with faculties so noble and surrounding us with so brave a world, in which every sense has abund- ance of work to do and abundance of gratifica- tion to drink in.^ Up to this point all has been plain sailing : but from this point onwards the course becomes much more difficult. The five senses are, as we have seen, gateways or avenues by which impressions of diff'erent sorts are constantly being conveyed from the ex- ternal world to the interior of man's person ; and it is from the accumulation of such impressions that knowledge or experience is made up. The avenues all converge in the brain. There all the nerves along which the impressions travel from the eye, the ear, and the other organs reach their termination ; and the inner termination of the nerve-track, in the substance of the brain, seems to be as original a formation of the brain-sub- stance as is the organ at the external surface of Excellent observations on the senses will be found in Sully, " Outlines of Psychology," or Ladd, " Psychology Des- criptive and Explanatory ". See also the charming popular account of them in Wilson, " The Five Gateways of Know- ledge". Experiments are said to prove that the average educated person relies more on the eye than the ear. 6 82 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY the skin and other tissues. At all events each kind of information goes along its own track ; and the part of the brain can be located where each is discharged. The same nerve-tracks do not serve indifferently eye and ear, for example ; and at the end of the eye-track there seems to be a receiver of peculiar configuration, and the like at the termination of the ear-track. As has been hinted above, it is in the brain that every sensation is felt,^ though it seems to be felt at the surface of the body. When I grasp anything with my hand, it seems to be the hand that feels it. In fact, the feeling may even appear to lie outside the body altogether, as, when I touch the ground with a stick in walking, I seem to fee] the sensation at the end of the stick. But that the sensation is really felt in the brain is proved by the fact that, if the nerve be touched mid- way to the brain, the sensation is still felt in the accustomed place. In a long day's walking in Switzerland, a companion of my own, who had had the misfortune, in boyhood, to have a foot amputated, had unwittingly overtaxed his 1 But see what is said on p. 218 of reactions without the co-operation of the brain. If such be possible, we may have to alter our conception of mind as associated with the brain, and extend this association to the whole spinal cord. THE FIVE SENSES 88 strength ; and he woke up the following morning with a violent pain in the foot which was not there. The great mystery, however, is what takes place when the terminus in the brain is reached by the impressions from the outside. For ex- ample, on the retina of the eye a photograph of a face is taken, and this is transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain ; but who or what is it that perceives it and recognises it as a face, and as somebody's face ? This act of turning round, so to speak, on the impression and recognising it to be what it is seems to be something totally different from the conveyance of the impression. To receive the impression and to convey it so accurately as is done by the eye and the optic nerve must be considered a great thing ; yet it is no more than can be done by the manufactured apparatus of the photographer. The camera, however, does not see the face it has produced ; and just as little is it in the power of matter to recognise the face mirrored in the brain. This can only be an act of mind — of an invisible, spiritual something, which we cannot locate but which we naturally speak of as having its seat in the brain. An eminent psychologist has drawn attention 84 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY to the fact, that, while the various senses and the other parts of the body sending impressions along the sensory nerves have their terminal organs in the brain, there has been discovered in the brain no organ which is the general receiving- house for all the senses. Yet there must be some such point of junction, if not material, then spiritual and invisible ; because the mind has the power of combining, in one united act, the impres- sions received from the different senses. Thus, it may, at the same moment, discern an object to be large, red and hot. These three kinds of in- formation it receives from three different senses, yet it perceives them all united in a single object.' ^ " It has seemed, and still seems to many thinkers, neces- sary to assume that the different sensory nervous processes must become fused in a unitary physical or physiological pro- cess in some part of the substance of the nervous system. Hence they have sought for a sensorium commune, some cen- tral nervous substance to which the various sensory nerves shall communicate their specific modes of activity (commonly conceived by these authors as forms of molecular vibration), so producing in that central substance a unitary physical process, a complex form of vibration, the resultant of all the specific kinds of processes in the sensory paths simultaneously active. Many different parts of the brain have been in turn regarded as this hypothetical central organ, but the progress of our knowledge of the structure and functions of the nervous THE FIVE SENSES 85 This transition from the material to the spirit- ual is the most important point in the whole field of psychology ; and it is of the utmost im- portance to perceive its necessity. The student ought to follow again and again in his own mind the process by which knowledge becomes ours — the external object transmitting the waves of light which fall on the eyeball ; the formation of the image on the retina ; then its transmission along the nerves to the brain — and consider whether he can conceive that the act of receiving the impressions and recognising the object from which these proceed can also be thought of as an act of matter ; or whether it is not a totally Bystem has proved that no such organ is to be found. We are compelled to admit, or so it seems to the writer as to many others, that the so-called psychical elements are not independent entities, but are partial affections of a single sub- stance or being ; and since, as we have seen, this is not any part of the brain, is not a material substance, but differs from all material substance in that, while it is unitary, it is yet present, or can act or be acted upon at many points in space simultaneously (namely, the various parts of the brain in which psycho-physical processes are at any moment occur- ring), we must regard it as an immaterial substance or being. And this being, thus necessarily postulated as the ground of the unity of individual consciousness, we may call the soul of the individual." McDougall, "Physiological Psychology,'* pp. 76-9 ; some sentences omitted. 86 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY different kind of act from all that has preceded — separated from it, in fact, by an immeasurable diameter.^ The stream of impressions from the 1 " Even the vaguest of evolutionary enthusiasts, when de- liberately comparing material with mental facts, have been as forward as anyone else to emphasise the chasm between the inner and the outer worlds. ' Can the oscillations of a molecule,* says Mr. Spencer, * be represented side by side with a nervous shock (he means a mental shock), and the two be recognised as one ? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition.* And again : ' Suppose it to have be- come quite clear that a shock in consciousness and a mole- cular motion are the subjective and objective phases of the same thing ; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces.* In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any common character. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph which has been quoted so often that every one knows it by heart : ' The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from one to the other.' Or in this other passage : ' We can trace the develop- ment of a nervous system and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubt- ing certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connexion between them, TherQ is no fusion possible between the two THE FIVE SENSES 87 external world is pouring incessantly along the channels of the senses ; but the power of turning round upon them, separating them and identify- ing them is that which really creates knowledge. The mere impact of the impressions on the brain, however often repeated, would leave no mark, unless there were at the centre an intelligent agent, to capture and detain them. English philosophers have generally inclined to the view that the mind derives its knowledge wholly from the senses, and that it is a blank sheet of paper until experience writes on it its communications ; but in more deeply thinking regions the widely different view has prevailed that, if the mind re- ceives much from the outside, it also brings much into the world with it. At least it brings recep- tacles, so to speak, in which the impressions coming from the outside arrange themselves, in- stead of being piled up in confusion. Take, for instance, the scale in music, with its fixed inter- vals, as these are embodied in the framework of the pianoforte : must there not be something originally in the mind corresponding with these intervals, so as to produce the harmonies which classes of facts — no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from the one to the other.' " Jambs, " Psychology," i. 147. 88 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY afford such exquisite delight ? In the same way, it is by something native to the mind that the contours and colours of external objects are ren- dered agreeable or the reverse. It is as if the mind were born with an image of the world al- ready in it, which the material objects gradually fill up ; and perhaps this may be the meaning of the deep saying in the Book of Ecclesiastes : "He hath set the world in their heart." ^ Not a few thinkers have gone so far as to hold that all the order and beauty of the world are contributed by the mind of man : it is only our way of seeing it which makes a line symmetrical or a colour beautiful.^ But this is an exaggeration. iiii. 11. 2 The most striking evidence of the necessity for a reaction from within on the materials supplied from without through sensation is furnished by discoveries recently made concern- ing the localisation of functions in the brain ; for these seem to show that, through accident, the power of comprehending words may be lost, though these are still sensed as sounds, or of music, though it is still sensed as noise ; and so with the other senses. Thus, Sir William MacEwen of Glasgow, whose name has become famous in connexion with such in- vestigations, gave, in an Address before the British Medical Association, the particulars of the case of a mechanic, among his patients, who had received a severe injury to his head. Immediately after the accident he was in a peculiar mental condition. Physically he could see, but what he saw conveyed THE FIVE SENSES 89 The order and the beauty are in the world as well as in the mind. But how did they get into the world ? It must have been out of another mind — the divine mind. Thus is nature a system of signs by which mind speaks to mind — the divine mind to the human mind. The deepest question of all, however, is whether the human no impression to his mind. Thus an object presented itself before him which he could not make out, but, when this ob- ject emitted sounds of the human voice, he at once recognised it to be a man who was one of his fellow -workers. He was equally unable to recognise his wife and children. By eye- sight he could not tell how many fingers he held up, when he placed his own hand before his face, till he became cognisant of the number by the sense of touch. These symptoms gave the key to the hidden lesion in his brain and, therefore, where to trephine his skull. On operation it was found that a por- tion of the inner table of the skull had been detached from the outer and had become imbedded in the grey matter of that locality. The bone was removed from the brain and re- implanted in proper position, upon which he recovered and returned to his work. "It is evident," comments Professor W. Hanna Thomson, in "Brain and Personality," who re- ports this case, " that that fragment of bone interfered with an important mental function located in the brain- spot which it penetrated, because, so soon as it was removed from that place, the mental function returned. What was that mental function ? It was not sight, for the man saw his wife and friends as well as before, but he did not know what he saw. Hence, seeing and knowing what is seen are not the same thing." 90 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY mind has a native and inalienable perception of this Speaker behind nature. Some of the deepest thinkers have held that the voice of God is heard in every impression from the outside world, even the faintest ; because the finite always implies the Infinite. However this may be, it can at least be heard in nature by a trained ear ; and this training of ourselves to discern the Eternal behind the transitory is our highest attainment. It is the deepest in ourselves awaking to discern the Great Being from whom come all things, ourselves included, and who is the prop and soul of the universe. But we are hastening too fast ; and we must now return to the position, that in the formation of even the simplest forms of knowledge there are at work two elements — on the one hand, the stream of impressions entering from with- out and, on the other, the mind itself, appre- hending these and making them its own. At a certain point the objective becomes subjective ; or, to express it in the technical language of philosophy, sensation passes into perception, the one of these being a passive and the other an active state of mind. We have no experience of pure sensation ; THE FIVE SENSES 91 because our mental states are all complex, and it is only by an artificial efibrt that we can separate one element and study it by itself. The nearest approach we can make to an ex- perience of pure sensation is perhaps when we try to realise what has been happening to us whilst asleep. During sound sleep the distant hum of the city, the shouts of passing revellers, the striking of the clock must be entering through the organs of hearing, but, because the self is not available to mark them, they are not per- ceived. Perhaps, if they were all suddenly to stop, the mind would awaken to observe the change ; and this would seem to prove that, in a dim sort of way, it has been noticing them all the time. At all events what happens in ordinary awaking is familiar to all, and may be illustrated as follows : The sleeper becomes aware of a clock striking, and he counts one, two, three, four. But he is not certain whether he has heard the first of the strokes, until an- other clock begins to strike — one, two, three, four. Then he is satisfied ; and he recognises that the first sounds have come from a clock at the top of the stair and the others from one at the bottom. Had he still been asleep when the clock struck, the sounds would have passed 92 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY unobserved through the portals of the ears ; but now he connects them with the points in space from which they come, and he observes their succession in time. This is what is called Per- ception; but it is obvious that it presupposes the activity of other powers likewise, such as memory and reason, to the discussion of which we shall come by and by.^ iln philosophy an immense amount of labour has been bestowed on a question which can never have much reality for the popular mind — namely, what it is that is perceived when, through the senses, we are made acquainted with the external world. Is it the thing itself ? or is it only a repre- sentation of it mirrored in the mind ? Many philosophers hold that things themselves can have no direct access to the mind: we are all like the Lady of Shalott, in Tennyson's poem, who is under a spell by which she is prevented from turning round, and only in her mirror sees the knights and the beggars passing along the highway outside the room in which she is confined. This, too, is what Plato meant by his famous image of the Cave : we are all like creatures sitting inside a cave, with their backs to the cave-mouth, who see not the beings of flesh and blood passing in front of the entrance, but only the shadows of these cast by the sunshine from without on the opposite wall, to which their eyes are directed. Per- haps also this is what St. Paul intended when he said, "Now we see through a glass darkly " ; for the " glass " is a mirror, and " darkly " is, literally, "in an enigma ". It is a comfort to know that even philosophers believe that we are directly conscious of ourselves ; we know at first hand all the motions of our own mind ; and it is generally held that this conscious- THE FIVE SENSES 98 Another way of expressing the same thing would be to attribute the change from sensation to perception to the power of Attention. The supplementary powers required for perception, as above described, namely memory and reason, are intellectual ; but attention suggests rather a faculty of a different kind, namely the will. As we shall see further on, the will gets its turn pretty late in the discussion of the various facul- ties ; but there is no great part of the mind that is not in motion all the time ; and psycho- logists have had to introduce the will, in so far as it is involved in attention, at a very early stage. Thus, Ladd^ has a chapter headed Primary Attention, before dealing in detail with ness of ourselves is a constituent of all knowledge : we cannot know anything else without knowing it as different from our- selves. The knowledge of other persons has puzzled philoso- phers. Is our knowledge of men and women, who think, feel and act like ourselves, of the same indirect kind as our know- ledge of things ? or is it more akin to the direct knowledge which we have of ourselves ? Perhaps it would be said that the most direct knowledge is of ourselves ; that very close to this is our knowledge of other persons ; but that the know- ledge of things is more remote. Not all thinkers would, however, agree in this, some holding that of the three classes our knowledge is the same ; and this is the naive judgment also of the common mind. 1 In " Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory ". 94 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY any of what he calls the Elements of Mental Life ; Sully ^ introduces Attention before either sensation or perception ; and Ward ^ is inclined to allow to attention a very wide range indeed, as a kind of intensification of any faculty. It is, indeed, less a distinct faculty than a concentra- tion of any of the faculties on its work. Yet certainly the will is conspicuous in it. The power of the impressions transmitted through the senses to influence the mind is due partly to the force of the stimulus in every case and partly to the mind's own preparedness to attend to them. Suppose, for example, that one were gazing forth from a hilltop on a far extended landscape, when fire suddenly burst forth from a cottage in the foreground : the whole power of vision would instantly become concentrated on this particular spot. Perhaps the rest of the landscape might still continue to be dimly seen by what is called the tail of the eye, but, on the whole, the eyes would be with- drawn from everything else and fixed on the blazing object. In the same way, a scream in church during the service would divert the at- 1 In " Outlines of Psychology ". 2 In article on Psychology in "The Encyclopaedia Brit- annica ". THE FIVE SENSES 95 tention of the congregation from the proceedings and fix it on the quarter from which the inter- ruption came ; and still more absolute would be the absorption of a crowd in the market-place in the roar of an escaped lion, should this be sud- denly heard. There is sometimes an urgency that is compelling in the objects themselves, and the harvest for everyone from the employment of the senses depends, in some degree, on the variety and novelty of the scenes through which it is his lot to pass. There are those who ex- tend the scope of their experience by visiting other lands, and others do so by living succes- sively in different ranks of society. It is a privilege to be frequented by interesting people ; and, through the medium of books, it is possible to be in constant contact with the richest minds of many countries and many generations. The success of a teacher or preacher depends, in part, on the number and variety of the things he knows, and on the power of presenting these in a commanding fashion. But of at least equal importance is the mind's own preparedness to attend to the impressions reaching it from the outside. The mind does not receive the whole of these equally : it has 96 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY • the power of selecting and rejecting. As the various streams of impression are passing in, along the channels of the senses, the attention can be focussed on any one of the streams or on any object in any of them ; and, in point of fact, this concentration is shifting from point to point continually. But an object in the stream may be detained, as it passes, or brought back again and again for examination. In short, attention is of all degrees of intensity, duration and re- petition ; and the grasp on life of everyone de- pends on his power of controlling this activity and keeping it fixed wherever he pleases and as long as he pleases.^ This infuses meaning into ^Compare Arnold, "Attention and Interest," New York, 1910. "Interest," says Stout, "Analytic Psychology," p. 225, "is nothing but attention itself, considered in its hedonic aspect." In books on Psychology intended for the use of teachers, of which the name is legion, those of Professor Adams being easily the best, great prominence is given to Attention and to Interest, which is a comprehensive term for the means of winning the attention. Much is said both about heightening the stimulus in the presentation of the object and about culti- vating in the mind habits of attention through exercise. The great secret of the teacher's art, however, and the essence of all that has been written on Method is contained in our Lord'a counsel to " the scribe instructed unto the Kingdom of God " THE FIVE SENSES 97 such a text of Scripture as, " He that hath ears to hear let him hear," or, " Turn away mine eyes from viewing vanity ". There is a hearing of the Gospel which is not hearing, the sound, as we say, going in at the one ear and out at the other ; but there is also a hearing of another sort, in which every word is drunk in, to the exclusion of all other objects. Similarly, we can turn away our eyes from viewing any object, or we can withdraw any sense from that which is en- grossing it. In the last resort we can disengage our attention by removing the body itself beyond the range of the object to be avoided ; and there may be forms of temptation with which this is the only safe mode of coping. Among psychologists there has been much dis- cussion as to the number of objects to which the mind is capable of attending at once, some hold- ing that only one can receive distinct attention at a time, while others have extended the number to six or seven. It would seem that at least two can be thus thought together ; otherwise (an excellent title for a religious teacher), to bring forth out of his treasure "things new and old" — a phrase which does not mean sometimes things new and at other times things old, but old and new at the same time, the old or well-known being made the stepping-stone to the new or not-yet- known. 7 98 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY how could comparison be made ? But all are agreed that the amount of attention is in inverse ratio to the number perceived. That is to say, the more the attention is distributed over a number of objects, the less of it can be given to each ; and for the full concentration of attention the field must be limited to one. From this law a powerful lesson can be learned in the moral and spiritual sphere. In the Gospels, from the lips of Christ Himself, there are many hints about the necessity of concentrating on the one thing needful, as well as about the danger of dispersing one's pursuit over too many objects ; and St. Paul exclaims, in the same tone, " This one thing I do ". It is by minds most apt towards religion and ready for every good work that such restraint is most required. And let him who administers it to others begin by taking his own advice ; for there is no commoner source of ministerial failure than the diffusion of atten- tion over too many objects. The first time the writer met the late Dr. W. M. Taylor of New York, the veteran said to the novice, " As soon as the Devil sees a young minister likely to be of use in the Kingdom of God, he gets on his back and rides him to death with engagements ". But, besides the attention which is compelled, THE FIVE SENSES 99 there is a more genial kind, which is either nature or second nature. Thus, the hunter in the high Alps perceives a chamois among the rocks where the tourist sees nothing ; the North American Indian hears a distant footstep before the ordinary man has made any such observation ; and, in the street, the shoemaker notices the shoes of the passers-by and the tailor the condi- tion of their clothes almost without looking. Whatever we have an interest in or warmly de- sire we notice without effort ; and each man sees in every scene that to which he brings the power of seeing. No two persons standing in the same landscape would perceive exactly the same things ; for, though the streams of impression, pouring from the outside along the passages to the brain, might be approximately identical, yet each selects those to which he will give attention in accordance with his own history and in- terests. The optician would have his attention drawn to sights, the musician to sounds, and other persons to other aspects of nature accord- ing to their tastes and occupations. There are probably differences due to heredity in the power of using the different senses ; and there are certainly great differences acquired by practice, as when a man unawares cultivates a sense 100 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY which he has to employ in his daily vocation.^ But in the world as a whole, as well as in his own limited sphere, that which everyone sees de- pends on his own ruling impulses. If his heart is vain, then he will see vanity ; if not, his eyes will pass it by. If he love God, he will see His footprints everywhere and hear on every hand the rustle of His robes ; and, if Christ be his Saviour and heaven his home, then he will listen with avidity to every authentic voice testifying of Christ or delivering news of heaven. Thus we perceive, that such precautionary sentiments as have been quoted above from the Word of God — *'Turn away mine eyes from viewing vanity," and "He that hath ears to hear let him hear" — though they go deep, do not go deep enough : we require to make our own a prayer which goes far deeper : " Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew in me a right spirit ". 1 Stout, "Analytic Psychology," p. 88, says: "I am somewhat deaf, and when conversation is going on among a considerable number of persons, I am usually unable to hear anything which is not directly addressed to myself with a distinct irtterance by my immediate neighbour ; all the rest of what is being said around me is a confused murmur. I sometimes find, however, that if anyone, even at a distance from me, happens to refer to philosophy or any other subject in which I have a keen interest, his words disengage them- selves from the chaos of sounds and fix my attention." CHAPTER IV THE MBMOEY CHAPTER IV THE MEMOBY Through the gateways of the five senses streams of impressions from the external world are con- stantly pouring into the mind ; and it is from these accumulations that knowledge or experience is gradually built up. But there could be no building-up of knowledge unless the images, thus transmitted to the mind, were retained in it ; and the power by which they are retained is what we call Memory. If, when I see a thing to-day which I have often seen before, I were unable to identify it as the same thing which I had seen yesterday, and the day before, and a score of times before that, I could never know it. At least there are many things which can only be known by piecing together all we have learned about them through many successive observa- tions. Without memory we should not even know ourselves : it is only because I, who am perceiving things at the present moment, re- member perceiving things yesterday, and all the (103) 104 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY yesterdays of my past life, that I know myself to be the person I am. By the term memory two powers are popularly designated, which differ considerably from each other. For example, I may be asked the Latin for "door," and I say Janua; that is, I bring the Latin word janua into my mind at this moment. This is called remembering it ; but, if I be a Latin scholar, there are thousands of other Latin words in my mind somewhere, though they are not so in the sense of being at the mo- ment present to thought ; and these also I am said to remember. All the Latin I am thinking of at the moment may be this word janua ; yet, if it were required, I could bring any of the other words in the same way into consciousness. Thus, both the power of bringing past experiences into present consciousness and the power of retaining things in the mind out of consciousness are called by the same name. Perhaps the two ought to be distinguished by different words : the summoning of images into present consciousness might be called Recollection, while the term Memory might be restricted to the retention in the mind of images out of present consciousness.^ 1 " All highly psychological languages have recognised the distinction between active and merely passive reproduction. THE MEMORY 105 In some respects the power of retaining in the mind things of which we are not at the moment thinking is the most remarkable phenomenon of psychology. It is tolerably easy to understand how the mind holds an object of which it is at the moment thinking ; but how does it keep hold of things about which it has not thought for years ? Consider the memory of a cultivated man well advanced in age — what enormous quantities of things it contains ! There are the events of his own life ; the lives of his family and his friends ; the history of his country and of the world, as far as it has come within the range of his observa- tion or reading ; the languages he may have mastered ; the sciences with which he may be familiar; and a thousand other things far too varied to mention. Now, where are all these possessions treasured up ? By what kind of action does the mind retain its hold on them ? It is as if in every mind, receding backwards from the sphere of present consciousness, there stretched a magazine, in which the acquisitions of the past For example, we find in Plato, and still more in Aristotle, the distinction between dva/tv^o-ts and ftvri/x.17, in Latin be- tween reminiscor and memini, in modern German between Erinnerung and Gedachtniss, in French between souvenir and m^moire.** Ladd, " Psychology Descriptive and Ex- planatory," p. 394. 106 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY are stored and kept in silence and unconscious- ness. In some persons this depositary is smaller, in others larger ; in some it may be well in others ill arranged. Scott compares the mind of Dominie Sampson, the voracious bookworm, to a pawnshop, in which nearly everything can be found somewhere, but nothing is in a place of its own, so as to be found immediately. I am told, however, that a modern pawnshop, in a great city, is the very reverse of this — a place in which order reigns, and every article can be found the moment it is wanted. There are some memories, then, like a pawnshop as Scott supposed it to be, and there are others like what it really is ; unless this be too humble an illustration for so dignified a subject. But, again one asks, where is this treasure-house ? has it any local habitation ? is it in the brain ? or where is it ? Nothing else perhaps is so baffling to any ma- terialistic theory of the mind. Materialism makes thought to be merely a modification of the matter in the brain. But, if so, in what shape do the modifications survive, so as to be remem- bered ? Any additions to the matter of the brain would soon utterly exceed the holding capacity of the skull. Any marks, like footprints or tracks, would soon be so buried beneath others as to be THE MEMORY 107 quite undiscoverable. Everyone can recollect such an experience as the following : a gentleman not seen or heard-of for a score of years en- counters you on the street ; you and he pull suddenly up, and he asks, " Do you know me " ? you have the luck to be able to answer instantly that you do ; whereupon you pour forth numerous details about himself and his family. Now, is it conceivable that the image of this man, presented thus before your eyes, could so instantaneously have found the former impressions of him, left in the material of the brain, as it must have done, if thought be material ? It may be replied, But what explanation do you offer yourself ? con- fessedly the materialistic theory of mind stands here before a formidable difficulty, but does the spiritual theory make it any more intelligible ? Perhaps it does not ; but at least it refrains from offering as an explanation that which is palpably none. Spirit is itself a mystery ; and, when we refer memory to it, we are referring it to a mysterious domain. This is obviously where it belongs. While it cannot be denied, that, in re- membering, as in every other mental act, the spirit makes use of the brain as an organ, yet the brain is no more to be identified with the think- ing subject than a musical instrument is to be 108 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY identified with the performer. " Great," says St. Augustine, in his " Confessions," " is this power of memory, exceeding great, O my God — an inner chamber large and boundless. Who has plumbed the depths thereof ? Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the extent of the ocean and the courses of the stars, and '^mit to wonder at themselves." ^ The other power which goes by the name of Memory is the bringing of past experiences into present consciousness ; and, in comparison with 1 This retention of past experience out of consciousness is the most important and the most easily comprehended in- stance of what has of late been much in the mouth of the public under the name of the Subconscious or the Subliminal Self. Below the threshold of consciousness certain activities of the self must be assumed as taking place in unconscious- ness, in order to account for other phenomena which enter into full consciousness. A good deal that has been written on this subject has been rather obscure ; but everybody can understand that memory out of consciousness is an essential presupposition of memory in consciousness ; though whether this hold upon past experiences can be properly described as a form of mental activity may be called in question. In reply to Sanday and others, who perhaps make too much of the Subconscious, it has been said, by my colleague. Principal Iverach, that memory is not the workshop but the warehouse of the mind. THE MEMORY 109 the almost boundless dimensions of memory in the other sense, this action of the mind takes place on a very limited stage. It is as if, at the entrance to the magazine or treasury already described, there were erected a platform, to which the objects within can be summoned forth, as they are wanted. Sometimes the summons is very slight : a thought has only to be passing, when at once a former thought comes forth and joins it. Per- haps, indeed, a whole bevy of these may come. Suppose, for instance, during the holiday-season, you are back in your native village and chance to visit some scene of natural beauty, which was a favourite walk in the days of the past. At every step images will, unasked, come pouring out of the storehouse of memory — the faces and forms of old companions and their tender or witty re- marks. You will say, " On this bench I sat on such-and-such a day with So-and-so by my side ; at this turn of the road I was meditating on such- and-such a subject ; across the ravine I heard So-and-so calling and, on looking in that direc- tion, saw his smiling face ". The whole of the past comes pouring on you in a tumult of images ; and you are astonished at the minuteness and life-likeness of the reproduction. no CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY At other times the summons must be louder and more urgent. You seek an image of the past, but it does not come. At your summons other images come ; but they are not the right ones, and you have to order them back to their places. Perhaps you have to wait long, to see whether the right one will appear ; or you have to enter the magazine and turn things over and rummage in remote corners. Ah, there it is at last ! and you exclaim with delight, " Now I remember " ! Or perhaps you cannot find it not- withstanding all your searching, and you exclaim, baffled, " It has escaped me ; I cannot re- member ". The question has often been raised by philoso- phers, whether there is any absolute and final forgetfulness, or whether the memory retains all the images which have ever entered it. It is no answer to this to say, that at any moment we may utterly fail to recall something ; because everyone has observed that, while at one time you search in vain in the memory for a forgotten fact — say, someone's name — at another time this very fact will come sauntering into your recollec- tion, when you are not thinking about it. Sir William Hamilton tells of a woman who, in a fever, was heard to pour forth words which to THE MEMORY 111 those living in the house were unintelligible ; but a learned man, having gone, on hearing of the circumstance, to listen to her ravings, testi- fied that the sounds were words and sentences in foreign languages. It seemed an inexplicable mys- tery, until it was discovered that, in youth, she had been servant in the house of a man of science, who indulged in the practice of reciting aloud, as he walked up and down a passage contiguous to the kitchen. The girl had heard the words so often that she had been in the habit of re- peating them. No doubt she had subsequently forgotten them ; but, in the excitement of fever, they were revived. In other abnormal conditions people have often shown that they remembered things which even they themselves believed they had entirely forgotten ; and owing to such inci- dents the belief has been suggested — and it has been warmly espoused by certain thinkers — that we really forget nothing absolutely ; but that, when our consciousness is abnormally intensified, as it may be, for example, in a future state, our own entire past may stand out before our vision in unabridged completeness, as invisible writing is brought into distinctness by the proximity of fire. However this may be, it is certain that, for the 112 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY uses of the present world, innumerable experi- ences of the past are forgotten ; they may still exist in us in some form, but meantime they have gone out of reach and cannot be recovered. Per- haps, indeed, this is a necessity : if the mind re- tained all the images of the past, it would be embarrassed with its own riches, and it has to forget some things in order that it may the better remember others. As a rule, older impressions are displaced by newer ones ; although in old age this law is reversed, and although in all minds there are some memories which can never be dimmed : — Time but the impression deeper makes, As streams their channels deeper wear. The rate at which impressions grow dim or sink out of sight and beyond recovery varies ex- tremely in different persons ; and one of the ex- cellences of what is called a " good " memory is the area of reminiscence it can permanently com- mand. All persons of outstanding ability hold sway thus over a wide domain of acquisition or experience. Another excellence of memory is rapidity in committing things to heart. This also varies ex- ceedingly in different persons. In some it is THE MEMORY 118 almost miraculous. Thus, the famous scholar Scaliger is said to have learned the Iliad by heart in three weeks and the entire corpus of the Greek poets in two years ; and feats even more astonish- ing have been related of persons not gifted ex- cept in this one direction. Some have the power of permanently retaining what is thus rapidly acquired ; but, as a rule, what comes quickly goes quickly. Thus, the advocate who has got up the details of a case, and perhaps, along with these, the facts of a science, for a particular occasion, forgets the whole as soon as his speech is delivered ; and the student who is crammed for an examination with similar rapidity gener- ally exhibits a like facility in getting rid of his acquisitions. The most enviable excellence of memory is the prompt and easy delivery of its contents as oc- casion requires. This enables the historian, as he writes, to illustrate events by parallel incidents ; it pours into the mind of a speaker, as he stands before an audience, facts and principles, from which he can select whatever is most profitable or acceptable to his hearers ; it makes the fortune of the copious and brilliant conversationalist, whereas the talker who lacks this quality of memory makes the best remark of the evening 114 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY to himself on the way home, after the opportun- ity of shining is past. There exist numerous systems for the improve- ment of the memory ; and everyone knows what it is to make use of such an artificial aid to memory as tying a knot on a handkerchief ; but the conditions on which memory depends are far from difficult to enumerate. It depends on the amount of attention bestowed on objects as they enter the mind : the more we attend to them at this stage the better shall we remember them afterwards. It depends on frequency of observa- tion: the frequent repetition of the act of ob- servation deepens the impression on the memory. It depends, also, on the recency of impressions. It depends most of all on emotion. All are aware how the shock of a great bereavement stands out in the memory so clearly that, at the distance of years, the mourner will, on the slightest encour- agement, describe the incidents from hour to hour and minute to minute ; and there are many other experiences which make the same ineflface- able impression. In all such cases it will, on close investigation, be found that there has been strong emotion, painful or pleasurable ; and, in general, it may be laid down as a rule, that anything will be remembered in proportion to the number and THE MEMORY 115 the strength of its connexions with different parts of the inner man. Mnemosyne, or Memory, was called by the ancients the mother of the Muses ; because all the arts and the sciences depend on memory for their existence and progress. If human beings could not retain their impressions and accumulate these in the internal treasure-house, they would never be able to stir from the bit. As was re- marked above, even the consciousness of self de- pends on this : it is because I remember what I have been doing ever since consciousness began that I am aware of myself as the centre of all my experiences. This is personality, which would dissolve if the power of recollection were lost.^ There is one religious sentiment of a very peculiar kind which is the offspring of memory. This is the sense of guilt. Guilt is the identifica- tion of an evil action in the past as the property of the author, who is still responsible. The sin may be very old, and it may have been long for- gotten, but the reappearance of an accomplice, or some incident of similar character, may bring ^ As early as Plotinus memory is adduced as proof of the continuity of personality. 116 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY it up again with perfect vividness, and he by whom it has been committed cannot deny that it is his own. Tn every life there are certain past actions which can never be remembered without awakening this shameful and disquieting feeling. Others, however, may require to be sought for among the records of the past, because at the time of commission they made little impression, the conscience not having been sensitive at the time. Sins of omission require specially to be thus sought for, because they are easily over- looked. Our fathers used to appoint days of fasting for the purpose of thus looking back- wards and recalling the evil past ; and it might be salutary to have stated private occasions for realising how little we have made of opportunities, how little we have grown spiritually, how little good we have done, how seldom we have prayed. It is no pleasant exercise, indeed, thus to revive the memory of our sins and shortcomings ; but it is better to remember these now than to re- member them when it is too late. To the rich man in the parable the first word of Abraham was, " Son, remember ". Memory is the worm that dieth not. Another religious sentiment closely connected with the sense of guilt and, therefore, with THE MEMORY 117 memory is the sense of forgiveness. Forgiveness '•efers entirely to sin past ; sin present — that is, the power of sin as a corruption of the nature — is a different problem ; but past sins can be in- stantaneously and permanently forgiven. He who forgives is God, who has been offended, and who cannot but condemn and hold liable to punishment. There may be such a thing as human beings forgiving themselves ; but to sub- stitute this for the divine forgiveness is a mere trick of the fancy and a confusion of ideas. It was the merit of the Reformers to appreciate the greatness of this gift of God and to separate it, on this account, from all the other acts of salvation. The theologians of the Council of Trent, on the contrary, hopelessly mixed together justification and sanctification ; and not a few Protestant theologians in our day, by doing the same thing consciously or unconsciously, are losing the ethical impulse which springs from forgiveness. It is out of the sense of forgiveness that the sense of gratitude springs ; and this is the mother of praise, which holds so prominent a place in Christian worship, producing psalmody and hymnody, as well as inspiring the music of the human voice and the grave sweet harmonies of 118 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY instrumental accompaniments. Forgiveness is not, indeed, the only inspiration from which thanksgiving proceeds. There are hundreds of other subjects, belonging to the region over which memory holds sway, which enter into praise. But in the one-hundred-and-third Psalm — that grand- est utterance of gratitude in the entire repertory of praise — the very first thing said of God is, "Who forgiveth all thine iniquities " ; and, further down, occur the tender words, into which the saints of all the ages have poured their penitence, " As far as the East is from the West, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us ". A piety which does not know what penitence is, and which has not felt the impulse to gratitude and to duty derived from pardon, may be said to have missed the secret altogether. While it is with the memory we remember, it is also with the memory we forget ; and this, also, is of no small consequence in religion. In Holy Scripture, God often complains of being for- gotten. And to be forgotten may sometimes afford the justest ground for complaint. Were a husband, away from home, to become sensible that, for days on end, he had not once remem- bered his wife or children, would he not have the best cause to feel ashamed ? If days can pass THE MEMORY 119 without our thoughts once turning to God, we may be certain that we do not love Him ; for emotion quickens memory, and the heart that loves much will remember often. Jesus also, in the miracle of the Ten Lepers, when He asked, " Where are the nine " ? indicated both how He felt ingratitude and what value He placed on gratitude. There could be no more convincing evidence of the function of memory in religion than that sacrament at the institution of which He said, "This do in remembrance of Me". The question has been sometimes raised, whether in the other world the redeemed will remember their sins. There have been teachers who have thought it so impossible to be happy while seeing the sins of a lifetime in the light of eternity that they have taught that a sponge of oblivion will pass over this part of the tablets of memory and blot out its records forever. But the truth is far greater and grander than this : such is the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the mercy of God that the memory of their own sins will not perish in the redeemed, yet it will be allowed to yield to them not the poison of re- morse but only the honey of gratitude ; and to all eternity it will infuse an inimitable sweetness 120 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY into the songs they sing to Him who hath loved them and washed them from their sins in His own blood. In the great chapter on Memory in the " Con- fessions " of St. Augustine the profoundest thought is, that memory is not entirely of the facts of past terrestrial experience, but embraces movements and suggestions coming from a greater distance. This is an idea much older than even St. Augustine ; for Plato sometimes spoke of knowledge as being reminiscence, eternity being filled with types of which human beings are reminded by the actual experiences of time. In all lives there are hints of the same truth; for we encounter sometimes a face, of rare loveliness or peace, which makes on us the impression that we have often seen it before, though in fact we have not ; and a few minutes spent with a kindred spirit may awaken the sense of having known him for a lifetime. That on which St. Augustine fixes as haunting the mind with some antenatal vision is the conception of happiness. This is found in the minds of all, even in those of the most miserable. None have ever enjoyed happiness in perfection, and yet all are aware of it as a perfect thing, for the comfort and sun- THE MEMORY 121 shine of which they are craving at every moment. By St. Augustine this is interpreted as a craving for a happiness once enjoyed but now lost. It is, in short, the sense of God, in whom alone resides our blessedness. CHAPTEK V THE IMAGINATION CHAPTER V THE IMAGINATION In the preceding chapter the remark was made, that perhaps the most astonishing of all the phenomena of human psychology is the power possessed by the mind of retaining past experi- ence out of consciousness. When we are recol- lecting, as we call it, we are holding in present consciousness some bit of past experience ; but the most of which we can thus be immediately conscious is only an infinitesimal fraction of our entire knowledge. For example, it may be a single word in a foreign language well known to us; but where are all the other words of that language ? At present I am not thinking of these ; they are not before my mind ; yet they are in me somewhere and somehow ; because, if it were necessary, I could summon them, one after another, into consciousness. All we have ever seen or heard, all we have experienced or learned, all we have done or suffered must somehow be (125) 126 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY kept hold of by the mind. As was remarked in last chapter, behind the stage on which our pre- sent conscious experience is enacted there stretches a vast, silent region of unconsciousness, in which past experience is preserved. This part of the mind has been compared to a treasure- house, divided into many rooms and fitted with shelves and drawers, in which different kinds of knowledge are stowed away ; and the size and spaciousness of this internal magazine differ in different persons according to the length of life, the intensity of thought, the variety of experience of each individual. In front of this storehouse stands the stage or theatre of present conscious experience ; and recollection can summon to the platform, for present service, any of the materials within. But there is another mental power which likewise comes to the door of the storehouse and sum- mons forth the forms of past experience, to make use of them for its own purposes. This is the Imagination ; and in the present chapter we have to investigate what are its peculiar functions. The most palpable difference between memory and imagination is, that, while recollection, when raising out of the memory the forms of past ex- perience, revives these exactly as they were when THE IMAGINATION 127 put into the memory, and, indeed, displays its excellence in the truthfulness with which it can reproduce the past exactly as it was experienced, the imagination, on the contrary, transmutes into shapes of its own the materials with which it is supplied from memory's storehouse. Hence the epithet frequently applied to it — the *' creative " imagination. To a very large extent the imagina- tion is dependent on memory; for it has to borrow all its materials from the stores which memory has accumulated ; but, for its own pur- poses, it alters these in a hundred ways, adding or subtracting, separating or combining, subdu- ing or heightening. A blind man, who has had no experience of light, cannot, by the force of the imagination, conceive what colour is, nor can a person born deaf conceive what sound is ; but a seeing man can imagine thousands of pageants which he has never witnessed, and a hearing man can imagine hundreds of conversations to which he has not listened. The mind, being acquainted with human beings of the ordinary size and at- tributes, can diminish these to Lilliputians or enlarge them to Brobdingnagians ; it can com- bine the body of a man with the limbs of a goat and so make a satyr, or the head of the woman with the body of a fish and so make a mermaid ; 128 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY it can put the brains, the passions and the lan- guage of human beings into other animals and so produce fables like those of ^sop ; or it can combine all the scattered excellences it has ever seen or heard of and, magnifying and intensify- ing these, create a glorious city, peopled with ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, and so make a heaven. All this is the work of the imagination ; and from what has been said it is easy to define what the peculiarity of this faculty is : it takes out of the storehouse of memory the materials of experience and, under impulses still to be explained, alters them and fashions them into novel shapes of its own. The simplest form of imagination is Dream- ing ; and in this familiar experience, it is easy to test the truth of what has just been said. Dream- ing is dependent on memory. Unless we could remember having seen men, women and children, houses and streets, earth and sky, and having heard words, music, laughter, we could not have the dreams in which such objects figure. But in what altered shapes do these appear in dreams ! Dreams are like life, and yet how unlike ! All our bygone experiences of seeing, hearing, read- ing, meditating, rejoicing, sorrowing are there, THE IMAGINATION 129 yet in forms the most fantastical. These phantas- magories, which succeed one another with such amazing rapidity, dissolving and rearranging themselves with kaleidoscopic suddenness, are the work of the imagination ; but in this case it is extremely difficult to say on what impulse or on what principle it acts. Everyone knows what it is, on awaking from a dream, of unusually sur- prising character, to ask, Was it I who had these thoughts ? or was it some breath from heaven or blast from hell which, with the arbitrariness of the wind, was compelling the contents of memory into such grotesque shapes ? A kindred form of imagination is Reverie or Day-dreaming. Children are said to see faces in the fire, and youth to build castles in the air ; but, in truth, these practices belong to all ages. In hours of leisure, and especially in the watches of the night, when we are lying awake, images and scenes rise out of the dark background of the mind and present themselves to the inner eye. These may be images of fear, such as a child sees when it awakes in the dark, or they may be scenes of radiant beauty and glowing hope, such as haunt the mind of youth. Much of reverie is, indeed, mere recollection, the mind living over and over again remembered experi- 180 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY ences ; yet even in such cases there is always an element of pure imagination ; for, by omitting the disagreeable element in past realities, we make our experiences better than they actually were. In even the sweetest recollections of by- gone experience the choicest morsel is that which did not take place, and the brightest scene is always the one after the last. So unlike ourselves are our dreams sometimes that we wonder by whose mind they were created; but the reverse is the case with our day-dreams : these are the very picture of our- selves. When the restraints imposed by business and society are removed, the mind springs back to its native shape, and from the subjects to which it then betakes itself, it may be learned whether it be fair or foul. If it could be known what anyone is habitually brooding upon when he is lying awake, an infallible index would be found to his character ; and by the same test everyone is able to know himself. It is common to warn the young against re- verie ; but this advice requires qualification. Certainly reverie may be indulged in to such ex- cess as to make the whole life dreamy and pur- poseless ; some people, instead of dreaming in the pauses of their work, may rather be said to THE IMAGINATION 131 work in the pauses of their dreams. Bnt, on the other hand, there can be no depth of thought or character without the meditative habit. The finest thoughts come to us not when we are pur- suing a subject, as the saying is, but when the mind is lying still and the subject is acting on it of its own accord.^ What does require vigilance is the nature of the subjects on which the mind in such moods ruminates. If themes foul and forbidden are permitted then to take possession of the mind, they destroy the very power of thinking. When lust Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being. 1 Amiel characteristically comes to its defence : " Reverie, like the rain of night, restores colour and force to thoughts which have been blanched and wearied by the heat of the day. With gentle, fertilising power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping germs, and, as though in play, gathers round us materials for the future, and images for the use of talent. Eeverie is the Sunday of thought ; and who knows which is the more impcHiiant and fruitful for man, the laborious tension of the week or the life-giving repose of the Sabbath ? It is like a bath, which gives vigour and suppleness to the whole being, to the mind as to the body. It is the sign and festival of liberty, a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet of the butterfly wandering from flower to flower over the hills and in the fields. And remember, the soul, too, is a butter- fly." " Journal," I, pp. 42, 43. 182 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY Such imaginings must be fought at the threshold and kept rigorously out, or the inner man will grow leprous from head to foot. Happy he whose imagination, when the strain of reality is relaxed, springs spontaneously into a region of pure and wholesome fancies ; but happiest he who can say, " In the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer to the God of my life '\ From what has been said it will have been gathered that the principal function of imagina- tion is to improve on reality. It creates a world brighter and more perfect than that in which we live. In children we see this power marvellously displayed. Give them a few bits of wood, roughly cut and brightly painted, a few clip- pings of cloth, a few bricks, a little sand or mud, and out of these they will form for themselves a world in which there are kings and queens, the tinker and the tailor, the soldier and the sailor, and these figures perform all the movements and activities of real life, as far as these are known to a child. Why is it that children, aye, and children also of an older growth, delight in stories? It is because in these life is seen heightened and perfected. In ordinary life there is little scope for adventure, and our achievements lag far be- THE IMAGINATION 133 hind our desires ; but in a story, whether it be historical or only invented, we see a rare and glorious moment, a heroic resolution, a perfect action. This is what we should like life to be ; it is the ideal, undiminished and undimmed by the obstacles and qualifications of reality. Herein lies the explanation of the pleasure derived from works of art. A song or a piece of music is a combination of sounds more ex- quisite than those which ordinary experience afibrds; a picture is the essence distilled from the beauty presented in ordinary scenes. Especi- ally is the enjoyment due to works of imaginative literature to be thus explained. When we open a book of poetry or romance, the ordinary work, in which we have been toiling and moiling, fretted with fatigue and failure, fades away, and we enter a world where all is ampler and more serene. Ordinary existence is slow of move- ment and grey of hue ; but here a year is com- pressed into an hour, the colours are bright, the crisis exciting, the end satisfying. In the epic one stirring episode succeeds another, in the drama some great principle receives perfect il- lustration, in the novel love is crowned and justice vindicated. Is it good thus to live in a world so different 134 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY from reality ? That depends on circumstances. Such reading may easily be carried to excess. If, instead of being an occasional treat, it is made the daily bread of the mind, it cannot but en- feeble. We may dwell so much among the bright creations of the imagination that the duties of ordinary life appear dull and irksome. We may so exhaust our sympathies on imaginary heroes and heroines as to have none left for actual human beings. It is possible to shed floods of tears over women who suffer and child- ren who die on paper and yet not have a tear to shed or a penny to spare for real distress. Fiction not infrequently conveys entirely mis- taken notions of what life is, and leads readers to expect success not in the paths of steady diligence and perseverance, in which alone the majority must find it, but through some effort of genius or stroke of chance, which cannot fall to the lot of one in a million. But imaginative literature may pursue a better path. There is poetry which reveals the depth and mystery of which the actual world everywhere is full, and there is fiction which helps us to divine a secret deep and tender in every heart we meet. Of such works of imagination the influence may be beneficial ; for the wisdom of life consists in THE IMAGINATION 185 appreciating the romance of ordinary existence and enjoying the poetry of common things. But, if the office of imagination is, as we have seen, to improve upon reality, only a little reflec- tion is needed to perceive that it may fulfil a purpose far more practical than the creation of an imaginary world, to serve as a retreat from the constant insistence of reality; for it may apply itself to the improvement of the actual world. The imagination creates many worlds which never have any existence except in fancy ; but every conception which anyone has of a better state of things in the actual world is also a work of the imagination. The world would never rise one step above its present condition unless there were continually presenting them- selves to human minds visions of possible im- provement and perfection. Humanity is lighted along the path of progress by the torch of ima- gination. Every time a workman is fashioning anything on the bench or the anvil, he sees in his mind's eye the perfect article ; this determines every stroke and touch he gives to the unformed ma- terials in his hands ; and, the more perfect and beautiful is the conception of the finished article 136 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY in his imagination, the more difficult will he be to please with rough and bungling workmanship. When a mechanic, in attending at his post, sees some part of the machine where the action might be simplified or where a mechanical arrangement might take the place of human labour, the con- ception which forms itself in his mind of the machine, thus improved, is a work of imagina- tion. When Edison sits in his laboratory and thinks out the undiscovered qualities which may reside in this material and that, or what kind of arrangement of materials would fill up the gap between invention and a desired effect, it is largely with the imagination that he is working. It was because Columbus had a stronger ima- gination than the rest of Europe that he believed in a new world on the other side of the globe. It was for a similar reason that David Living- stone could not settle down to ordinary mis- sionary work on the outskirts of heathenism, but was forever dreaming of the secrets hidden in the depths of the desert, till at last the desire to go and see became overpowering and made him the greatest discoverer of modern times.^ 1 See a fine section on " Imagination in the Grand Call- ings " in Johnson : " The Religious Use of the Imagination ". It was Tyndall, in his famous Belfast Address, who first THE IMAGINATION 137 The vision of an improved world in the ima- gination may be a dream and nothing more ; in millions of cases it is so ; but, on the other hand, the world is never improved without a preceding dream in someone's imagination. Youth is full of visions ; the great majority of these subse- quently dissolve and leave not a rack behind ; but woe to him who in his youth has no visions — no vision of his own future, no vision of the future of the world — no passionate sense of the wrongs and imperfections of society, no plan for improving the land of his nativity or the place of his abode, no enthusiasm for the re- demption and perfection of humanity. I like beyond measure that saying of Burns, that when he was "beardless, young and blate," he had a wish — Even then a wish — I mind its power — A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast — That I for puir auld Scotia's sake Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least. This is very near religion. What is religion ? It could hardly be better defined than it has brought home to the general understanding the part played by the imagination in scientific investigation. 138 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY been by St. Peter in these words: ''We, ac- cording to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- ness ". Who is a Christian ? I answer. The man, who, taught by Christ, looks forward not only to heaven, but to a new earth, in which righteousness shall reign and from which all the unrighteousness of every kind with which the earth is at present disfigured shall be banished, and who, trusting to the grace of Christ, is doing his part to make that good time come. He is a Christian who cannot look on a fellow-creature, however degraded, without having a vision of imprisoned possibilities, the release and develop- ment of which will lead to glory, honour and immortality, and who, in the spirit of human brotherhood, seeks to save the lost. But no man can thus feel and work for others who has not first had a vision of himself. Pro- fessor Drummond used to say, that, in our day, many are made Christians not by conviction of sin, but by the conviction of righteousness. Like some other sayings from the same quarter, this has an air of paradox ; yet there is in it an un- doubted truth. The impulse which carries a man to Christ may be not the thought of a horrible pit beneath him, into which he is falling, THE IMAGINATION 139 but of an ideal above him, which he is struggling in vain to reach. Only I should say, that such a sense of an unattained purity and nobility would naturally create at the same time, in any man who has felt it, a horror of his actual self and a passionate desire to be separated from the evil past. The imagination, at all events, can do us no better service than when it gives us such a view of the possibilities of our own life that the desire to realise these becomes our ab- sorbing passion. Or rather, its highest service is when it furnishes us with such an enchanting image of the Man Christ Jesus that we follow Him by an irresistible impulse, and our whole existence becomes a ceaseless prayer to be like Him in mind and heart, in speech and behaviour. The imagination, as thus interpreted, is almost identical with the Christian conception of hope ; and the Scripture says that we are '* saved " by hope. Protestantism says, indeed, that we are saved by faith, and to this Eomanism has retorted by affirming that we are saved by love. Not a few who can understand either of these latter statements could hardly attach any meaning to the statement that we are saved by hope. Yet it is the truth ; and, though faith and love have 140 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY got before it in the race, the turn of hope will come, to be realised and prized as an instrument of salvation. The most vivid picture of the com- mencement of salvation in the Scriptures is the Parable of the Prodigal Son ; and it is manifest that the Prodigal was saved by hope. The actual sight of his wretchedness among the swine, though an essential element in his redemption, would never have taken him home, had he not, by the force of imagination, seen the possibility of a position totally different from that which he was occupying in the far country. No less is the con- tinuation of salvation, which we call sanctifica- tion, due to the same faculty. The habit of brooding over our own imperfections or mourn- ing over our own shortcomings will never do much good, unless accompanied with the vision of something better to draw us up and on. We must have the faculty of seeing, in contrast with the actual self, a self more worthy and Christ- like ; and then this hope makes contentment with our imperfections impossible, because it fills us with a divine hunger for a more developed and harmonious character. The most redeeming quality of hope, however, is the identification of our desires with Christ's redemptive purpose for the world. By Himself this was designated the THE IMAGINATION 141 Kingdom of God ; and, under the same title, it is captivating in our own day the imagination of His followers. The Kingdom of God is a dream ; and yet it is more than a dream. The poet creates an ideal world, but he knows that the light by which it is illuminated will never be seen on sea or land ; the philosopher creates an ideal state — his Republic or Utopia — but he knows that it will never exist except on paper, and he acqui- esces in the actual arrangements oi the very im- perfect terrestrial country of which he is a citizen. But the Christian expects his dream to come true. Indeed, he is sure of it, because he is sure of God and His promises, of Christ and His destiny. He goes further : he works for the coming of the Kingdom. There may be a weak Christianity which talks of the battle of Armageddon and the glories of the millennium, yet folds its hands and does nothing ; but, where genuine hope has been generated, it counts the cost and looks for long results ; it begins at once and does not de- spise the day of small things ; it lays hold of the wheels of things and lifts them out of the ruts of evil custom ; and in every triumph, however im- perfect, it sees a prefiguration of the coming consummation. The great modern form of hope is missionary 142 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY activity ; and the revival in our day of this func- tion of true Christianity is the most cheering of all signs of the times. From the point of view of the natural man the conversion of the world is a chimera ; but to many minds, destitute of neither sense nor knowledge, it is a certainty ; and they are even speaking of its accomplishment within a single generation. Not only, however, are they speaking : they are planning, studying, praying, sacrificing. They are estimating the obstacles and the encouragements, and they are of opinion that greater is He who is for us than all they that can be against us. Christian hope, however, does not exhaust itself in picturing either the spiritual develop- ment in the individual or the missionary conquest of the world in these earthly years and on this terrestrial sphere : it has always occupied itself, besides, with picturing a life to be entered on after the completion of man's present career. So it was at the beginning ; even a scoffer like Gibbon acknowledging that the expectation of immortality was one of the explanations of the early diffusion of Christianity. The more gloomy and desperate the situation of the martyrs was on earth, the more distinctly did they see the crown of life awaiting their arrival in another THE IMAGINATION 143 world. The two greatest works of the imagina- tion in literature are the '* Vision " of Dante and the ''Paradise Lost" of Milton; and both are efforts of the imagination to make the unseen world palpable in both its attractions and its terrors. Some allege that visions like Dante's and Milton's no longer affect the modern mind, so as either to attract or to warn. If so, the sooner new imaginative forms are invented to bring home the eternal realities the better will it be. The testimony of the Son of God to the existence of an eternal world, out of which He had come and to which He was returning, has lost none of its impressiveness ; the human spirit is not so dead that it cannot feel the glory of its own immortality ; and, therefore, it ought not to be beyond the power of Christian genius to body forth the hopes and fears of eternity in such shapes as to draw the soul with passionate desire on the one hand and affect it with wholesome terrors on the other. Someone has said that the lever by which this world is moved must have its fulcrum outside of the world ; and the Scripture itself, speaking of the hope of heaven, asserts : " Everyone that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is pure ". CHAPTER VI HABIT 10 CHAPTER VI HABIT 1 When, in a vacant hour, we are indulging in reverie, and out of the magazine of memory the images of past experience are rising at their own sweet will, how arbitrary seems the succession of the thoughts that come into the mind ! From century to century and from continent to continent the busy brain ranges with the speed of lightning. One moment the thinker may be in Norway, the ^ Although this chapter was not included in the course delivered in America, the first part of it especially, on the Association of Ideas, seems to be required, to link-up the pre- ceding chapters with that on the Beason, which follows. In the second part, on Habit, the author is sensible of being more than usually indebted to Professor James, whose chapter on this subject is the most brilliant portion of a work which is throughout a wonderful melange of wit and wisdom — I mean *' The Principles of Psychology," in two volumes, in the American Science Series. Few are the preachers who can, as James does here, bring home the power of sin to paralyze the whole man or the consequent necessity for resisting its be- ginnings. (147) 148 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY next in Australia, the next in the Holy Land, the next in China. Although, however, this succession of ideas ap- pears to an untrained observer to be absolutely arbitrary, it is not so in reality. On the contrary, thought is linked to thought, and for even the most wild leaps and wayward turns of fancy there is in every case a sufficient reason. It is one of the merits of the English school of Psychology to have detected this connexion among our ideas and investigated the laws by which it is regulated.^ Let us indicate some of these. Things which have been observed by the mind in the same place are apt to recall one another. Thus, if I happen to think of a man whom I noticed in the street yesterday, I immediately think of an- other citizen, who chanced to be walking by his side. Likewise, things which have happened at the same time or in immediate succession are likely to recall one another. Thus, if the first of July last year were mentioned, your mind might be an ^ The first hints of the doctrine of the Association of Ideas go back, however, as far as Plato and Aristotle. But it was in Hume first that " association came to be recognised as the one principle of mental change and movement, somewhat as attraction was found to be in the domain of the physical ". Baldwin, " History of Psychology," Vol. II, p. 7. HABIT 149 absolute blank, as you could remember nothing which had happened on that day ; but, if it oc- curred to you that the first of July was the day when your annual holiday commenced and when you started for a fortnight's tour on the Contin- ent, immediately the events of the thirteen days which followed would pour through your mind in a stream, the one bringing the other in its train. Again, things which are like one another bring one another to mind. Thus, a portrait makes you think of the person whom it represents ; a torrent of rain reminds you of the rainiest day you have ever experienced ; and so on. Contrast acts in the same way as likeness ; and so, indeed, does any relation between one object and another ; as, for instance, that one is a part of the other. Thus, if York Minster be mentioned in your hearing, you see at once, in the mind's eye, the Five Sisters, a window generally considered to be the loveliest part of that cathedral ; or, if St. Paul's be men- tioned, you remember the Whispering Gallery — that is, a part of the whole — and so on. Recur for a moment to the illustration with which this lecture began — when I said that, one moment, the mind may be in Norway, the next in Australia, the next in Palestine, the next in China. These leaps from continent to continent seem unaccount- 150 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY able ; but, if you analyze your thinking, you will perceive that for each of them there is the simplest reason in the world. You were thinking of Nor- way, when naturally you recalled a friend, in whose company you visited that picturesque country but who is now in Australia ; and so your thought flew away to the Southern Hemi- sphere. And thereupon you thought of the Southern Cross, because you had recently read a poem in which that constellation was described as the most prominent feature of the nightly heavens in that part of the globe. The name of the Cross sent your thought flying back over cen- turies to Calvary ; and so you found your- self in Palestine. Finally Christ's Cross made you think of the sufferings of Christians ; and, accordingly, your thoughts flew to China, where the professors of Christianity were, not long ago, suffering martyrdom. Thus, beneath phenomena apparently arbitrary there are fixed laws, and for even the slightest movement of the thinking mind there is a sufficient reason. The comprehensive term applied by philo- sophers to the laws by which thought thus pro- duces thought is the Association of Ideas ; and some have found in this the key to the whole HABIT 151 miracle of thinking.^ Without at present going into that large question, I may say, that at all events it is the key to that feature of mental life to which attention is to be directed in this chapter. Habit may be considered as arising in this way : when, in the revolution of time — that is, of the day, or the week, or the month, or the year — a point is reached at which we have done anything before, we, by the law of the association of ideas, think of it again and do it again. Thus, when day dawns, we awake and rise out of bed, because we have done so before ; when a later hour strikes, we take breakfast and walk off to business ; and so we act from hour to hour throughout the day. On the first day of the week, for a similar reason, our thoughts turn to sacred things, and we make ready to go to church. As the New Year comes round, our thoughts turn to friendliness, and we consider by what kindly turn we can inform those who are far away that they are borne in our remembrance. Of course some other juncture of circumstances, different ^ As early as Plato the laws of association due to resem- blance and contiguity were formulated, and Aristotle added that of contrast. There is a disposition at present to reduce all these laws to one — that of succession. 152 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY from the revolution of time, may be that which recalls the past experience ; but, on the whole, the cycles of time, narrower or wider, have an im- mense deal to do with the formation of habit. If a thing has been done merely once at a certain time, there will be a tendency, when that point of time recurs, to think of the thing and to do it again ; but this tendency is very much increased if it has been done often at the same time ; and this frequency of repetition enters largely into the formation of habit. The reason why on Sunday morning we think instinctively of the house of prayer is not because we have been there once before, but because we have been going there regularly every Sunday of our lives. The more frequent the repetition the stronger the habit. Frequent repetition, further, confirms habit by producing facility in the doing of anything. Ac- tions apparently the most impossible are able not only to be done, but to be performed with perfect ease, if only they are done often enough. Thus, a celebrated character tells that in a month he learned to keep up in the air four balls at once and to read a book whilst he was performing this feat. Multitudes of women can read whilst they are knitting, although at one time knitting was to everyone of them a slow and laborious pro- HABIT 153 cess, demanding every particle of their attention. Everyone who has learned to play the piano re- members the difficulties of commencing — the pain in the wrists, the counting of the intervals, the touching of the keys with one finger — but practice produces the astonishing rapidity of the virtuoso. Practice can convert even disagreeable tasks into pleasures ; and what has been done at first with groans and tears may become in the end a source of triumph. It is not the mind alone that is involved in habit : even the body is brought into its service. The soldier is known by his gait, the scholar by his stoop, the merchant by his swing. Still more is habit woven into the very texture of those parts of the bodily structure which are unseen, such as the muscles and the nerves. Hence the advice given by a philosopher : " Make your nerv- ous system your ally, instead of your enemy, in the battle of life ". The mind itself, however, is the great seat of habit ; and, were it a substance capable of being seen, we should find that it was all worn into channels, some shallower and some deeper, according to the amount of repetition in our mental actions ; and along these channels the energies of life pour themselves. Man has been declared to be a bundle of 154 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY habits ; and this definition is not unfitting. As time goes on, life falls more and more into grooves, and there is many a man of middle age about whom it might be predicted, with almost infallible certainty, what he will be doing at every hour of the day and on every day of the year. When the maxim was repeated in the hearing of the Duke of Wellington, that habit is second nature, '' Second nature ? " he exclaimed, "habit is ten times nature". Such was likely to be the sentiment of a disciplinarian, whose life was spent in training men to act at the word of command and to face the enemy and death, instead of obeying the instinct of nature by fleeing away. The discipline of home and of school is largely directed to the end of training the volatile spirits of the young to flow in certain fixed channels. Up to the age of ten, it is said, we are acquiring those habits which are called manners ; between ten and twenty the habits which belong to per- sonal character ; and between twenty and thirty those which belong to professional character. After thirty a human being may be said to be formed, and thereafter it is difficult to alter him. Still, the formation of character never entirely ceases. In some cases, indeed, the pliancy of the formative period lasts to the very end of life. HABIT 155 If we have been in any degree mismade — and who has not ? — we ought never to consider it too late to mend. The aspiring soul struggles after per- fection; and how is this to be obtained but through the modification of habit ? I have heard the venerable Principal Whyte, of Edinburgh, from the Moderator's chair of the Church of which he is an ornament, preach to his brethren, with great persuasiveness and power, on the maxim, that it is never too late either to unlearn an evil habit or to learn a good one ; and even the elderly men who were listening felt this to be one of the truest as well as most encouraging gospels they had ever listened to. Habit, even if it be good, may be excessive : it may become hidebound and tyrannical. There is a Pharisaical adherence to opinions once formed and customs once adopted which is the greatest obstacle in the path of progress. Yet, on the whole, there is no more valuable posses- sion than a few good habits.^ Such a possession means that not only is the mind pledged and 1 " In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, become flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing : it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is every- thing, for it is to reach the substance of life." Amiel, " Joiirnal," I, 9. 156 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY covenanted to what is good, but that even the muscles are suppled and the very bones bent to the same end. This is what a good home and a good education should impart. The child grown to youth should come out upon the world with a sweet and natural disposition, acquired from long practice, to do the right thing at the common junctures of life — to be courteous, punctual, truthful and obedient. This is what schoolboys of a superior class mean by " honour " and by " playing the game " ; and such a bent in the right direction may for years be no bad substi- tute for principles and convictions. Those who have gone before have tried the alternatives and discovered which are the ways of wisdom, and the newcomer ought to be able so far to profit from their experience. No doubt he may, through inward perverseness, in spite of all that his elders can do, choose the path of folly ; but his parents and teachers can at least communi- cate to him a bias towards the better part. Nothing could be more miserable than if at every moment of life we had to stop and deliberate, handling every weapon as if it had never been used before. In that case, life would be inex- pressibly slow ; we should always be merely screwing up the instrument and never playing the HABIT 157 tune. But habit makes us experts in conduct ; it saves our time and enables us to forge ahead. What the good habits are which everyone should seek to acquire at an early stage, it would be difficult to say. Every adviser would give his own list ; and even a very full list would easily be capable of extension. Still, there are some which the wise would be unanimous in recom- mending, and there may be advantages in speci- fying a few of these. No habit is more essential to character than self-control. This is the power of getting oneself to do promptly and resolutely whatever one is aware one ought to do and to refuse to do what would offend conscience and honour. At first, this habit may be extremely difficult to acquire because of the volatility of one's own spirits or a disposition to yield to the desires of others ; but there is an enormous exhilaration in it. To be able to do what one knows one ought to do is moral strength ; it breeds self-respect ; and it is sure to command the respect of others. Another habit of incalculable value is concen- tration of thought. This is the power of calling the mind in from other objects and fixing it for a long time on the point in hand. To all perhaps 158 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY this is difficult at first, the mind, when one tries to confine it, leaping away to a hundred irre- levant subjects. But, if one only perseveres, it will at last obey ; and then one is on the way to be a real thinker. The secrets and the joys of truth belong only to those who can think in this way. There is no more desirable habit than that of really working when we are at work. I do not care what anyone's work may be — whether of the brain or of the hand ; whether well-paid or ill- paid — what I say is, do it for its own sake and for your own sake, as well as it can be done ; do it so well that you can be proud of it. There is no happiness like that of daily work honestly and thoroughly done. Your employer may cheat you of your pay, but he cannot cheat you of this satisfaction. I never meet a young man — a young minister or a student, a tradesman or a mechanic — who is doing his work with all his heart but I feel as if I could embrace him. This is the Gospel of Labour which, when preached by Carlyle a generation ago, put iron into the blood of the thoughtful members of the middle class and a stoical joy into their conflict with difficulties; and well would it be for the world if in our day there arose another apostle to HABIT 159 bring home the same wholesome doctrine to a wider audience and a lower stratum of society. We are hearing at present too much of wages and too little of work. They are not true prophets who preach to the multitude their right to wage^ if they do not, in something like fair proportion, preach to them also the duty of work ; for, while work for insufficient wages is a great curse, wages for insufficient work would be a greater. For the sake of the workers themselves there is at present no message more urgent than this ; for it is only when men can take a pride in their labour and hold up their face to their own handi- work in view of the keenest inspection that they can be really independent and free. One more good habit only let me mention — that of prayer. To work is to pray, many say at the present day ; but I am not satisfied with this dictum. No man prizes genuine work more than I do ; but we require prayer besides. And happy is he who, at a certain time or times of the day which experience has taught him to be the best for him, bends the knee and prays to his Maker. Happy, I say, is that man; for his heavenly Father, who seeth in secret, will reward him openly. Evil habits may be contracted by merely failing 160 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY to acquire good ones ; for, like weeds, they grow spontaneously wherever the ground is not culti- vated and preoccupied with good seed. The man who does not work becomes a dissipated loafer. When anyone fails to acquire the habit of going to church on Sunday, he loses, as a rule, the spiritual instinct and has no taste for either Christian truth or Christian fellowship or Chris- tian work ; and on Sunday he becomes a prey to habits of slothfulness. Leisure-time is in many lives the DeviFs opportunity. This is because, when people have nothing in particular to do, and no way of spending the sacred day is obligatory, time is not only wasted, but modes of killing it are invented which are demoralising to the character and difficult, when once indulged in, to abandon. The tyranny of evil habit is proverbial. Habit is like a thread to begin with ; but, as thread is twisted with thread, it grows to be a cable, which it is impossible to snap. At first it is like a twig which can be bent at pleasure ; but by degrees it becomes like the stem of a tree, con- taining an evil twist, which it is hardly possible to undo. Nothing is more appalling than to ob- serve how little even the strongest motives avail to overcome habit after it has reached a certain stage of maturity. HABIT 161 The rules for breaking oflF evil habits supplied by the moralists are such as the following : "Launch yourself on the new course with as strong an initiative as possible " ; " Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is rooted in your life " ; ** Seize the very first possible oppor- tunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experi- ence in the direction of habits you aspire to gain " ; " Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day ". These rules are taken from James' ''Psychology " ; and the author enforces them with the shrewdness of a man of the world and the earnestness of a teacher who, beneath the gaiety of his language, conceals a moral purpose. I do not disparage such rules : on the contrary, I should be happy to enforce them ; for we must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. But the rest of this Scriptural adage is of equal value — " for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure ". The problem of Christianity might quite well be stated in this form : Is there available for man, when he is trying to uproot evil habit, a power outside of himself, which, when his own resources do not suffice, may come to the rescue, not, in- 11 162 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY deed, by suspending the action of his own powers, but by working through these and raising them to the potency required in every time of need? What answer to this question is given in the Scriptures it is unnecessary to say. But experi- ence confirms Scripture — the experience of thousands who, having tried in vain to reform themselves, have found in the Gospel the power of God unto salvation — the experience of men in whom evil habit had grown to be so strong that it seemed as hopeless to overcome it as to reverse the course of Niagara, yet who by the grace of God were converted into humble and consistent saints. There is no sin, however inveterate, the power of which Christ is unable to break ; publi- can and sinner, Pharisee and Sadducee experience in contact with Him deliverance from their be- setting sins ; for He is able to save to the utter- most all who come unto God through Him. The word " habit " originally means a garment ; indeed, in French it is the word for dress ; and in English we speak of " a riding-habit " in this literal sense. Habits are the dress of the spirit, by which it is known for the very thing it is. And the Scripture compares the whole of the habits of an unregenerate man to an old and filthy gariAentj but the Christian character to clothing HABIT 163 new and dignified. " Put off," it says, " the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts ; put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." " Put ye on," it says elsewhere, in a still bolder figure of speech, " the Lord Jesus Christ " — that is, the perfect character of Christ, so that who- ever looks upon anyone thus arrayed may imme- diately be compelled to think of Christ. The phenomena connected with the association of ideas have been used to support a doctrine of determinism ; the assumption being that one idea creates another, and that ideas form a continuum as little liable to interruption or creative change as are the facts of the physical world. But it must not be forgotten that an idea may have many associated ideas, one lying in one direction and another in another, and that in this there is scope for choice, by the mind itself, of the next step it will take. Besides, against the alleged assumption there is the consciousness of all that their habits might have been very different from what they are, and that character is a develop- ment for which everyone is responsible. From our point of view it certainly is not necessary to deny the tyranny of habit or to ignore the 164 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY influence of the past on the making of the future. Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are. But it is essential to keep open the access of the divine presence and power to human nature ; be- cause from that quarter there comes an im- measurable redemptive force. Habit may be so hardened that the individual may appear both to himself and others no more able to alter it than is the Ethopian to change his skin or the leopard its spots ; but this is the very situation v^hich gives to God's grace its opportunity : " A new heart also will I give you, and a right spirit will I put within you ; and I will take away the hard and stony heart out of your flesh, and will give you an heart of flesh ". And it is tlie situation out of which springs the initiative of faith ; because, the more desperate anyone's sense is of his lost condition, the more absolutely will he cast him- self upon the power which is able to lift him out of sin and misery. CHAPTER VII THE EEASON CHAPTER VII THE REASON In the panegyric on the greatness of man, in " Hamlet," already quoted, the dramatist ex- y claims first, " How noble in reason ! " and reason is man's prime dignity. . It is the mark by which he is specially distinguished from the inferior animals. It is the means by which he rules over^ the other creatures and subdues the earth to his will and purposes. It is by the development of the reason, or intellect, or mind — for these are all names for the same faculty — that one race of mankind outstrips another in the path of pro- gress; and the degree in which this faculty is possessed is the accepted measure of greatness between man and man. The cultivation of the reason must, therefore, be an object of sacred ambition for all who covet a lofty or well de- veloped humanity. What i^ the work of the reason ?^ The reason may, in its highest form of activity, (167) 168 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY be described as the faculty by which from things already known we advance to conclusions which these imply but which, till the act of reasoning is performed, are unknown. Thus there resides in the reason, as well as in the imagination, a kind of creative power ; for out of the facts lodged in the mind through the faculties of observation it educes thoughts which are new and of its own invention. Of this an inkling may be discerned in the exaltation with which a successful piece of reasoning is completed by one's own mental faculties or even listened to from another's lips. A touch of this self- satisfaction is felt even by the schoolboy as he sees that the sum at which he is working is coming right; and by every housewife, at her accounts, when the two sides exactly balance. At the close of the evidence submitted during a prolonged trial in a court-of-law the facts to which the jury have listened may form a con- fused mass of isolated statements, apparently pointing in no particular direction ; but an able advocate, rising, takes hold of them and, separat- ing part from part and laying this thing and that together, compels the jury to recognise that in the facts to which they have been listening there is a certain conclusion involved, which emerges /"^^HV.. THE REASON 169 as clearly as a point of light. The entire science of mathematics is deduced from a few axioms, with which it begins ; to these an uninstructed mind would assent without perceiving anything which they imply ; but the educated reason can trace out the conclusions, one after another, until there arises, out of little or nothing, a vast and noble structure of demonstrative truth. Thus, the reason, bringing its force to bear on the raw materials of knowledge supplied by the lower faculties, infers from them a more ad- vanced and lofty knowledge of its own. A humbler way of describing the reason is to call it the faculty of comparison or of relation. By the lower faculties the materials of thought are brought into the mind singly and apart ; but the reason combines them ; it observes those which are like one another and gathers these into groups, while it separates the unlike. So multitudinous are the objects presented to ob- servation in nature and in history that, if the mind had to deal with them one by one, it would be hopelessly confused, and movement would be impossible ; but the reason enables it to reduce this multiplicity to manageable proportions by gathering them into bundles. Thus, for example, nature presents to the mind numerous objects, 170 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY no two of which are in all respects alike, but the reason, comparing them, perceives that in certain respects they are all alike, and accord- ingly it puts them in one bundle which it labels " flowers " ; and then, instead of attending to each of these objects by itself, it can, when it finds it desirable, think of millions of them under this one conception. The mind is constantly forming such groups by comparing and contrast- ing the objects brought under its notice. Some- times it includes a group under a wider one, as when Europeans are known to be Aryans ; sometimes it breaks up a group into smaller ones, as when a boy learns to distinguish his books into poetry and prose ; and constantly has the mind to be deciding to which group every new object coming within its ken has to be re- ferred. As a rule this is easy; yet it may be the reverse ; and not seldom may mistakes be made. Thus, many a person is astonished to learn that a whale is not a fish, or that a sponge is not a plant. When a prisoner is at the bar, it has to be determined whether he is to be placed in the group of Guilty or that of Not-guilty ; but everyone is aware that to do so may be far from easy : it may require the leading of much evidence and the presentation of a lengthy argu- THE REASON 171 ment; and, when all is done, the conclusion may be less clear than could be desired. The relations between one thing and another by which such classification is regulated may be of many difi*erent kinds ; but it is the function of the reason to detect these, whatever they may be. Thus, some things are related to one another as means and ends. Something requires to be done ; but how ? To find this out is the province of reason. It has to calculate and to experi- ment, until it has discovered the means for accomplishing the end contemplated. Thus, the general sent to reduce a territory or to capture a fortress has to pick the requisite number of troops, to provide these with arms and ammuni- tion, to accumulate stores of every description, to determine the routes, to devise the mode of attack, and to do a hundred other things, all of which are the work of the reason. The engineer to whom is submitted the problem of propelling a ship of a certain size and weight at a certain rate has, in like manner, to calculate the type of engine requisite, to test the strength of materials, and forecast the effects of lines and curves ; and in this adaptation of the means to the end it is the reason which is at work from point to point. 172 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY The statesman has the welfare of the country committed to his charge, but he will fail of his task, and it will not be long before his place must be taken by someone else, unless his in- tellect be continually exercised in devising new improvements and removing old hindrances. In short, a very large proportion of the work of human beings, from the highest paths of activity down to the humblest, may be described as the exercise of the reason in the way of adapting means to ends. Another kind of connexion between objects with which the reason has to do is that of cause and effect. Not infrequently the problems ofifered to the reason from this quarter are closely related to those just described. For example, when a doctor is called in, because a patient is suflPering pain, he has first to set his brain to work to discover what is the origin of the disturbance — this is a question of cause and effect — and then he has to apply his mind to determine by what specifics the disorder can be removed — this is a question of means and ends. This world, as soon as we open our eyes upon it, is seen to be full of phenomena into the causes of which the mind is impelled to inquire. Why do day and night succeed each other so regu- THE REASON 173 larly ? why do the four seasons divide the year amongst them ? why does it rain ? why does the wind blow ? why does the tide rise and fall ? " Why " is a great word of the reason ; and its twin- word is " Becaoase " : whenever either of these is made use of, the reason is at work. There have been parts of the world, indeed, and there have been epochs of history, in which little use of such words has been made ; but, in the present century and in the countries of civilisa- tion, there is awake in the minds of men an in- satiable curiosity ; things that had for centuries been taken for granted have been called in ques- tion ; every feature of nature has given rise to inquiry, and the answers have been made the occasion for deeper investigations. The result of all this mental travail is the fabric of modern sci- ence, which is the answer, as far as it has yet been possible to give it, to the queries of the intellect. Not only, however, can the mind thus reason from the phenomena which it sees back to the causes by which these have been produced, but it can also turn the problem the other way and ask, " Such-and-such conditions being given, what will be the consequences " ? If gunpowder and fire were brought into contact, we know what would ensue ; if a living animal were 174 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY thrown into the water and could not swim, we know that it would be drowned. But, though the answers to such simple questions are notorious, there are problems arising every day to which the answers cannot yet be given even by the wisest ; and there are others for the solution of which the widest survey is requisite of which the human faculties are capable. But this is one of the most important functions of reason — to fore- cast what the results will be of certain modes of action. Such are some of the relations of which the reason has to take cognisance. But it can hardly be much engaged in this work without the question arising, how these connexions between things have been formed. When, for example, certain of the objects perceived in nature are separated from the rest and called flowers, is this a division only formed by the human mind for its own convenience, or does it exist in nature it- self ? and, if so, how did it come there ? One of the greatest triumphs of the reason has been the discovery of what are called the laws of nature. There is, for example, the law of gravitation. First formulated, in the mind of Newton, to ex- plain very simple phenomena, it was subsequently applied by him and by others to explain the en- THE REASON 175 tire system of the physical universe and the motions of the bodies with which space is peopled. But how do the motions of all physical things in heaven and earth happen to be regu- lated by this law ? As the human mind arranges the objects of its knowledge, it finds that it is not proceeding arbitrarily : the order is there already in the very framework of nature, and all that the human mind has to do is to find it out. Thus, the path of thought goes along deep lines which have been fixed in the constitution of the world before man arrived. The universe, in short, is a creation of intelligence. It is moral also ; for, in reasoning from antecedent to conse- quent, the mind discovers that certain kinds of ac- tion lead to happiness, while others lead to misery. The stars in their courses fight on the side of righteousness and against iniquity. At the back of nature, therefore, there is a somewhat — must it not be a Someone ? — who has impressed on it the order which it is the glory of the human mind to trace out and who, therefore, must be wise. And not only is all orderly, but all is ordered with a view to righteousness ; and, therefore, its Author must be good.^ ^ Of all the achievements of modem philosophy perhaps the most remarkable is that of Kant, who, in his doctrine of 176 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY The above is a faint outline of the functions the Categories, proved that in the mind, as it comes into the world, there is a system of pigeonholes, by which the process of classifying the objects presented in sense is facilitated, and so the multitudinous and confused presentations of sense are worked up into experience. Just as in the body, at its birth, there are orifices and receptacles of various kinds, through which the impressions of external things are conveyed to the mind from the outside, so in the mind itself there is machin- ery provided for dealing with these masses of sensation, separating them into like and unlike and thus enabling them to be unified into knowledge ; for the mere reception of sen- sations is not knowledge : knowledge is a manufactured article, consisting of the sensations after they have passed through this internal machine. Time and space, Kant early saw, form part of this mental apparatus ; but he subse- quently discovered that the means of working out the entire structure of which he was in search had been provided, many hundreds of years before his own thinking began, in the Logic of the Greek philosophy. The ancient logicians had arrived at the doctrine that all judgments are of four species — those of quantity, quality, relation and modality — and Kant, laying hold of this suggestion, worked out twelve categories, by means of which the mind is always performing the separat- ing and unifying operations in which it is engaged. These categories are not themselves, properly speaking, knowledge ; knowledge comes through the senses ; but they are the indis- pensable forms through which the sensations must pass before they are worked up into knowledge. It is one of the wonders of history that the doctrines of logic were so early perfected ; it fills one with the same astonishment at the power of the human mind as is produced by the early perfection of mathe- matics ; and this use by Kant of the labours of his ancient THE REASON 177 of reason. A word may now be said about its cultivation. This valuable faculty is distributed among the members of the human species in very varying ^ degrees. Those fitted by nature to take the foremost places among their fellow-creatures are all generously endowed with it, while, at the op- posite extreme, there are multitudes whose ideas are habitually vague and feeble. Even among those who have received the gift in a liberal degree, however, reason exists in different forms, some of which are more and some less conscious. In the less conscious forms it obtains such names as Tact and Commonsense. In women of the abler class there is frequently little capacity for formal argument, but there is an insight by which motive is penetrated and character judged with al- most infallible accuracy, and in practical matters there is a power of choosing the proper instru- ment and going straight to the mark which the formal thinker toils after in vain. In the same predecessors is so convincing that it is difficult for anyone who has really grasped the significance of the Categories ever to be satisfied with a view of mental science which attributes everything to matter and sense, without recognising the marvellous structure of the mind itself. Matter and sense, indeed, contribute the material, and mind only the form ; but form makes all the difference between chaos and cosmos. 12 178 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY way persons of the opposite sex strongly endowed with commonsense reach just judgments in diffi- cult cases by shortcuts, which they would them- selves be unable to explain ; and they have frequently the power of compressing into brief and luminous sayings the results of a lifetime of experience. When the Forth Bridge was in pro- cess of construction, I once had the privilege of spending an afternoon in the company of one of the principal engineers, who told me that, in the carrying out of that gigantic undertaking, many new and surprising difficulties had to be sur- mounted. On the solution of these the highest trained skill which money could purchase was brought to bear ; yet most of them were solved by one man, who had had no College training and possessed little mathematical knowledge, but was full of a kind of genius which, without con- scious rules, could always find some way out of a difficulty. " Set him down," said my inform- ant, " before any difficulty whatever, and he will come out of it somehow at the other side." The man was Sir William Arrol, whose earthly career has since terminated, and whose memoir has re- cently been given to the world. Commonsense is generally considered to be a gift which, unless it has been bestowed by THE REASON 179 nature, cannot be acquired at all. What amount of truth there may be in this popular impression need not be discussed here ; but at all events, in certain of its forms, the reason is a faculty ex- tremely susceptible of education ; and it may be worth while to mention some of the ways in which it may be cultivated. The science of logic has for its aim to put into forms visible to the eye all the processes through which reasoning passes, whether the mind be conscious of its own operations or not ; it also exhibits all kinds of fallacious arguments in such a way as to demonstrate their absurdity ; and there can be no question that the study of this science has a practical value in enabling the mind to reason correctly.^ Mathematical science ^ The science of logic has to do with three processes — conception, judgment and reasoning — and an attempt has been made in the text to give some general notion of what these are. But perhaps more space should have been taken to explain at least the third — reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Only, if such technicalities were admitted at all, it would be difficult to know where to stop. The ordinary man is not aware that the workings of his own mind can all be re- duced to the simple forms of logic, or that the most stupend- ous structures of thought put together by the mind of man, such as the abstract sciences, can all be taken asunder and ex- hibited as illustrations of the same processes. Hence, where real mental curiosity exists, a slight acquaintance with the laws of thought may be found anything but dry. 180 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY being from beginning to end a pure effort of the reason, its pursuit is an excellent discipline for this faculty. The same tonic influence is exerted by grammar — one of the most valuable elements in elementary education. He who wishes to strengthen this faculty in himself ought to ac- custom himself to sequestered and prolonged meditation on important themes ; for practice here, as elsewhere, makes perfect ; and he ought to accustom himself to such reading and study as will put a strain on the attention. At the present time many even of those possessed of intellectual tastes are spoiling their minds by the scrappiness and discursiveness of their reading. In an autobiographical work the Duke of Argyll before the last, who deserved well of his country by the perseverance with which for a lifetime he moved, in the eyes of the public, on the higher levels of thought, mentioned the influence exerted on his own faculties by the practice of certain mechanical arts, which his father had him taught. Love, he remarked, of accurate workmanship — of absolutely smooth surfaces made by the plane and of joinings where the edges absolutely met — with a dislike and disdain of slovenliness in such re- spects, strengthened the mental powers. There can be no doubt that this observation is just. THE REASON 181 To habits of accuracy and perfection in doing whatever the hand finds to do — the habit of making one's job as clean and complete as it can be made — belongs the virtue of exerting a most invigorating influence on the intellect ; and here mental culture and moral culture are one. The religious use of the reason has already been hinted at. God might almost be said to be a product of the reason ; at all events He is its discovery. In v^hat way the reason apprehends Him is, indeed, a subject of hot controversy ; but that, in some way, we rise from "things which do appear" to the Author from whom these proceed is certain ; and this is by far the sublimest flight of this faculty. On the objects of the creation the marks of the Deity are im- printed, and similar marks of Him are repro- duced day after day before the eyes of men in the evolution of history. From these the reasoning mind infers God's various attributes — "His eternal power and godhead " — and there can be no nobler occupation for the reason than to piece together such indications into a consistent and impressive view of what God is, and so vindicate the divine existence and character against the objections of unbelief. 182 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY In a well known passage of the Old Testament, y Jehovah says to His people, " Come now and let us reason together " ; and, all through the writ- ings of the prophets, one of the commonest com- plaints is, that those who have had the best ' opportunities of apprehending the Divine Being do not make use of their reasoning powers — " My people do not know, Israel doth not consider ". Everywhere in the Scripture it is taken for granted that, if human beings would only think, they would worship and obey. One of the commonest names for sin, on the contrary, is "folly" or " unreason ". In the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, in which not only wisdom but folly also is discussed, the fundamental idea is, that He who has created this world and appointed man to inhabit it has laid down, in the very sub- stance of things, the rails on which human lives must move forward, if they are to reach happi- ness here and blessedness hereafter. Therefore, to find out what these lines are and to keep life running forward on them is the predestined work of reason. But, if, when God says, '' You must move in this direction if you wish to be happy," anyone is moving in the opposite direction and yet expecting to be happy, then this person is a fool ; for the end of these things is death. THE REASON 183 It has often occurred to me that, if even a person of abandoned character could be got to sit down and consider what the issues of his present con- duct must be, and what would be the results of turning round to God, he could not fail to come to a right religious decision, so loudly would his own rational nature cry out to him to repent and believe. God has not, however, left us to the light of reason alone : He has given to us a revelation of Himself in the Word and in Christ, by which we may far more clearly and fully learn both what He is and what is our own duty. This supple- mentary revelation is not, however, contradictory to that of nature ; and the exercise of reason is requisite to comprehend its message and to incor- porate this with the rest of knowledge. God's Word is not given as a substitute for thought, but is fitted to widen and elevate our own think- ing. There is in it, indeed, a marvellous simpli city, so that it can be comprehended and loved by the humblest ; yet the most gifted are carried by it, if they will accept its aid, far above them- selves, till they are able to apprehend things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. At the present day there is need to plead for an intelligent and reasonable faith ; because re- 184 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY ligion is tending to sink into sentimentalism and sensationalism ; and the majority of earnest people are so busy with practical undertakings that they have too little leisure to think. A generation ago it was dififerent : one of the features of the religion of our fathers and grand- fathers was grasp of principle combined with strength of conviction. They may have had less learning than we enjoy ; but they knew the Bible, and its profound truths and overawing mysteries made thinkers of them. Facts are pouring in upon us from every quarter in bewildering numbers, and we read voraciously ; but the ac- cumulation of miscellaneous fragments of informa- tion is not thought : there is requisite a principle of unity, to combine our scattered knowledge into a whole ; and this we shall seek most hope- fully where our fathers found it — in the Word of God. With such a principle in hand, not only shall we comprehend this wonderful world in which we exist, but we shall see our own path- way clearly through it, to the better world to which we are travelling ; for the growth of Christian intelligence has far more to do than it is usual at present to recognise with both depth of character and consistency of conduct. The Kef ormation of the sixteenth century was, THE REASON 185 on one of its sides, a revival of reason. Before it arrived, the clergy had practically discontinued the function of preaching, the worship of the house of God being limited to a ceaseless round of forms and ceremonies. But, as soon as the dry bones had been moved, the awakened people began to cry out for the sustenance of the mind ; and this was supplied to them in ample measure through the earnest and systematic preaching of the reformed clergy, while, in addition, the Bible was put into the hands of the common man, who proceeded to acquire for himself the power of reading, in order that he might learn, at first hand, the truth about the way of salvation. Very soon he had learned this so well that he was able to say whether or not the message delivered from the pulpit was in accordance with the sacred oracles. Ever since, preaching has been the dis- tinctive feature of Protestant worship ; and this involves the cultivation of the reason in both pulpit and pew. As a regular churchgoer listens from Sabbath to Sabbath to the lectures and ser- mons of a conscientious preacher, there gradually forms itself in his mind a view of the world — what the Germans call a Weltanschauung — inside of which all the most important objects coming within the scope of his experience are arranged ]^ 186 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY into unity, and by which the conduct and the motives of both others and himself are judged. This view of his may be limited, and it may in some respects be mistaken ; but there is no reason, but the reverse, why it should not be constantly expanding and constantly in process of correction. " Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection ? " But to possess such a Weltan- schauung at all is a mark of distinction : it means that he who possesses it has passed out of the herd and joined the ranks of the thinkers — of those who not only live but know what they are living for. No occupation can be more honour- able than to preach to minds of such calibre, however limited may be their education and however lowly their lot in life ; and, if a preacher takes such hearers where he finds them and handles them with respect and sympathy, there is no intellectual height accessible to himself to which he will not find them able and willing to rise with him. f God Himself is the reason of the universe ; and, by His stupendous works in nature and by the mystery of His providence, He has evoked from the mind of man in all ages its profoundest thoughts.'^ There is every reason to believe that / THE REASON 187 this will continue and increase, the better man- kind becomes acquainted with the objects of creation in the distant heavens and with the pro- cesses of nature on the earth. In the Old Testa- ment a David and an Isaiah touch the highest notes of sublimity when describing Him who sits on the circle of the heavens and counts the number of the stars. But a St. Paul in the New Testament finds so much deeper a wisdom in the process by which a righteous God is able to make sinners righteous that, when he contemplates it, he breaks out into the rhapsody, ** O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God^! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past tracing out ! " and a St. John, in similar fashion, finds the flight of his soaring mind at once stimulated and baffled by the mystery of how the Word was made flesh. However fast or far other knowledge may ad- vance, the fact of redemption will always sur- pass for the individual every other earthly ex- perience, and the hope of finding out how much it may mean for other beings in the distant places of creation is one of the reasons for which enlightened Christians covet immortality. ^ CHAPTEK VIII THK HEABT CHAPTER VIII THE HEAET At the point now reached we make the transi- tion from one great part of Psychology to another — ^from what used to be called the Intellectual or Cognitive Powers to what used to be called the Active and Moral Powers.^ The distinction will be remembered, which was drawn in an earlier lecture, between knowing and doing. Know- ledge and conduct have often been spoken of as between them exhausting human life ; but, it was pointed out, there is a third kind of human consciousness in which these two meet — namely, feeling. And on this meeting depend great issues ; because, on the one hand, it is knowledge which excites feeling, and, on the other hand, it is feeling which produces action. Feeling used to be reckoned among the active powers ; but it differs ^ The distinction between the Cognitive and Motive Powers goes back as far as Aristotle. (191) J 192 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY widely not only from knowledge but from con- duct.' There will be remembered also what was said, in the same lecture, about the two systems of nerves — the sensory, conveying messages from the outside world to the brain, and the motor, conveying messages from the brain to the ex- ternal world. These two systems of nerves may be compared to a double set of telegraph-wires ; but, in order to make the comparison adequate, you would require to have a telegraph-wire of a pattern never seen — a wire aware of the purport of the messages it is conveying and, therefore, swelling and glowing when conveying a message of joy and becoming solid and rigid when con- veying a message of sorrow ; though, strictly speaking, it is not the substance of the nerve it- self that is thus affected, but the surrounding tissues, and that by forces coming in the op- posite direction. When messages are being flashed along the wires of the nerves, not only ^ How vast are the fields of human experience covered by the Cognitive Powers will be realised if a remark of Bacon be recalled, that memory produces history, imagination poetry, and reason philosophy. But the scope of the Active Powers may be brought home to the intelligence if, in the same way, we connect with the heart religion, with the will jurisprudence, and with the conscience ethics. THE HEART 193 is information supplied at head-quarters, but there is created along the course of the message, and especially in the brain, a tumult or excite- ment corresponding with the character of the message transmitted. Thus, suppose one were unfortunate enough to be the witness of a bar- barous murder, not only would the nerve-wires convey to the brain the facts of the crime, but at the same moment there would arise within the frame a tumultuous sense of horror and indigna- tion, which, it is easy to perceive, would be some- thing additional to mere knowledge. Or suppose an orator, in the presence of a multitude, is char- acterizing a tyrannical government ; he conveys, by the motions of his lungs and throat and by the use of language, certain details of infor- mation ; but the effect which he produces is not entirely due to this : it is by the passion visible in his eyes and by the pathos trembling in his voice that the multitude is moved ; and here again, it will be perceived, there is something additional to the mere facts. It is, however, when the effects of the same information on the hearts of different persons are considered that the difference between knowing and feeling is most manifest. Suppose, for in- stance, that in the morning papers there were an- 13 194 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY nounced the sudden death of a well-known man in a foreign land : while the mere fact made known to every reader would be the same, the impression produced on the woman who thereby was made aware that she was a widow might be in violent contrast with that made on someone who had never had any intercourse with the deceased but knew himself to be the dead man's heir ; and there might be other readers for other reasons nearly as differently affected by the news. This extra thing, which accompanies our know- ing and willing, and which forms the third side of the triangle of our inner life, goes under many names : it is called feeling, emotion, affection, passion, sentiment — terms between which it is not very easy to discriminate — but the most compre- hensive term is " the heart," when this is used, in its popular sense and in such phrases as " head and heart," as a general name for all feelings whatever.^ ^ As there seems to be in the brain no organ which is the physiological substrate of feeling, mechanical philosophy finds great difficulty in including feeling at all in the cycle of causa- tion ; but the gigantic part played by feeling in the production of history, both personal and social, is one of the strong points of a spiritual philosophy. Compare the remarks on Subject- ive or Hedonic Selection in McDouqall, " Physiological Psy- chology," pp. 157 ff. THE HEART 195 Feelings have an almost infinite range and variety. They may consist of the gentlest wave- lets, or they may toss the internal ocean into tempest. Some of them are easily identified by their bodily effects ; for feeling, though properly belonging to the mind, overflows into the body and produces changes in its appearance. Thus, grief is associated with tears, amusement with laughter, happiness with smiles ; horror is ex- pressed by rigidity of the frame and dilatation of the eyes, contempt by the curling of the lip, and so on. The eye and the mouth especially have an almost infinite capacity for expressing shades of feeling. Yet many feelings reside more deeply in the mind, and betray their existence but little by bodily effects. I am not sure that I have ever seen a complete list of all possible feelings ; but many attempts have been made to classify the more important of them. Thus, in a work by President McCosh, entitled " The Motive Powers," they have been divided into those relating to the past, those relating to the present, and those relating to the future. Feelings relating to the past are such as remorse and gratitude ; feelings relating to the present are such as love and joy ; and feelings relating to 196 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY the future are such as hope and foreboding This, however, is not a division of any great sig- nificance ; and there are feelings which may be referred to any of these three classes. Terror, for example, may relate either to past, present, or future. Another division of far more consequence is that into feelings of pleasure and of pain. This is a very old division, and it has played even too great a part in the thinking of the world on the subject, many taking for granted that it is ex- haustive. It may be questioned, however, whether all feelings can be included in such a twofold division. There may be feelings, as Bain, for example, contends, which are neutral, causing neither pleasure nor pain. But undoubt- edly most feelings can be classed under one or other of these categories ; indeed, pleasure and pain themselves consist in the experience of cer- tain feelings ; and herein lies the importance of this division — that we delight to have pleasurable feelings and dislike to have painful ones. Hence, when we have had a pleasurable feeling once, we seek to repeat it, and, when we have once had a painful feeling, we try subsequently to avoid it, as well as the causes by which it has been occa- sioned. Many philosophers have not scrupled to THE HEART 197 teach that this is the key to the whole of human existence : what people are incessantly doing is, these say, seeking for pleasurable emotions and endeavouring to avoid painful ones. I do not believe this — at least not in this bald and exclu- sive form — but undoubtedly we put our finger here on one of the pulses of the machine. There is a third division of feeling, to which I attach more importance still — into simple and elaborate. The simplest feelings of all may be called animal, and they are such as arise from the body — hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and the like. These belong to all human beings and reach back into the earliest childhood. Then, there are feelings a little higher, in which mind is a little more involved, such as pride, envy, anger. These also reach far back, a child being capable of manifesting anger at an extremely early age ; so, it can exhibit pride and envy ; in short, whatever feelings relate exclusively to self show themselves very early. A child is the centre of the world to itself, and it expects all the rest of the world to minister to it. As long as this expectation is fulfilled, it manifests gratification of various kinds, but, when it is disappointed, it can exhibit very strong feeling indeed. Beyond this, again, there is a higher stage ; and to reach y 198 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY it a long step is required : this is the stage of sympathy. If childhood is self-centred, youth is distinguished by the outgoing of the heart to- wards others. At the transition from childhood to young manhood or maidenhood, there passes over human nature a change which has been compared to that which takes place in the Alps in the early year when^ the breath of spring creeping up the peaks, the grasp of winter is re- laxed on snowdrift and glacier, and, away down on the plains of Holland and Italy, the rivers go brimming to the sea, diffusing beauty and fruit- fulness along their course. In youth it is as natural to give and communicate as it is at other seasons to grasp and retain ; and this is the op- portunity of escaping from selfishness and emerg- ing into the life of sympathy and affection. This expansion of the heart may go on, till it embraces not only individuals but far wider circles, and grows into the passion of patriotism or the en- thusiasm of humanity. Yet there is a still higher stage to be mentioned : those who have studied this subject most deeply usually place at the sum- mit of the development of feeling three senti- ments which do much, where they appear, to dignify humanity — the love of truth, the sense of beauty and the sentiment of duty. THE HEART 199 These divisions will help to indicate the wide range of this subject, which includes such dis- tinct and widely separate feelings as vanity and humility, rapture and melancholy, pity and jealousy, vengeance and contentment, scorn and patience, and many more. It is probable that different persons are born with different capabilities of feeling, just as they come into the world with different intellectual capacities. We speak of certain persons as being thin-skinned or as having their nerves too near the surface ; because by the slightest causes their feelings can be set in agitation. It is no rare thing to meet a man — though oftener perhaps it is a woman — who might be described as a bundle of nerves. Other persons are at the opposite ex- treme : they are difficult to move ; jokes which convulse others with laughter cannot elicit from them a smile ; and occurrences which throw others into transports leave them cool and com- posed. These differences characterize not only individuals, but whole races and nations. Thus, to the French or the Irish would be ascribed the peculiarity of being easily moved, and to the Dutchman or the Englishman the reverse. But, whatever differences may belong by nature to indi- JJOO CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY viduals or peoples, feeling, like the other powers of the mind, is to a large extent a matter of train- ing. It is acknowledged by all that the intellect must be trained : whatever may be its native capacity, it cannot dispense with the discipline of the school or the culture derivable from reading. And, in the same way, many of the finest feelings slumber, unless they be called forth by the appro- priate education. In many, for example, the sense of beauty slumbers : when they stand in presence of the fairest landscapes, they are un- moved ; when they listen to classical music, they are only ennuyed ; and they have no desire to see the masterpieces of art. As, however, such limitations denote not only the narrowing of the horizon but the absence of access to some of the purest and most satisfying pleasures of life, it is worthy of inquiry in what ways the culture and discipline of the feelings can be carried out. First : the growth of feeling ought to proceed pari passu with the growth of the other two sides of the mind — namely, thought and will. Only in this way can a complete and well-balanced man- hood be obtained. If feeling be allowed to de- velop without the guidance of thought or the control of will, a character weak and hysterical will be the result. There are people in whom THE HEART 201 feeling has been allowed to become completely preponderant. Such a character was, for ex- ample, the late Walter Savage Landor, whose life consisted of a series of explosions of temper and a chronic display of whim and caprice. Persons of this composition are a source of never-ceasing perplexity and solicitude to those whose lot it is to live with them, and their career may end in the lunatic asylum. They have lost control of themselves, and the motives suggested by reason have not power to stop them.^ Not infrequently, indeed, their own eyes are open all the time ; so that they see with perfect clearness the precipice to which they are posting ; yet, when the oppor- tunity of renewing the feeling arises, they are unable to resist. In such over-mastering feeling there resides a certain splendour or magnificence, which is deceptive. It gives the person experi- encing it a sense of power and superiority: he thinks he is at the summit of enjoyment, in the region inhabited by the geniuses and the excep- tional spirits of humanity ; and ordinary existence seems to lie far beneath his feet. This, however, is only illusion : there is no real strength where ^"A person, no matter how highly educated otherwise, is a neural monster if he has not inhibition. '* Fraseb Hareis, "Nerves". 202 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY thought, conscience and will are excluded. Nevertheless, it can deceive others as well as the victim himself ; for persons in whom feeling is predominant are capable of exhibiting excessive affection, and they are profuse in the external demonstrations of the same. By these the un wary are taken-in ; for they do not know that what their professed lovers are enjoying is not the person loved, but the luxury of their own emotion. - Eternal constancy is sworn ; but the enjoyment would be quite the same whoever were the object of their passion. True love, on the contrary, may be penurious in expression ; it strikes inwards more than outwards ; it smoulders at the centre rather than sparkles on the surface ; it is controlled by modesty and good sense ; but it can be relied upon in the time of need, and it lasts forever. A second rule is, that the higher feeling is to be preferred to the lower. It has been already proved that there is a scale of feelings in worth and dignity. The lowest are those directly con- nected with the body, such as the satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and the highest are sentiments like the love of truth, the love of beauty, the love of duty. In the annals of academic life there are many stories of students who have THE HEART 208 lived for years on the humblest fare, as far as the appetites of the body are concerned, in order that they might gratify the passion for know- ledge ; and the rising of the soul with which such tales are listened to is an eloquent testi- mony to the superiority of the latter feeling. If, on the contrary, there be circles in which the highest enjoyment is that supplied by food and wine, while the taste for letters and art is un- known, such society, however lavish its wealth, would be looked down upon by all good judges as degraded. In like manner, the feelings which have self for their centre require, as a rule, repression, while those into which the ele- ment of sympathy with others enters are to be developed. Among the selfish feelings are pride, envy, jealousy and the like ; and it re- quires no argument to prove that these need to be severely checked ; or that pity, benevolence, public spirit, and other feelings into which re- gard for others enters are generally far too weak and require careful cultivation.^ From this posi- ^ Nietzsche, no doubt, and his followers make themselves conspicuous by turning the moral world upside down and setting not only the magnificence and magnanimity of the Greek, but even the violence and ferocity of the savage, above the humility and the holiness of the Christian. But surely Christian Apologetic has an easy task when it has to 204 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY tion it is easy to see how mucli truth or false- hood is contained in the statement, often made by the cynical, that every human being follows the feeling, whatever it be, that gives to himself most pleasure and avoids that which gives him pain. In a sense this may be true ; but, if a man takes more pleasure in doing what he believes to be for the welfare of others than in what benefits himself, he must have arrived at this height of attainment by a long course of victory over himself ; and it is idle to place him and the selfish man, who obeys his own first impulse, on a par by the argument that each prove that sympathy is better than selfishness, and gentleness more to be admired than arrogance. There may be circum- stances in European civilisation at the present time which impart a certain usefulness to the words of one who preaches at the pitch of his voice that the conclusions reached by his own intellect are more valuable than those of all the intellects that have ever peopled the earth before him, just as, in the wake of the Puritan Revolution, Hobbes obtained a hearing for the very similar doctrines of his " Leviathan " ; but every thinker knows that, if the thoughts of all who have preceded him have been folly and nonsense, his own are destined beforehand to the same futility ; for he is only human. No doubt to err is human ; but it is far less likely that the whole human race, striving throughout the ages to know and to do the right, has altogether missed the way than that one thinker and his disciples have formed an overweening estimate of his originality. THE HEART 205 obeys his own strongest bias. The highest illus- tration of this triumph of the higher over the lower is seen in the martyr, who has so far sub- dued all the lower desires as to be able to sac- rifice life itself in the interests of an ideal end. The last rule may be given in the words of Scripture : " Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth ". Feelings are good or bad according to the objects on which they rest. For example, one man's heart is set on wealth ; his whole being is absorbed in pursuing it ; and he grudges no time or pains in compass- ing his end. Another man has exactly the same devotion to the public good and exhausts his powers on this object in exactly the same way. But we do not place these two men on the same level. One young man has a friend for whom he cherishes an admiration only short of idolatry ; and, his friend being noble and pure, the con- nexion has a refining influence ; another has the same devotion to one who is worthless and whose example leads astray ; but we da not place these two on the same level. Now, there are two competitors for our feelings, characterized by St. Paul as " things above " and " things on the earth " ; the feelings which go out in these two directions may be the same ; but they become 206 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY different on account of the objects to which they are directed. Heligion may be said to consist in the putting forth on the things above of the same feelings which we naturally put forth on the things that are on the earth. For instance, all men dread fire, but some men dread the fire that shall never be quenched ; all men desire happi- ness, but some men desire blessedness ; all men love their fellow-creatures, but some men love the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is well known what place is given in Scrip- ture to faith, hope and love. What are these ? They are three feelings ; and they are the three master-feelings — the tap-roots among the in- numerable roots and rootlets of feeling in our nature. These tap-roots must be sunk some- where ; and the soil in which they are embedded will determine the character of the man. "When they are rooted in Christ, the man is a Christian. There are few reflections more pathetic than that in our nature there may be lying possibilities unused and faculties undeveloped which might be copious sources of both happiness and use- fulness. Perhaps, indeed, there may be in all possibilities which, in this life at least, are providentially prevented from developing natur- THE HEART 207 ally and fully; but it is sad when these pos- sibilities remain unrealised through our own fault. No man can be a man in the fullest sense of the word if his nature be shut against the influence of the things that are above : in that case there are possibilities of expansion and ex- cellence lying in him waste and barren ; and these are the noblest possibilities of all. No woman can attain to perfect womanliness unless her heart has opened to the softening and refin- ing influence of the love of Christ. We may miss many things in this world and yet not have lived in vain; but the secret and the glory of life are missed altogether if the gateways which admit the influence of the Eternal have never been opened.^ When the Age of Rationalism, the very name of which suggests that its characteristic was the ^ Strong, in his excellent work entitled " Christian Ethics," draws attention to one great contrast between Ancient and Christian Ethics. This is, that, in Ancient Ethics, emotion was distrusted; reason, the intellectual faculty, being alone credited with the power of forming character. Hope, for example, was spoken of as an ebullition of enthusiasm, not unlike intoxication, which could only be good if reason held it steadily in hand. Christianity, on the contrary, trusts emotion ; in fact, it makes the goodness which it aims at pro- ducing consist to a large extent in emotion — especially in the three emotions of faith, hope and love. 208 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY idolatry of reason, was reaching the stage of ex- haustion, Schleiermacher startled the theological world with the thesis, that the essence of religion consists in feeling — the feeling of absolute de- pendence on the Infinite. In Christ, he taught, this had existed perfectly and permanently, but in other men it can be attained only through union with Him. Years before, however, the same doctrine had secured expression in the United States at the mouth of Jonathan Ed- wards, who, at the very outset of his great work on the Religious Affections, lays down and de- fends the proposition that "true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections " — that is, in feelings. And, at the same time in England, the Wesleys and the other apostles of the Evangelical Revival were bringing about, in the experience of tens of thousands, a crisis the commonest symptom of which was the transition from one state of feeling to another — from the deepest depression, due to conviction of sin, to ecstasy, caused by apprehending Christ as the soul's wisdom and righteousness, sanctification and redemption. Since that time there has been no disposition anywhere to underestimate the place of feeling in religion, but rather perhaps a tendency to exaggerate it; although it may THE HEART 209 not seem easy to do the latter, when we recall St. Paul's summing-up of the essence of Christi- anity in a long list of feelings : " The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-con- trol," and especially when we recall our Lord's own statement that the first of all the command- ments is to love the Lord thy God with all the heart and with all the soul, with all the strength and with all the mind, and that the second is like unto it, to love one's neighbour as oneself. It is an echo of this sentiment when the poet de- clares : The heart's aye The part aye That mak's us richt or wrang. There have been centuries in the history of Christianity, and there have been quarters in the Christian Church, in which a pagan suspicion of religious feeling has prevailed, good men recog- nising the influence of the Spirit of God on the saints far less in the modification of their feelings than in ** enlightening their minds in the know- ledge of Christ and renewing their wills ". Even at the present day many are suspicious of feeling when it assumes the form of a movement in the crowd or extends as a contagion from one com- 14 210 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY munity to another. But Christianity took its rise in the enthusiasm of multitudes on the Day of Pentecost, and it has lost something of its na- tive genius if it does not know how to utilise and control popular ferments. The aesthetical may not be religious ; but religion, when it is mature, produces the aesthetical. In nature the masculine and the feminine are always found together, and utility and beauty are united, as when fruits are not only wholesome for food but pleasant in odour and colour. While the expansion of the reason and the steeling of the will may be the substance of sanctification, feeling is its form; and it is principally in the development of the gracious qualities of the heart that we recognise that irresistible something which we designate the beauty of holiness. CHAPTER IX THE WILL CHAPTER IX THE WILL There is a tendency in the literature of all sciences to expatiate with excessive prolixity on ^ the earlier portions and to leave the later ones undeveloped and attenuated. For example, in the department of theological science with which I am myself usually occupied, Church History, the books written on the first three centuries are bewildering in number, but on the centuries that follow, and especially on the Middle Ages, works of the same ability are much more diiBficult to find. At the Reformation a new commencement is made, and works on the Reformation Period are both numerous in quantity and excellent in quality ; but for the period between the middle of the seventeenth century and the present day it is far from easy to obtain sifted and connected information. In Psychology the same circum- stance is discernible. The Intellectual Powers, as they are called, or the course by which sensa- tion is transformed into knowledge, may be said (213) 214 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY to have been written about even to excess ; and by some writers in recent times the science of Physiology has been tumbled in a heap into Psy- chology. But the Active Powers have been far less amply treated. President McCosh and Professor James, for example, in writing of feeling, have both complained of the unsatisfac- tory nature of what had been written on the subject by psychologists before themselves ; and, even after one has perused their own valu- able contributions, one may still be far from sa- tisfied. But it is when we come to what follows feeling that dissatisfaction becomes strongest. It may be that philosophical authors grow tired as they are nearing the end of the long journey ; or, perhaps, having planned the scope of their lectures on too vast a scale, they find themselves short of time, as the session draws to a close, and have to huddle things up at the finish ; but it is certain that the method by which action becomes conduct has not been nearly so fully explained as that by which sensation is worked-up into knowledge. For this is the problem. Sensations from the external world are pouring in on the mind con- tinually from every quarter through the avenues of the senses ; but these would remain a,n over- THE WILL 215 whelming and confusing mass of separate atoms, unless there were in the mind faculties by means of which they are aiTanged and combined into that system of orderliness and unity which we call knowledge ; and, as we have seen, it is the part of Psychology to describe the different mental zones through which the materials have to pass, whilst they are undergoing this transformation. But, when the centre is reached, there takes place a reaction in the opposite direction, which issues in conduct. Mere action, however, is not conduct. In the same way as sensations pass upward through certain zones, in the process of becoming knowledge, so the reactions — which in combina- tion are called Action — must pass downwards through certain zones, in order to be transformed into conduct. If the mind has categories of its own which it lets down on the impressions coming from without, so as to transmute these into a cosmos, which it can apprehend and work with, so has it categories which it applies, in similar fashion, to the impulses going in the opposite di- rection, in order that these may become the con- duct of reasonable and responsible beings. This is the portion of Psychology which does not ap- pear to me to have as yet been nearly completed ; at this point there is ample room for the labours 216 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY of the psychologists of the future ; and the cate- gories of conduct may yet come to be reckoned no less important than the categories of thought. We must remember here, once more, the double system of nerves, described in an earlier lecture. The motor nerves form the bodily agency by means of which impulse is carried into action. As along the sensory or afferent system the impressions are conveyed which the world makes on us, so along this motor or efferent system are conveyed the impressions which we make on the world. Along the nerves proceeding outwards from the brain a force travels which sets in motion the hand for example, and the hand, with this force com- municated to it, displaces an object — say, a book. It does so because of its firm, bony structure, and because of the contraction of certain muscles in the arm ; but these movements take place on account of notice communicated to them along the telegraph-lines proceeding from the brain. The power in the brain in which the message originates is the Will. It is this faculty which sets in motion the nerve-force, which, in turn acting on the muscles and the limbs, produces all the activities of daily life, such as walking, lift- ing, smiting, fondling, talking, and so forth. In THE WILL 217 short, it controls the whole process by which action is converted into conduct. It is easy to perceive how elaborate is the ar- rangement in the bodily organism for the use of the will ; but still more wonderful is it to observe how inevitably the will flashes such messages always along the right nerves, not sending a message in- tended to move an eyelid along the line which would move a lip, or a message intended to move the thumb along the line which would move the forefinger. Equally impressive is it to consider how delicately it weighs out the amount of force requi- site in every case ; so that sometimes we speak in whispers and sometimes cry loud enough to be heard a hundred yards away ; we put out the ex- act amount of effort to move a candlestick an inch, not to hurl it to the opposite side of the room ; we do not crush the hand held out to salute us, but give it a gentle pressure. The will is the source of all the movements and activities of life, and it can be trained to com- municate to these expressiveness and harmony. It will, besides, be remembered how close, in speaking of feeling, we found the connexion to be between the action of the sensory system and that of the motor system. It is by the impres- sions conveyed to the mind by means of the 218 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY sensory nerves that the will is caused to communi- cate to the motor nerves the impulse that leads to action. Thus, when an orange is held up before a child, certain impressions are transmitted to the child's brain through the eye and the sense of smell ; and the result is that the little arm and hand are moved to touch the fruit. From the nursery a cry of a certain kind falls on the ear of the mother, sitting in the parlour, and in an instant she has thrown down her work and is on the stair, on the way to the scene of accident, the reality of which she has too well divined from the quality of the cry. Sometimes the act, pro- ceeding from within, follows so instantaneously on the reception of the impression from without that there seems to be hardly room even for the exertion of the will ; it rather looks as if the in- coming impression pulled the trigger of itself and let out the reactive force. Thus, when any danger suddenly approaches the eye, the hand goes up so instantaneously in an attitude of pro- tection that the act appears to be mechanical rather than voluntary ; and there are psycholo- gists who incline to ascribe a not inconsiderable proportion of our actions, especially those into which habit largely enters, to this involuntary kind of reaction, THE WILL 219 In general, however, several things, besides feeling, come between the impression received from without and the ensuing act. Of these the first is Desire. In the instance just cited, for example, of the child and the orange, the sight and the smell of the fruit ex- cite pleasurable feeling ; and this, in turn, creates desire, which rushes out towards the object be- fore the hand grasps it.^ ^ In books on Psycho- logy desire is usually discussed in connexion with feeling, as if it were a species of feeling. But this is questionable. It seems to me that desire is a different thing from either pleasure or pain, although it is excited by it. In fact, this is one of the points referred to above where Psychology has still work to do : it has to explore the quality of desire and the whole subject of motives, which have so much to do in determining the value of conduct. Desire may be either positive or negative. Negative desire is aversion ; and it disposes us not to act but to refrain from acting. All day long, and all life long, the objects of the world, brought before our minds by the senses or by the memory of sense-impressions, are exciting in us 1 Some psychologists say that objects give pleasure because they are desire^, not vice versa ; but this is too paradoxical. 220 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY desires and aversions of various kinds, and these constrain us to act or restrain us from acting. The will, however, does not necessarily obey either kind of prompting. Desire for an object may be intense, and yet the will may refuse to act ; aversion to a course of action may be equally strong, and yet the will may carry the course of action through. This power of the will to over- come desire we call Self-control ; in any con- siderable degree it can be acquired only through long practice ; but it is one of the most valuable qualities in the formation of character. Here allusion may be made, in passing, to what is called the Freedom of the Will. No question is more perplexing in itself, and it has been further darkened by confusion of ideas. In philosophy the phrase has one meaning and in theology another. The most formidable objec- tions to freedom of the will come at present from natural science ; and they are essentially materialistic ; for the mind is regarded as a por- tion of nature, completely under the law of cause and effect. Physical forces play on it, and the objects of the outside world appeal to it ; the force of these appeals is due to the qualities of the objects themselves ; and, if the appeal be strong enough, the will yields ; there is no THE WILL 221 creative and sovereign power in the will itself to originate action. Against this doctrine, however, the clearest testimony of our own consciousness protests. When we have done wrong, we know that, had we chosen, we could have done other- wise ; and, when we do right, we know that, had we chosen, we might have done wrong. It is this alone which makes us responsible beings. If what seems to our consciousness the free choice of our will be only the pulling of the trigger by the hand of circumstance, then the most sacred testimonies of our nature, such as the sense of guilt, are delusions. There are, in- deed, persons who have no control over their own actions, being compelled to act or not to act by the mere forces of nature ; but such persons are shut up in confinement ; and the obvious fact that there is a difference between them and healthy human beings is a strong proof that the latter do possess freedom of will. We have seen how desire or aversion is prompted by feeling, and how it thus becomes a stream moving in the direction of action ; but that, notwithstanding, the will can control this stream. It can either innervate or inhibit the nervous flow, such being the technical language for its action at this point : it innervates when it 222 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY lets the stream loose ; it inhibits when it shuts it off, or drains it away in some other direction. There may be a conflict of desires or a conflict of desire and aversion. Thus, a thief may be powerfully constrained to act by the desire for booty but, at the same time, may be equally restrained by terror of punishment ; and so the decision of the will may be deferred. Nor does the control stop here ; for the outgoing energy has still to pass through zones cooler than those of feeling. Reason, for instance, may have its arguments to urge against the promptings of desire. Conscience, in like manner, may have its admonitions. Thus the will may be kept halting between two opinions ; and this state of indecision may last not only for minutes, but for days, months or years. It is astonishing how little notice of this part of the process is taken in some systems of Psychology. But it is in these zones of hesitation, considera- tion and judgment that the transmutation of action into conduct, spoken of above, takes place. This is a point so important that it is worth while to take time to repeat that there are three zones through which the impulses towards action have to pass, before they become conduct, in order to test their conformity to the true, the beautiful, the good. The first test — that of THE WILL 223 Truth — is the guide of science in all its branches ; and innumerable students and investigators ac- knowledge the obligation to follow the call of the great whole of tinith, which is constantly drawing them on, while they feel bound to reject every opinion, however accepted and venerable, which is finally proved to be irreconcilable with facts. But the same guidance is daily leading the common man, especially in the ordering of his speech, constraining him to take the risk of stating what he knows to be true, whatever may be the cost, and teaching him to despise himself if, for any bribe whatever, he utters what he knows to be a falsehood. It is, however, the same motive which enables the reformer, in some hour big with destiny for the human race, to voice, in the presence of principalities and powers, what Heaven has taught him and, if need be, to lay down his life in support of his testimony. The second test — that of Beauty, or what may be denominated the aesthetic test — is at work all the time in all departments of life, and many who would not identify it under this name are daily applying it, without being conscious of doing so. In dress, for instance, it is this which de- termines the progress from the nakedness and the filthiness of savage life to the elegance of 224 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY civilisation ; and, in manners, it makes those who are susceptible to its influence think not only of what will gratify their own taste and fancy, but of what will be agreeable to others ; and thus society grows in refinement and happiness. The aesthetic judgment, however, reaches both up into higher spheres and out into more practi- cal endeavours. It is this that sends forth the wayfarer to visit distant cities and foreign lands, in order that he may regale his spirit with the sight of famous objects of art ; but it is the same impulse that makes the ploughman draw his furrow straight and causes the mechanic to wince unless his handiwork be in exact accordance with the pattern furnished by an artistic hand. The Creator is said to have placed man at the first in a garden ; and, although man has long been ex- cluded from Eden, he knows, at the bottom of his heart, that he was intended for life in a garden, and he will never be content till he con- verts this world into one. Such is the aesthetic sense, appearing in varied forms and very varying degrees in different specimens of the race, yet not altogether awanting in any of the children of men; and it is a test of conduct. The third test is conformity to the Good, but this is so essential that I intend to devote to it, under THE WILL 225 the name of Conscience, the whole of the next chapter. When at last the Will acts, we call its act Choice, because a decision has been made between two or more alternatives ; or we call it Resolution, because there has been a problem, which is now solved ; or we call it Determination, because the struggle has terminated. Decision, choice, re- solution, determination — such is the nomencla- ture of the will/ A person's will may be called " good " if it does not decide too soon. The will ought to wait till it has before it all the materials, instead of act- ing on the first impulse of desire. A will which goes off the moment the trigger is touched is hasty and precipitate, and what is decided in haste is apt to be repented of at leisure. On the other hand, the action of the will may be too slow. Shakspeare speaks of the native hue of resolution being " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" ; and his greatest drama, " Hamlet," ^By some the will is regarded as comprehending the whole process from the time a desired object first presents itself until it is attained — as, in fact, the whole movement of the self from a present state to another state recognised as more desirable. 15 226 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY is a study of this form of infirmity in will. Action loses its healthy force when it is too long delayed. There are instincts which ought to be obeyed at once and are only enfeebled by thinking. '* The thing was done suddenly " is a remark made in Scripture on a certain episode ; and it is a sentence of commendation. Especially when conscience has spoken distinctly, action ought to be instan- taneous. Not too fast and not too slow — these are the properties of a good will ; but to these we must add one of equal value — namely, firmness, by which is meant the power to persevere and actu- ally carry out what has been decided. We say that the choice is made when the inward struggle j terminates, and the will has taken its side. The decision come to, however, may be to do some- thing to-morrow or a year hence ; and, before to- morrow or next year arrives, the intention may have been forgotten, or, at all events, when the hour arrives for carrying it into action, nothing may be done. When the Prodigal Son says, " I will arise and go to my father," it is not tauto- logical when the parable adds, " And he arose and came to his father " ; for multitudes in the far country have said what he said and yet have never come home. Video meliora proboque^ De- THE WILL 227 teriora sequor, said long ago an Epicurean poet — '* I see the better course and approve it, but I follow the worse " — and thousands in every age have found the phrase only too apt an expression for their own experience. Just at this point, in short, lies the universal weakness of human nature ; here is the gulf between ideal and real, between knowing and doing. Sometimes th^ will is so weak that it cannot rise above wishing ; we wish to do good, but cannot will it : the little wavelets of resolution rise and fall, but the sea never swells up into the curved and foaming wave of a true decision. Or we will, but cannot do : there is a wave of decision, but it is not long and strong enough to float decision over into action. Yet, till it issues in action, the will is not con- summated. ''If ye know these things," said our Lord, " happy are ye if ye do them.'' And a poet of our own to the same eff'ect exclaims, *' Oh happy he whose will is strong ". I suppose, there are great natural differences in strength or weakness of will. The Will may even have excessive strength ; its strength may degenerate into ob- stinacy : it may be the will of a mule. Still, on the whole, the will requires to be strong. Some wills have a contagious strength ; one man's will 228 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY may invigorate and support the will of another ; there have even been men possessed of wills which, with the force of torrents, have carried away whole nations or whole generations of men. Bat for the average man as much strength of will as is necessary to make his life harmonious and serene is a slow and laborious acquisition ; it re- quires self-control and self-conquest ; it requires repentance and prayer. In reading an American book, published some years ago, by Professor Stearns, a theologian who, to the great loss of the Church Universal, was cut off in his prime, at the commencement of a career of unusual promise, I was struck with a phrase which occurred in it frequently and has haunted my memory ever since : it was the phrase Permanent Choices. I had never met with the expression before ; and the thing denoted by it had never impressed my mind so much as it did when I found it indicated in this happy phrase. Permanent Choices — what does the phrase mean ? Our wills are at work every day : per- haps between waking and sleeping we daily per- form thousands of acts of will. When we get out of bed, that is an act of will, and not always an easy THE WILL 229 one ; in dressing many acts of will are involved ; so in breakfasting; and so on throughout the day. Most acts of the will must of course refer to trivial things ; it is only on rare days that we come to decisions which have been long delayed and have occasioned us much perplexity. Even such a decision, however, may be soon forgotten, or its results may disappear. But there are decisions the effects of which never disappear, but obviously influence the entire subsequent life, and bring in their train thousands of other acts of will, which are virtually included in them. These are what Professor Stearns meant by Permanent Choices ; though he intended, I think, to include also this idea, that in a permanent choice the will always stands to its selection, believing in it, rejoicing in it, and never wishing to have it reversed. Emigration may be such a permanent choice. In early life a European becomes fascinated with America and leaves his native land forever. How many things are affected by this decision — the objects with which his mind is stored, the people who will be his friends and neighbours, the literature he will read, the principles of government he will believe in ! But he makes the choice with decision ; he becomes naturalised not in name only but in heart ; he becomes a 230 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY loyal and enthusiastic subject of the United States ; in short, it is a permanent choice. The choice of a trade or a profession may be such a permanent choice ; and it will determine before- hand a hundred things which a man will do every day of his life ; it will even determine be- forehand what will be the shape of his body and the cast of his features in old age. Marriage is a permanent choice ; and obviously it is one of the most momentous of all ; happy he who, every succeeding year, can with more cordiality and conviction approve his own choice. But the most momentous of all permanent choices is certainly the choice of Christ ; it is the one which most deeply influences the entire sub- sequent life ; and it is the one which is most certain in every succeeding year to secure alike from the head and the heart complete justifica- tion. As soon as St. Paul had made this choice, the entire history of Christ from eternity to eternity — for it was of His cosmic history he prin- cipally thought — became alive with motives, which were both constraining and restraining his will at every step of his subsequent career. Nothing was too small to be dignified from this source, and nothing was too great to be attempted, if he was convinced that it was the will of Christ. THE WILL 281 The cosmic history of the Saviour still exerts the same influence, though we have learned, in recent times, to be moved even more than St. Paul was by the earthly history of Jesus — the details of His daily walk and conversation, as these are revealed in the four Gospels — and there is never a day that dawns but a multitude which no man can number of humble and happy hearts rise from the rest of the night to resume a life which is literally a walking with Christ ; for they greet Him the moment they awake to consciousness ; they are sensible of His presence beside them all the day long ; and their testing question, at every crisis and in every difficulty, is, What would Jesus do ? for their decision has been no pale or feeble choice, but an act blood-red with vitality, which only be- comes the more determined the more fully they know whom they have believed. CHAPTER X THE CONSCIENCE CHAPTER X THE CONSCIENCE CoNSCiENGE is more a popular than a scientific term ; in fact, in some books on Psychology you will not find it even in the index. For all that, it is a powerful word, with blood and bones in- side it ; and I should not be at all surprised if, some day, it were elevated to a position of great consequence in philosophy. It does not occur in the Old Testament — that is, the word does not — but the thing for which the word stands occurs often enough. On al- most the first page you have that scene which is one of the most graphic accounts of conscience in all literature — Adam and Eve, overwhelmed with shame and terror, hiding themselves among the trees of the garden — and, on the very next page, you have another great exhibition of the power of conscience in the flight of Cain after the murder of his brother Abel. In the New Testament the word occurs with (235) 286 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY tolerable frequency ; St. Paul alone employing it about a score of times. This might have been expected to secure for it a permanent place among the ethical terms of Christian instruction ; but, while words like faith, love, hope, and others belonging to the Apostle's ethical vocabulary al- ways retained a foremost place, this good fortune did not fall to crvveihiqcri^. Nevertheless, Chry- sostom places it, alongside of Nature, as one of the two books in which God reveals Himself out- side the Bible. St. Augustine makes less use of it than might have been expected in such an ethical genius. But the Schoolmen began to discuss and define it ; and Thomas Aquinas de- votes to it one question in each part of his " Summa ". The peculiarity of his treatment is, that he identifies it with synderesis, a term which Origen appears to have employed — in the form of o-vvTTJprjoTL^ — to designate the remnant of the image of God left in man after the Fall ; or rather, Aquinas distinguishes between synderesis and conscientia in this way, that he makes the one the faculty in the mind which supplies moral principles and the other the faculty which applies these to actual cases. The former is infallible, the latter fallible. Of course the example of Aquinas was long followed in the schools; THE CONSCIENCE 237 but, after the Keformation, the Jesuit moralists dropped the former of Aquinas' two elements, making the conscience a weak, hesitating, fallible thing, which had to fall back for support and guidance on the Church and the confessor — that is, on themselves — every person who could afford it keeping a Jesuit as a guide to his conscience. The Mystics of the Latin Church, however, made much of the element which the Jesuits had dropped, finding in the synderesis the point of contact at which the divine comes down to touch the human spirit. At the Reformation the conscience — both name and thing — came very prominently to the front. The pangs of conscience, in the experi- ence of Luther and others, were a negative pre- paration for the positive doctrine of justification ; and it will be remembered how powerfully, at the Diet of Worms, the Reformer appealed to con- science as the ground on which he took his stand in resisting the authority of the Church. It was thoroughly in accordance with the juridical meaning attached by Protestantism to justifica- tion when one of the worthies of the period, Schoberlein, defined conscience as "the organ for the juridical relation of man to God " ; and Luther himself defines it as *' a witness touching 238 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY those things in which man has to do with God ". Not dissimilar is Calvin's definition — sensus divini jvdicii et imperii. Within Protestantism the rights of conscience have been a favourite sub- ject not only of reflection but of testimony and courageous assertion ; although it is a task of no little delicacy to define where exactly the freedom of conscience begins and ends. In Post-reformation Theology the treatment of Ethics under the title of Cases of Conscience continued much longer than might have been ex- pected as a practice even of Protestant moralists ; but the fact is a straw showing how the wind was blowing. In Jeremy Taylor's ''Ductor Dubitantium " the whole of the first book, ex- tending to nearly three hundred pages, is devoted to the conscience, the several kinds of which are handled in great detail, such as the good con- science, the erroneous conscience, the scrupulous conscience, and so on. Indeed, such descriptions of different kinds of conscience formed a feature of the ethical productivity of the period, which continued till it became a weariness to the flesh. During the reign of English Deism the conscience was set up as a rival to revelation, its testimony to God, duty and immortality being considered sufficient without any higher source of enlighten- THE CONSCIENCE 239 ment ; and the same contention was made still more strenuously in Continental countries, when the English movement had crossed the German Ocean ; the glorification of this faculty reaching a climax in Rousseau, who, however, character- istically wished the conscience to be only a source of self-approval and happiness, the old bad ideas of guilt and punishment being banished out of a philosophical world. Butler in England and Kant in Germany restored the conscience to its rightful position of authority, yet subordinating it to the will of God ; but the tendency to dis- solve its authority, through tracing its origin to mere association and heredity, has come in again with the advent of a naturalistic and develop- mental philosophy, which is at present so potent in England and on the Continent ; not, however, without evoking powerful reaction in such thinkers as Martineau and Green. This brief sketch shows that the conscience has, during the course of the centuries, been making, if not a steady, yet an ever renewed ad- vance to philosophical recognition ; and, as I have hinted, I expect it, some day, to be adopted by a philosophical genius, who will vindicate for it aprominent place in the vocabulary of Psychology.^ ^ On the history of the doctrine of Conscience the books on the History of Ethics, such as Luthardt's and Gass', may 240 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY The aspect of conscience on which the popular mind has principally fastened, and to which, ac- cordingly, the literature of the world has given the amplest expression, is that which is technic- ally called the Sequent Conscience— that is to say, the action of conscience which follows the formation of a decision or the commission of an act. No sooner is a decision come to or a deed done than there ensues a judgment favourable or adverse, a sentence of guilty or not-guilty. Con- science has often been compared to a court-of- law, in which there are culprit, judge, jury and witnesses ; only all of these are in the individ- ual's own breast. Thus in " Sea Dreams" Lord Tennyson says : He that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more ; and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned ; And that drags down his life. be consulted. Schmidt, in "Das Gewissen," is very full. Gass' note on " The Scholastic Term Synderesis," in " Die Lehre vom Gewissen," is a fine morsel of scholarship. For the more popular and literary aspects of the subject, reference may be made to the second series of the late Joseph Cook's "Boston Monday Lectures". It is a pity that this author is being so soon forgotten ; because not only has he big ideas, but his volumes abound with illustrations novel, original and illuminating. THE CONSCIENCE 241 In the individuars own breast is, besides, the executioner; because, on the back of the sen- tence of condemnation or acquittal, there imme- diately follows the pain of a wounded or the satisfaction of an approving conscience ; and of all human miseries or blisses this is the most poignant. Especially has the remorse of an evil conscience impressed the human imagination, in such instances as Cain and Judas, Saul and Herod ; and the greatest of the poets have found some of their most moving pictures in the repre- sentation of this aspect of human experience; the ancient poets representing the terrors of con- science under such figures as the Erinnyes or Furies, who with swift, silent, unswerving foot- step track the criminal and pull him down, while Shakspeare, in such dramas as ** Macbeth" and *'Kichard the Third," has burnt the same lesson into the imagination of all readers of the Eng- lish tongue. The satisfaction of a good conscience may stamp itself on the habitual serenity of a face, while the accusations of an evil conscience may impart a hunted look even to the external ap- pearance. This contrast is powerfully given in the picture of the Bishop and the Burglar, in the same room at midnight, in " Les Miserables " : 16 242 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY " He was sleeping peacefully, and was wrapped in a long garment of brown wool, which covered his arms down to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the pillow in the easy attitude of repose, and his hand, which had done so many good deeds, hung out of the bed. His entire face was lit up with a vague expression of satis- faction, hope and beatitude — it was more than a smile and almost a radiance. There was almost a divinity in this unconsciously august man. The burglar, on the contrary, was standing in the shadow, with his crowbar in his hand, motionless and terrified by this luminous old man. He had never seen anything like this before, and this confidence horrified him. The moral world has no greater spectacle than this — a troubled, restless conscience, which is on the point of committing a bad action, contemplating the sleep of a just man." It is to be observed, however, that not only does a man's own conscience thus pass sentence on his conduct but the consciences of others pass sentence on it too ; and to this may be due a great intensification of the consequent sensa- tions. Thus, a crime may be hidden in a man's memory, and the pain of its guilt may be as- suaged by the action of time, when suddenly and THE CONSCIENCE 243 unexpectedly it is found out by the public ; and only when the force of the public conscience breaks out on the culprit, driving him from society, does he feel his guilt in all its hideous- ness. The Day of Judgment, as it is represented in Scripture, is an application of this principle on a vast scale : it is the submission of the char- acter and conduct of everyone to the conscience of all. On the other hand, a friend may be to a man a second conscience, by which his own conscience is kept alive and alert ; and this approval from without may, in some cases, be, even more than the judgment within, an en- couragement to everything that is good or a protection against temptation. There is a third activity of the Sequent Con- science, in addition to the judicial and the re- tributive — namely, the predictive. Not only does conscience reward and punish now, but it hints of ampler and more perfect rewards and punishments still to come. Human beings are instinctively aware that they will have to answer for the deeds done in the body, when they pass within the veil. Thus is the anticipation of immortality a part of conscience. The second aspect of conscience is what is technically called the Antecedent Conscience; 244 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY and this designates a function of conscience which precedes moral decision or action. When the will stands at the parting of the ways, seeing clearly before it the right course and the wrong, conscience commands to strike into the right and forbids to choose the wrong. This is its imperative ; and — to employ the language of Kant — it is a categorical imperative. What conscience commands may be apparently against our interest, and it may be completely con- trary to our inclinations ; it may be contrary to the advice of friends or the solicitations of companions ; it may be opposed to the decrees of principalities and powers or to the voices of the multitude ; yet conscience in no way with- draws or modifies its claim. We may fail to obey, giving way to passion or being overborne by the allurements of temptation ; but we know that we ought to obey ; it is our duty ; and this is a sublime and sacred word. The great crises of life arise when conscience is issuing one command and self-interest or pas- sion or authority another, and the question has to be decided which of the two is to be obeyed. The interpreters of human life have known how to make use of such moments, and many of the most memorable scenes in imaginative literature THE CONSCIENCE 245 are of this nature ; a fine example being the scene in "The Heart of Midlothian," in which Jeanie Deans, with a heart bursting with love for her frail sister, yet will not deviate from the truth by a hairsbreadth, though a lie would save Effie's life. But the actual history of mankind has been dignified with numerous scenes, in which confessors and martyrs, standing on the same ground, have faced death rather than con- travene the dictates of the authority within; and, we have good reason to believe, there is never an hour that passes but the All-seeing Eye beholds someone on earth putting aside the bribes of self-interest or the menaces of authority and paying tribute to the voice of conscience by doing the right and taking the consequences. As to the aspects of conscience discussed up to this point there is little difficulty or difference of opinion ; but I have now to mention one about which this cannot be said. It was remarked above, that, when anyone stands at the parting of the ways and sees clearly the right course and the wrong, conscience imperatively commands him which to take and which to avoid ; but how does anyone know which of the two alternatives is the right and which the wrong? does con- science come to his help at this point, or is he 246 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY dependent on some other faculty? Here the Intuitional and the Associational, or — speaking broadly — the Scotch and the English, the German and the French Schools of Ethics widely diverge ; those on the one side holding that conscience has still essential guidance to give, while those on the other hold that the guidance must now be undertaken by other faculties. The Sensa- tional or Experimental School hold that we are dependent on the authority of society or on our own estimate of the consequences of action ; while the opposite school teach that in the con- science there is a clear revelation of certain moral laws, approving certain principles of action and disapproving others. The strong point of the former view is the diversity existing among human beings in dif- ferent ages and in different latitudes as to what is right and what is wrong. What was virtuous in Athens might be sinful in Jerusalem ; what is admired as heroism in Britain may be despised as imprudence in Japan. The answer to this is, first, that this diversity has been grossly exag- gerated, the unanimity of the human conscience under all skies being greater than is allowed by philosophers of this school. " Let any plain honest man," says Butler, "before he engages THE CONSCIENCE 247 in any course of action, ask himself, Is this I am going about right ? or is it wrong ? is it good or is it evil ? and I do not in the least doubt but that this question would be answered agreeably to truth and virtue by almost any fair man in almost any circumstances." Further, there may be error in the application to actual cases of the laws revealed in conscience ; such application being a merely logical procedure, where the in- tellect is liable to all the mistakes into which it may fall when dealing in the same way with any other kind of material. What conscience is responsible for, in every case, is only the major premiss. So argues Calderwood ; ^ and this is very much the position of Aquinas, who, as has been mentioned, attributed to an infallible synderesis the oracular issuing of principles but to a fallible conscientia the application of these to particular instances. The strong point of the Intuitional School is the right of the individual to break away from the habits of society and, in defiance of the verdicts of authority or the voices of the multi- tude, to follow a course of his own. When he does so, is it a logical conclusion as to the con- sequences of action he is obeying or a higher 1 " Handbook of Moral Philosophy." 248 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY intuition ? When, for example, Christianity, at its entrance into the world, preached the sinful- ness of fornication, in opposition to the laxity of Greece and Rome, was it an argument about consequences with which she operated success- fully, or an instinct of purity, which she divined at the back of the actions and opinions of heathendom ? The lettering of the moral law may have to be picked out and cleansed from the accumulations of time, but the inscription is there all the same. It may be, however, that what is required for the solution of this riddle is a more exhaustive analysis of the Antecedent Conscience. Between the categorical imperative, which commands to choose the right path and avoid the wrong, and the indicative, which declares that this is the right way and that the wrong, there ought per- haps to be assumed, as a separate aspect of con- science, the intuition that one of the alternative ways is right and must be pursued at all hazards, while the other is wrong and must be abandoned at whatever cost. This perception, that moral distinctions exist, contrasted with each other as heaven and hell, is the peculiarity of conscience ; but it does not exclude the necessity for taking time to ascertain, in every instance, which of the ' THE CONSCIENCE 249 alternatives has the one character and which the other, or for employing a great variety of know- ledge to make this certain. Those who would limit conscience to the function of uttering the major premisses of moral reasoning are wont to hold that it cannot err and does not admit of being educated ; but such a use of the term is too remote from common usage ; and there must be room left at some point for the conscience to enlighten itself by making acquaintance with such objective standards as the character of God, the example of Christ and the teaching of Scrip- ture, as well as with the experience of the good and the maxims of the wise. To sum up — the conscience may be divided into the Antecedent and the Sequent ; and each of these has three aspects ; for in the Antecedent Conscience we distinguish three activities — the Deliberative, the Indicative and the Imperative — and in the Sequent Conscience three also — the Judicial, the Retributive and the Predictive. There is one other question of great interest about the conscience ; and this is the question, whether it involves an intuition of God. When the conscience is suffering the punishment of re- morse, who is it that inflicts the punishment ? is 250 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY it only the conscience itself, or is man, in such experiences, aware of the existence of a Being outside of and above himself ? When the will is about to act, it receives the command to choose the right and refuse the wrong, but who issues this command ? is it only itself, or does the im- perative come with a sanction and solemnity betokening a higher origin ? Conscience is an intuition of moral law — the reading, so to speak, of a luminous writing, which hangs, outside of man, on the bosom of nature — but who penned that writing ? It used to be believed that the word Conscience implies, in its very structure, a reference to God, meaning, literally, knowledge along with another, the other being God. This derivation may be uncertain ; but many are of opinion that it exactly expresses the truth. Prob- ably there are few persons with an ethical ex- perience of any depth who have not sometimes been overwhelmingly conscious of the approval or disapproval of an unseen Being ; and, if there be any trustworthy argument for the existence of a Deity prior to supernatural revelation, it would seem to be this. It may be only the same question in another form when the inquiry is raised, whether con- science and the religious faculty are identical. THE CONSCIENCE 251 Historically, they have been separated ; it being a well-known characteristic of pagan religions that they have little or no connexion with morality, a pagan being frequently a great cultivator of the gods and at the same time abandoned to every species of immorality. Even in professors of the Christian religion the moral sense has sometimes been very faintly developed ; an Italian bandit, for example, being able to combine the business of highway-robbery and murder with devotion to the Virgin, whose shrine he may enrich out of the proceeds of his adventures. Nevertheless, it will be remembered that the Mystics of the Middle Ages looked upon the synderesis as the point of contact with the Divine ; and it is not only true that conscience testifies of God, but also that the highest religion has morality for its aim. Fully developed religion and fully developed morality would very nearly coincide ; and it may be that, in the future, the religious faculty and the ethical faculty will be identified. With what has just been said about conscience as the common centre of both the ethical and the religious life it will harmonize not amiss if we now add — not so much by way of concluding the present chapter as by way of epilogue to the whole foregoing argument — that the perfection 252 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY of human nature is not only the task of man but the gift of God. We have seen that in the very structure of our nature there is a prophecy which craves for fulfilment ; and this is a strong motive, inspiring those to whom has been granted a vision of themselves as they yet may be. At every stage of progress this prophecy becomes more compelling ; because the landscape widens, as we advance, and the goal becomes more clear. But the whole transformation is in Scripture as- cribed to a divine causality. The " new man " is derived directly from the Father in heaven ; he is created in Christ Jesus ; and the transition from the " old man " to the new is, at all its stages, referred to the Holy Spirit, working through the agencies which He employs in the Church — the Word, the sacraments and prayer. Here are motives not less potent than those in- herent in man's own nature and destiny — the motive of gratitude, the motive of imitation, the motive of co-operation. These are felt in all their force and blessedness when the human subject of sanctification is most sensible of his own inadequacy for the task owing to the heavy weight of an evil past, the violence of passion, and the impotence of a demoralised will. It is this sense of personal unworthiness and unfitness that THE CONSCIENCE 253 most of all distinguishes Christian Psychology from Philosophical or even Eeligious Psychology ; although the pessimism of such penitential emo- tion is more than redressed by the spring and buoyancy with which the new man rises anew to face the task after casting himself in faith on the mercy of the Saviour, who has said not only, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," but also, *' I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly ". APPENDICES APPENDIX A THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS i The body, the soul and the spirit are common to every speci- men of the race, and to possess them gives one a claim to the honour and hopes of humanity. But, while human beings are to this extent identical, they are in numerous respects diverse from one another ; and we may now give some atten- tion to the differences existing within human nature. No two human beings have ever been absolutely alike. Even in the same family the contrast between one side and another is sometimes almost ludicrous in extent. In some men all the potencies of human nature are seen at their highest, while in others they sink to the very lowest stage consistent with being human at all. Between a Shakspeare and a Bacon, on the one hand, and one of the aborigines of Australia, on the other, how wide the gulf ! yet both are human. Many differences are no doubt the result of train- ing, but there are others which reach much further back. Philosophers have, indeed, sometimes tried to persuade them- selves that all souls come into existence alike, and that the 1 This lecture was not delivered in America ; but it is introduced here because it illustrates fully as well as any of the rest what is meant by the adjective " Christian " in the title of this book ; though, all through, the endeavour has been made to follow the counsel of Sir Thomas Browne, ♦• Christianize thy Notions ". (257) 17 258 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY differences by which they are subsequently divided are due to the force of environment or to personal choice. But it is impossible to believe it. Long before they leave the hidden laboratory of nature, souls are distinguished from one another. Certain thinkers have maintained that souls are all alike at their origin, but that the differences of the bodies in which they are encased make them appear to be different ; though others have held the exact opposite — that the soul within determines the shape of the body — its beauty or deformity. But both body and soul are, I suspect, peculiar from the first. Among the causes to which the differences among human beings are due may be mentioned sex, temperament, race, and talent or genius. Bach of these would be well worthy of close consideration ; but at present we must content ourselves with taking one of them as a specimen ; and we shall select the second.^ The word " temperament " means literally a mixture ; and the ancient physicians by whom it was invented held that a person's temperament is determined by the proportions in which the elements are mixed of which his constitution is composed ; or rather, the element which preponderates in the constitution of each determines his temperament. These ele- ments they reckoned to be four ; and, as any one of the four may be predominant, it follows that there are four tempera- 1 A thoroughly scientifio treatment of the Temperaments will be found in Dorner's work on "Christian Ethics," third chapter of the second division. There is a booklet on the subject by Principal Whyte, who handles it in his usual realistic and home-coming manner. And there is a similar work in German, by Oskar Briissau, entitled " Die Temperamente und das christliche Leben ". For a sharp criticism of the ancient doctrine of the Temperaments see Shand, " The Foundations of Character," bk. I., ch. xiii. APPENDIX A 259 ments, which they denominated the Sanguine, the Phlegmatic, the Choleric and the Melancholic. The Sanguine temperament, as its name implies, was sup- posed to be due to a certain fulness of the blood ; and it is of a warm and abounding nature. It is the temperament most disposed to happiness and hopefulness. It is easily excited by impressions from the outside and responds to these with prompt resolves and actions. It may be considered a precious gift to its possessor ; because the sanguine man easily rises again from beneath the blows of adversity; he welcomes every pleasure as it comes ; and he never borrows trouble from to-morrow. The Phlegmatic temperament is, in most respects, the exact opposite of the sanguine. It is slow and calm, perhaps cold, not easily excited or even roused. It loves the mono- tony of established custom and dislikes change and hurry. It knows neither the violence of grief nor the ecstasy of joy, and it has been compared to the skies of the North, where everything is enveloped in a perpetual haze. The phlegmatic man easily allows others to do things for him, and thus he is liable to fall completely under the influence of a stronger will. The Choleric temperament is, in some respects, like the sanguine ; but, whereas the sanguine denotes chiefly a suscep- tibility to impressions made by others, the choleric indicates the power of making impressions on others. It is full of passion and energy, fiery in conception and swift in execution. The choleric man achieves what he has set his heart upon. He can set before himself a single aim and, forgetting every- thing else, press toward the mark, scorning difficulties and trampling obstacles beneath his feet. This is the temperament of the pioneer and the missionary, of the reformer and the conqueror. 260 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY The Melancholic temperament is the antipodes of this prompt and practical disposition. It belongs to deep and brooding natures. In its external reserve it bears some re- semblance to the phlegmatic ; but this is only superficial ; for behind the veil of reserve it conceals the utmost intensity. Whilst the choleric temperament sees the objects at which it aims, however remote these may be, as if they were within reach, and eagerly stretches out its hands to seize them, the melancholic, on the contrary, loves to see its objects far away in dim outlines which melt into infinity. The Greeks, who invented these descriptions, attributed this temperament to their greatest men, such as Socrates and Plato. This is the temperament of the poet, the artist, the thinker. How far the medical knowledge of modern times would confirm the notions of the ancients as to the cause and origin of these distinctions among human beings, I cannot say ; but that the distinctions are real no person who hears them de- scribed can doubt. It is only necessary to look at any group of children in order to see them all. There is the child who is always happy and lively, giving no trouble except perhaps by her restlessness, welcoming every new proposal and always ready to adopt a new friend, sunny as a butterfly and passing from pleasure to pleasure as that insect flits from flower to flower. This is the sanguine temperament. Then there is the quiet child, whose voice is seldom heard, who is scarcely noticed if present or missed if absent, who never originates any proposal or takes the lead in any adventure, but is a hanger-on to a knot of friends and perfectly content to have every movement decided by the rest. This is the phlegmatic temperament. Then, in such a group there is sure to be a APPENDIX A 261 choleric specimen — the boy who gets his own way in every- thing and blazes up into fury if he be resisted, who drills his companions as soldiers, is ready with a blow whenever it is required, and is worshipped by his companions as a hero. Lastly, there is the solitary boy, who says little but closely watches everything, who beats his schoolfellows at lessons and is the favourite of the schoolmaster, who loves a book in a corner and asks questions which puzzle the oldest heads. This is the melancholic temperament. Not only are these distinctions visible among individuals : they characterize entire divisions of the human race. Thus, the sanguine and the phlegmatic temperaments are specially common among the female and the choleric and melancholic among the male sex. The broad distinctions in the ancient world of Hebrew, Greek and Roman correspond closely with differences of temperament ; so, in the modern world, do the contrasts of English, Irish and Scotch in the British Isles, of French and German on the Continent of Europe, and of Southern and Northern in America.^ There are, besides, mixed temperaments : that is to say, one individual may, in different circumstances, exhibit the peculiarities of more than a single temperament. Especially may this be the case at different stages of life. Indeed, it has even been suggested that each of the four stages of life is especially associated with one of the four temperaments, childhood being phlegmatic, youth sanguine, maturity choleric, and old age melancholic. This, however, it is manifest, can only be said with consider- able reservation ; and, upon the whole, there is most to be learned from the broad, general fact, that everyone comes into the world with his own peculiar disposition, this peculiarity 1 These are called by Schleiermacher ♦' national temperaments ". 262 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY being roughly at least equivalent to the possession of one or other of the four temperaments. It is not at all difficult to see the moral and spiritual bear- ing of all this. Each of the four temperaments has its own temptations. It does not, indeed, follow, because a man has been born with a certain temperament, that he will fall into certain sins. Sin is not inevitable. But, if he do fall into sin, it can be predicted, if his temperament be known, what kind of sin it will be. Every man according to his own temperament has sins which it is difficult for him to resist and into which it will be easy for him to fall. Hence, a wise man will desire to know himself, in order that he may be aware at which points it is specially necessary for him to keep watch and ward. The sanguine man's temptation is to grasp at many things but bring nothing to perfection. In business he flits from scheme to scheme and launches out into undertakings which not infrequently involve others as well as himself in difficulty or ruin. He is always certain that he is going to succeed, and his faith in his own star is so contagious that it is not easy for others to resist his enthusiasm. He exaggerates un- awares in speaking about himself and everything connected with himself, and it is hard for him to be absolutely honest in either word or deed. The phlegmatic man's temptation is to bury his talent in the earth. He clings to what is old simply because it is old, after it has become an abuse and a wrong, and he resists change even when it is urgently required. He has an excess of passivity, and it is difficult to make him realise that life APPENDIX A 268 Contains a task for the discharge of which he is responsible. The world's sins and sorrows are crying out for help, but the call by which others are thrilled does not move him. The cause of Christ is in need of initiative and support, but his life glides by with nothing done. His habit of leaving every- thing to be attended to and done by others exposes him to the risk of being dragged into error under the influence of a more fascinating or commanding personality. Great numbers of the young, both men and women, are led into courses where their souls are stained and their prospects ruined not so much by any violent desire for the forbidden fruit or by violent delight in the enjoyment of it as through their being easily led and not having enough of spirit to resist the pro- posals which their consciences condemn. It may be added that, at the opposite end of life also, this disposition is beset with special danger. The pleasures of the table then prove a snare to such vegetative natures, converting existence into a heavy dream. In fact, the worst temptations of phlegmatic natures begin at the very point where the fires of temptation in the sanguine are beginning to burn themselves out.^ The temptations of the choleric temperament are precisely the opposite of those just described. They arise from the im- pulses towards sensuality and are strongest at those early stages ^ Isaac is, in biblical biography, a striking example ofithis temperament, and he did not escape the danger indicated above. Abraham and Jacob are examples of other temperaments ; and that the three patriarchs stood in the relations of grandfather, son and grandson is a remarkable illustra- tion of how temperaments may differ even in the closest family con- nexions. Yet Jehovah was '• the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob " ; this being His name and memorial from generation to genera- tion ; which seems to prove that no temperament disqualifies for the love and service of God, but that each can render to its Creator a tribute of its own. 264 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY of existence when the flames of passion burn most fiercely. The man who rushes madly into vice, and who feels that he must have the forbidden thing which is destroying him even though he should have to go through the fire to procure it, is of this temperament. So is he who stakes upon a single oast his good name, his chances of success, and the fortunes of his family. Though this has been correctly called above the disposition of the pioneer and the missionary, it is likewise the temperament of the ringleader in evil, who by his brilliant recklessness draws others after him down the broad road. The Devil has his missionaries as well as the Saviour ; and it is a solemn reflection that the natural qualifications for both services are the same. The melancholic temperament has, like the rest, its own liabiUties to special sins. It is not, like the choleric, liable to be hurried headlong into open sin. For this it has too much self-restraint. But it broods in secret on forbidden subjects. In the hidden mind there may be going on a carnival of passion which prudence or shame keeps from breaking forth in outward acts. Besides, this temperament has other temptations : it disposes its possessor to brood on the sadness of the world and the apparent injustice of the providence of God, till from such ruminations may be gendered the savage scorn of the cynic, who jeers as he turns inside out the seamy side of human nature, or the reasonings of the atheist, who sees in the universe no loving Father but only the remorseless grind- ing of the wheels of fate. The ravings of a Timon and the obscene savagery of a Swift are exhibitions of this tempera- ment in a state of deterioration ; and the end may be the crime of suicide. In the doctrine of temperament there is, as we have seen. APPENDIX A 265 a solemn strain of warning, which none can consider them- selves entitled to neglect. But happily this is only one side of the picture : there is another side, which is as happy and hopeful as the one just presented is threatening. If each temperament has its own temptations, each has also its own possibilities of good. It does not, indeed, determine that, if a man possesses it, he will either be good or do good. This depends on divine grace ; it depends on whether or not a man surrenders himself to God. But, if a man be a Christian, his temperament determines beforehand what kind of Christian he will be and what kind of good works he will do. The special virtue of the sanguine disposition is to display the bright and hopeful side of Christianity. If we look round us in any living Christian community, it is easy in our genera- tion to pick out examples in which this temperament has de- veloped into a most attractive type of Christian character — the woman who never grows weary in well-doing and whose acts of considerateness and helpfulness are the subject of comment at every turn in the neighbourhood in which she moves ; the man who is engaged in a score of schemes for the temporal and spiritual amelioration of the world, who re- sponds with a sympathetic heart and a liberal hand to calls from every point of the compass, and who never pulls one iron out of the fire without thrusting in two or three others to take its place. The Church could ill want her sanguine members. The phlegmatic temperament, however, under the influ- ence of grace, also unfolds peculiar excellences. There are a great many Christians who never start anything new and are incapable of an original idea, yet lend their whole force to swell the well-defined testimony of Christianity and are willing to spend and be spent in accepted ways of doing good. They 266 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY dej)end for initiative and guidance on more original and ener- getic natures ; but they have chosen God's people for their people, and they never leave any doubt as to the side to which they belong. "While the work of God has places for conspi- cuous leaders, it has places also for those who have neither taste nor talent for leadership but cultivate the shade. The army of salvation requires multitudes of privates as well as a staff of officers ; and, when so many are determined to be either at the top or nowhere, it is gratifying to meet with those who can with perfect contentment and good humour take the second or third or even the twentieth or thirtieth place. In old age this temperament appears to great advan- tage ; for it blossoms sweetly into those virtues of meekness and peaceful contentment which so much adorn the hoary head, and which were so highly praised by the Saviour. The choleric temperament supplies the militant element in Christianity. Though Jesus Christ is called the Prince of Peace, yet He said Himself : " I came not to send peace, bub a sword ". His religion is an aggressive and conquering move- ment ; it must pull down every stronghold in which evil has entrenched itself ; for it has undertaken > nothing less than to embrace the whole world in a reign of righteousness. It re- quires, therefore, men of enterprise and courage, who can both take blows and give them, who will not be turned aside by fear or favour, but can set before themselves an object and sacrifice everything for its attainment. Such a man was St. Paul ; such was Luther ; such was Livingstone ; such have been hundreds more of the pioneer and conquering spirits of humanity — men of passionate force, but with the fiery ele- ments of nature yoked, like the flame in the steam-engine, to a beneficent purpose. And these have been illustrations of the choleric temperament. APPENDIX A 267 Lastly, the melancholic temperament has likewise its own peculiar excellences and possibilities, though, in a practical age like ours, these may be undervalued, because they do not at once strike the eye. Ours is an age of work, when every- one is expected to have his brain teeming with schemes for the improvement of the world and his hands full of philan- thropic and missionary activities. But the Church of Christ, in spite of the services of such adherents, would soon sink into spiritual poverty unless her great Head bestowed on her some servants who, though ill-fitted for the glare of pub- licity and the management of practical affairs, delight to brood on the mysteries of the faith and are compelled by an inner necessity to think out her beliefs in the face of the advancing knowledge of the ages. Such work takes place in the depths ; it makes no noise ; its results are long in coming to fruition ; but it is indispensable. Christianity needs her St. Johns as well as her St. Pauls, her Melanchthons as well as her Luthers, her Cowpers as well as her Wesleys, her Dantes and Miltons as well as her Moodys and Booths ; and she finds them among men of the melancholic temperament. Here we come upon that conception of the Church in which St. Paul so much delighted, as an organism in which every variety of natural disposition and endowment can find its own place and its own work. '* For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body ? And, if the ear shall say. Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body ? If the whole were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling ? But now hath God set the members, every one of them, in the body where it hath pleased Him. And the eye cannot say to the hand, I 268 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY have no need of thee, nor again the head to the feet, I haVS no need of you." This variety, however, of construction and function in the realm of grace is founded on an older variety in the realm of nature. But the most solemn lesson of this study is for the individual. Each has, at his birth, received from nature his own share ; but each has to determine for himself what he will do with it ; and the same powers may form a contribution to the right side or to the wrong. With the same natural gifts different individuals may be servants of Christ, helping to make the world better, or they may be servants of the Evil One, tempting and deteriorating others. Everything depends on a choice and a decision. " Choose well ; your choice is brief, and yet endless." APPENDIX B PSYCHOLOGY AND EVANGELISM BY Peofessor C. a. Beckwith, D.D., Chicago ^ Psychology is not a new thing as applied to evangelism. All successful evangelists have been past masters in the psy- chological method of appealing to men and winning converts. Some, as Whitefield and Moody, have a natural insight into the workings of the human heart. Others, as Jonathan Edwards, are reflective students and bring their knowledge to bear on the most specific, dijfficult and unusual conditions. Whether or not Mr. Moody ever had a formal acquaintance with psy- chology, no one knew better than he how to find and describe the stages of sin and consciousness of conversion. He knew the heart, its motives, its weaknesses, its longings, its defeats, and he knew how to touch its secret springs all the way from laughter to tears and from sin to the consciousness of forgive- ness. No more satisfying material is available for one who wishes to study the relation of psychology to evangelism than is provided in Mr. Moody's sermons as, for example, those on Lot and Zacchseus. In Jonathan Edwards' "Treatise con- cerning Eeligious Affections," one finds an almost perfect touch- stone for the tests of true conversion. No one else has ever written so thoroughly or with such subtle insight as he 1 See p. 25. (269) 270 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY in his investigation and description of the various types of Christian experience. I By " Evangelism " in this paper I mean that form of Chris- tian activity which seeks to make the gospel effective in human life, especially in the initial stages of renewal. It may then assume three forms : (1) Endeavour after social renovation, aiming at a gradual change of existing social conditions or an immediate application of Christian agencies to human need ; (2) Steady, prolonged, and continuous effort to persuade men to become Christians ; (3) Definite, organized, and periodic attempts for the immediate conversion of men. In what follows I refer particularly to (2) and (3). If psychology is not wholly new in respect to evangelism, it is new so far as it is now self-conscious and scientific. In looking around for opportunities to apply its interpretative suggestions, it has found in evangelism a promising field. On the other hand, evangelism, in inquiring how it may most effectually reach the individual and the community, has turned to psychology for its aid. In this paper only three aspects of our subject are pre- sented — its bearing on sin, on the conditions of evangelism in the crowd and the individual, and on conversion. I. Psychology is of help to evangelism in the light which it throws on the nature of sin. It enables one to trace the genesis of sin in the individual and in the race, and thus to ascertain the present moral condition of the sinner. Psycho- logy has discerned the truth in "original righteousness," " original sin," " depravity," and " moral inability ". It helps to an understanding of the " flesh " and its relation to the APPENDIX B 271 "spirit"; it interprets the conflict which arises between these, and the nature of the responsibility which is connected with the surrender of the " spirit " to the " flesh ". It reveals the part played by social heredity in the formation of individual character. It shows how impulse, instinct, and desire are related to choice. It takes sin out of the field of theology and plants it in the field of experience. In the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, in the terms which are trans- ated by " sin," it rediscovers the deep and permanent mean- ing which experience has stamped upon it — missing the mark, error, folly, emptiness, wickedness, violence, rebellion, wrong, transgression, lawlessness. Psychology shows further that sin is — sins, concrete deeds as well as a spirit of life, acts as well as habits. It makes it clear also that sinful actions are not always perfectly bad, that many actions are done from mixed motives, and that there is at times a heart of good in things evil. Moreover, it helps us to see that the conscious- ness of sin is sometimes a feeling of unrest, due to the sense of defeat or imperfection, of social disharmony, of divine dis- approval ; at other times sin gathers up into itself the pierc- ing cry, " Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned ". II. Psychology is of value in its description of the conditions 1 which lead up to effective conversion. These centre in the crowd and in the individual. Eecently the "crowd" has been subjected to a thorough-going analysis ; its fundamental notion has been defined, its mental characteristics described, and the laws upon which its suggestibility is conditioned have been formulated. It is evident, for example, that a revival is ' a form of impulsive social action and as such conforms to the i 272 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY ^w (1) of the origin of emotional states socially initiated, (2) of spread through imitation and geometrical progression, and j(3) of restraint or diminution and final subsidence. In such ^ crowd, the reflective or critical faculty gives place to the re- ieptive, there is a tendency to suggestibility and contagion, and to do things which if the individuals were alone and apart jivom the crowd no one of them would do. Psychology shows why the evangelistic appeal is through familiar beliefs and convictions, why its formulas are also familiar with little use of reasoned exposition, how it gives rise to unconscious illu- sions, what part fear plays in the emotional awakening, why ;the leadership is important, and what the forces are which determine social evangelism, as imagination, customary beliefs, emotion, mental contagion and suggestibility, and the personal i influence of the evangelist. Through psychology also we are aware of the value of the concomitants of evangelism, such as the preparations for the meetings, the place of assembly, the opening services, predisposing personal conditions, the prestige of the evangelist, and the general assumptions on which the meetings are conducted. The meanings of every one of the foregoing facts and conditions have been more or less under- stood through all the history of the Church, and evangelists have observed many of the requirements referred to, but not until a comparatively recent period have we been in a posi- tion to appreciate the specirfic mental bearing of all this, and adapt ourselves to it in evangelism. III. ] Psychology has helped us to a truer interpretation of the j nature of conversion. An experience which often appeared utterly mysterious or was referred exclusively to the will or APPENDIX B 273 power of God, is now seen to be to a great extent at least, if not entirely, explicable by known psychological processes. In this way several troublesome matters have been more or less cleared up. 1. Conversion has been studied inductively, with a view to ascertain what could be known about it as a human experience. For the time being the divine causal action was ignored and attention fixed on the human conditions and processes in which it takes place. Professors Starbuck and Coewere pioneers in this field, while to Professor William James is due our chief debt. 2. Discoveries made in the field of the sub-consciousness are found of the highest significance in elucidating the experi- ence of conversion. Facts of the sub- conscious life derived from hypnotic and hysteric patients have provided material for accounting for many hitherto mysterious phenomena of religious conversion. We now know what kind of persons are the most likely subjects of an explosive form of this ex- perience. 3. Sudden and violent conversions have been brought within the law of the human consciousness. Similar pheno- mena in the religious experience of the devotees of other religions have been studied and their results used to light up Christian conversion. Experiences also outside of the religious field explain the sudden emergence of emotional excitement in which in an instant the interest shifts and sets up a new and dominant direction of personal forces. 4. Psychology has shown that there are two main types of conversion — the volitional and the self-surrender — and we understand now what it is in the consciousness of each in- dividual which predisposes him to one or other of these forms 18 274 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY of experience. We now know why some conversions are the culmination of long striving for a better self, for higher ideals, for self-control in unity of will, for union with God, and we know why others are inwardly changed the very moment they leave off efifort and relax, so that what they could not attain by the most strenuous endeavour becomes their sudden pos- session. We know too why it is that bitter opposition sub- sides and one finds himself at peace in accepting, just as a moment before he was at war in resisting, the gospel. 5. Psychology has made it possible for us to understand the conditions which often accompany such conversions, some of which are more distinctly psychical, as the instantaneous reinforcement of the will, the peace after storm, the new light in which even the natural world appears, others of which are more definitely physical and are concerned with bodily dis- turbances, such as visions, auditions, shakings, and loss of muscular control. Professor Davenport in " Primitive Traits in Eeligious Kevivals" has introduced us to a very large number of such experiences at different periods and in widely separated regions of the world. Such instances are sus- ceptible of indefinite extension not only in Christian but also in non- Christian lands. 6. Psychology enables us to distinguish more accurately the essential from the non-essential elements in conversion. All that Jonathan Edwards has so subtly and exhaustively described in his " Narrative of Surprising Conversions," and his " Religious Affections " is still further sharpened and made convincing by the aid of a more thorough psychological analysis. The fact of a sudden or a gradually realized con- version is entirely indifferent. Emotion or the lack of it, the physical condition at the time, and even unusual accompani- APPENDIX B 275 ments of the new attitude are also indifferent. Persons may experience a doctrine or a suggested experience of a given type, and still not have begun the new life. One and one thing only is necessary — the beginning of that type of life; which Jesus Christ lived, H!is attitude toward God, His at- titude toward men. Not all who enter upon this life believe the same things or are conscious of the same ideals, or give * expression to the life in the same terms of conduct. If this new spirit now becomes "the hot place in a man's conscious- • ness, . . . the habitual centre of his personal energy " -payoho- , logy pronounces him a Christian. » INDEX Abraham, 263. Active powers, 192, 214. Adams, Professor, 96. Aflfection, family, 56. Alexander, A. B. D., 63. America, 20. American Christianity, 21 ; preaching, 21. Amiel, 131, 155. Anatomy, 39. Aquinas, Thomas, 236, 247 Argyle, Duke of, 180. Aristotle, 148, 150, 191. Arnold's "Attention and In- terest," 96. Arnold, Matthew, 32, 35. Arrol, Sir William, 178. Association of Ideas, 148, 150, Attention, 93, 96, 97, 98. Augustine, St., 108, 120, 121, 236. Bacon, Lord, 192. Bain, Professor, 196. Baldwin, J. M., 148. Barbour, Dr. G. F., 32. Beauty, test of, 223. Beck, Professor, 18. Beckwith, Professor C. A., 26, 269. Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 21. Begbie, Harold, 23. Bible, 19, 47. Body, 41, 47, 49, 51 ; sins of, 53, 59. Bois, Professor Henri, 24. Brain, 69, 82, 107, 193; sub- stance, 81. Browne, Sir Thomas, 257. Brlissau, Oskar, 258. Burns, Robert, 137, 209. Bush, Wendell T., 30. Calderwood, Professor, 247. Calkins' " Science of Selves," 28. Carlyle, Thomas, 158. Categories, 176. Character, 163; formation of, 154. Choice, 225 ; permanent, 228. Christian, definition of, 138. Christianity, 141, 210; problem of, 161. Chrysostom, 236. Coe, Professor, 273. Cognitive powers, 191. Columbus, 136. Commonsense, 171, 178. Conduct, 191, 215. Conscience, 58, 64, 71, 116, 202, 222, 226, 235; implies exist- ence of God, 250 ; and religious faculty, 250 ; in Old Testament, 235 ; in New Testament, 236 ; sequent, 240, 243, 249 ; ante- cedent, 243, 248, 249; Kant and, 239 ; Rousseau and, 239 ; Butler and, 239 ; Martineau and, 239; Green and, 239; Shakspeare and, 241 ; in "Les Miserables," 241 ; Luther's de- finition of, 237 ; Calvin's de- finition of, 238 ; Schoberlein's definition of, 237 ; English Deism and, 238 ; Protestantism and, 238. (277) 18 278 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY Consciousness, 111 ; of 8«lf, 115. Conversion, 20, 22, 26 ; two main types of, 273. Cook, Rev. Joseph, 240. Culture, gospel of, 32 ; mental, 56. Dale, Dr., 24. Dante, 143. Davenport, Professor, 274. Day-dreams, 130. Decision, 225. Delitzsch, Professor, 18. Desire, 71, 219. Determination, 225. Determinism, doctrine of, 163. Dickson, Professor, 49. Dorner, Professor, 258. Drama, 133. Dreaming, 128. Drummond, Professor Henry, 28, 138. Drunkenness, 51, 52. Ear, the, 80 ; the external, 77 ; the internal, 78 ; the drum of, 78. Edison, 136. Edwards, Jonathan, 20, 208, 269, 274. Eliot, George, 32. Emerson, 32. Emotion, 71, 194. Epic, 133. Eucken, Professor, 22. Evangelism, three forms of, 270. Excitement, religious, 21. Experience, 81 ; religious, 23, 24. Eye, 79, 80. Feeling, 70, 71, 191, 193, 217. Feelings, division of, 195, 196, 197 ; the lowest and highest, 202 ; the three master-feelings, 206 ; education of, 200. Fichte, 32, 35. Fletcher's, "Psychology of the New Testament," 18, Forgiveness, 117. Frank, Professor von, 24. Gass, Dr. W., 236. Gibbon, 142. Glover, William, 40. Gluttony, 51. God, 117, 118 ; the Fatherhood of, 29 ; voice of, 90 ; Word of, 183 ; kingdom of, 35, 141 ; the reason of the universe, 186. Goethe, 35. Good, conformity to the, 224. Gratitude, 117. Guilt, 115. '♦ Habit," the word, 162. Habit, 147 ; formation of, 151 ; strengthened by repetition, 181 ; mind seat of, 153 ; body in its service, 153 ; good, may become tyrannical, 155 ; evil, easily acquired, 159 ; evil, ty- ranny of, 160 ; rules for break- ing-off, 161. Hamilton, Sir William, 37, 38, 110. Hamlet, 167, 226. Harris, Professor Eraser, 201. Hearing, sense of, 77. " Heart," in Old Testament, 18, 64 ; in New Testament, 64. Heart, 191, 194; "new," 65. Heredity, 99. Herzog, 24. Hobbes, 204. Hope, an instrument of salvation, 140 ; and immortality, 142 ; modern form of, 142. Humanity, 59. Hume, David, 148. Idealism, modern, 74. Ideas, Association of, 148, 150 ; succession of, 148. Ihmels, 24. Illingworth, J. R., 27. INDEX '279 Imagination, 42, 71, 125 ; *' creative," 127 ; principal function of, 132, 135 ; highest service of, 139 ; dangers of, 134 ; and hope, 139. Immortality, 30. Impressions, stream of, 86, 96, 99 ; power of, 94, 112. Impulses, 71. Individuality, definition of, 33. Industry, 56, 57. Intellect, 37. Intellectual powers, 213. Interest, 95, 96. Introspection, 73. Isaac, 263. Iverach, Principal, 108. Jacob, 263. James, Professor William, 22, 23, 38, 86, 147, 161, 214, 273. Jesuit Moralists, 237. John, St., 187. Johnson, Dr., 136. Judgment, Day of, 248. Kant, 244 ; Doctrine of the Categories, 176. Knowledge, 71, 81, 90, 191, 215 ; five gateways of, 74. KOstlin, 24. Labour, gospel of, 158. Ladd, Professor, 81, 93, 105. Laidlaw, Professor, 32, 60. Landor, Walter Savage, 201. " Life," term, 27 ; definition of, 28. Livingstone, David, 136, 266. Logic, aim of science, 179 ; ancient, 73. " Lost," meaning of term, 28. Love, 58. Lust, 51, 52. Luthardt, 236. Luther, Martin, 237, 266. Macbeth, 241. McCosh, President, 37, 38, 195. McDougall's '* Physiological Psy- chology, "84, 194. MacEwen, Sir William, 88. McHardy, Dr. , 36. Man, 39, 40, 43, 49, 50, 154; Bible view of, 48; "of the world," 55; "old," 65, 252; "new," 65, 252; on physical side, 74. Materialism, 106, 107. Matter, 83, 85. Memory, 42, 71, 92, 104, 110, 114, 115 ; two powers of, 104 ; "good," 112; Mother of the Muses, 115 ; and imagination, 126. " Might," in Old Testament, 18. Milton, 143. Mind, 87, 88, 127, 167 ; materi- alistic theory of, 107 ; and habit, 153; knowledge of by the ancients, 72. Momerie, 27. Moody, D.L., 269. i Mystics, 237, 251. Nature, human, 34, 47, 48, 60 ; perfection of, 252. Nerves, system of, 69, 70, 74, 79 ; sensory, 192, 216, 218 ; motor, 192, 216, 218. Netoliczka, O., 33. Newton, 174. Niebergall, 34. Nietzsche, 38, 203. Novel, 133. Omission, sins of, 116. Origen, 236. Parable of Prodigal Son, 140, 226. Patriotism, 198. Paul, St., 18, 19, 92, 98, 205, 209, 230, 266 ; his conception of the Church, 267. Perception, 71, 92. 280 CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY Personality, 27, 28 ; definition of, 33. Peter, St., 36, 138. Philanthropy, 56. Philosophy, Scottish School of, 37 ; mechanical, 194. Physiology, 40, 214; Ancients' notion of, 72. Plato, 92, 120, 148, 150, 260. Plotinus, 115. Prayer, habit of, 159. Protestant worship, 185. Protestantism, 139. "Psyche/' 35. Psychology, 36, 39, 42, 70, 71, 213, 215, 219 ; English school of, 148 ; and conversion, 26, 271, 272 ; and Evangelism, 269 ; and sin, 269 ; purpose of, 18; of Religion, 20, 21, 25, 26 ; Biblical, 17, 19, 24, 25, 26, 47 ; Pauline, 64, 253 ; Chris- tian, definition of, 26, 29, 39, 47 ; of sanctification, 26 ; of evangelization, 26. Rationalism, 207. Reason, 58, 92, 167, 222 ; work of, 167 ; creative power, 168 ; cultivation of, 177 ; religious use of, 181 ; has to do with means to ends, 171 ; has to do with cause and effect, 172 ; faculty of comparison, 169. Reasoning, 71. Recollection, 104, 108, 126. Reformation, 184. Religion, 39, 137, 206. Resolution, 225. Retention, 104, 105, 108. Reverie, 129, 130. Revival, definition of, 271. Richard III., 241. Romanism, 139. Salvation, definition of, 29. Scaliger, 113. Schleiermacher, 208, 261. Schmidt, 240. Schoberlein, 237. Scott, Sir Walter, 106, 245. Seeing, sense of, 77. " Self," meaning of the, 27. Self, the subconscious, 108. Self-control, 157, 220. Sensation, 71 ; pure, 90. Senses, the five, 69, 74, 81; of animals, 75. Sentiments, 71. Seth, Professor, 37. Shakspeare, 225, 257. Shand, Alexander F., 258. Sin, 147, 182. Smell, sense of, 76. Socrates, 260. " Soul," in Old Testament, 18 ; in New Testament, 27 ; term of Jesus, 29, 30, 39. Soul, the, 40, 41, 42, 47, 51, 54, 64, 74 ; Bible use of, 54. Spencer, Herbert, 86. Spirit, 47, 51, 58 ; the work of, 59 ; supremacy of, 61. Spots, temperature, 76 ; pres- sure, 76. Starbuck, E. D., 22, 23, 223. Stearns, Professor, 228. Steven, Dr. G., 24. Strong, T. B., 207. Sympathy, 198. Tact, 177. Taste, sense of, 76. Taylor, Jeremy, 238. Taylor, Dr. W. M., 98. Temperament, the sanguine, 259, 260 ; the phlegmatic, 259, 260, the choleric, 259, 261; the melancholic, 260, 261. " Temperament," the word, 258. Temperaments, the four, 257. Temperaments, the temptations of, 262, 264 ; special virtues of, 265 ; mixed, 261 ; national, 261. Temple, on Personality, 27. Tennyson, Lord, 92, 240. INDEX 281 Theology, Biblical, 17, 18. Thomson, Professor Hanna, 73, 89. Thought, concentration of, 157. Touch, sense of, 75, 76. Trent, Council of, 117. Truth, test of, 223. Tyndall, Professor, 86, 136. Unconsciousness, 126. Universe, 175. ViNET, 37. Volition, 71. Ward, Professor, 94. Wellington, Duke of, 164. Wendt, 49. Wesleys, the, 208. Whitefield, George, 269. Whyte, Principal, 155, 258. Will, 71, 93, 202, 213; freedom of, 220 ; power of, 228 , "good," 225. Wilson's " Gateways of Know- ledge," 81. Wisdom literature, 182. Wobbermin, 20. Woman, the ''worldly," 56. Work and wages, 158. Youth, 198. PRINTED IN GBEAT BRITAIN BY THE ABBRPKEN UNIVERSITT TRUSS WORKS BY The Rev. Prof. JAMES STALKER M.A., D.D. 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