.^RVOFPr ^ -^^^^ ^LOGIC^, ^^ (?DF/ £• THE MODERN LIBRARY OP THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The publishers tvill be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LihKAYiY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price. By William James THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh University. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. pragmatism: a new name for some old ways of thinking: popular lectures ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. the meaning of truth: a sequel to "PRAGILATISM." 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THE PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans. Green & Co. SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUCTION TO PHI- LOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM. 8vo. New York, Londou, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY. I2m0. NcW York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans. Green & Co. MEMORIES AND STUDIES. 8vo. Ncw York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Long- mans, Green & Co. THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., Svo. New Yoik : Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. psychology: briefer course. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London: Macmillan & Co. TALKS TO teachers ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE's IDEALS. 13 mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Long- mans, Green & Co. HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE. l6m0. Bos- ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. Edited by R. B. Perry. Svo. New York, Lon- don, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. HABIT. Reprint of a chapter in "The Principles of Psychology." i6mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. ON VITAL RESERVES. Reprint of "The Energies of Men" and the "Gospel of Re- laxation." i6mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. ON SOME OF life's IDEALS. Reprint of "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "What Makes a Life Significant." i6mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM JAMES. By R. B. Perry. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, With an Introduction, by Wil- liam James. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 18S5. LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES. Selected and edited with Biographical Introduction and Notes by his son Henry James. 2 vols., Svo. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1920. fHE THOUGHT AND CHARACTER OF WILLIAM JAMES. By R. B. Perry. 2 Vols., 8v0. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1935. THE VARIETIES^ '''\1 OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE A Study in Human Nature BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL RELIGION DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH IN 190I-1902 BY ^VILLIAM JAMES THE MODERN LIBRARY NE>A^ YORK COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY WILLIAM JAMES This edition of THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIBNCB is authorized by LONGMANS, GREEN AND COMPANY d-of ^ b __,.g>{a^jiiiiii.n|RiB ^^5^___ Random House is the PUBLIS HER OF THE MODERN LIBRARY BENNETT A. CERF • DONALD S. KLOPFER ■ ROBERT K. HAAS Manufactured in the United States of America Printed by Parkway Printing Company Bound by H. WolfiF WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910) A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF "THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE" The road by which William James arrived at his position of leadership among American philosophers was, during his child- hood, youth and early maturity, quite as circuitous and unpre- dictable as were his father's ideas on the training of his children. That Swedenborgian theologian foresaw neither the career of novelist for his son Henry, nor that of pragmatist philosopher for the older William. The father's migrations between New York, Europe and Newport meant that William's education had variety if it did not have fixed direction. From 13 to 18 be studied in Europe and returned to Newport, Rhode Island, to study painting under the guidance of John La Farge. After a year, he gave up art for science and entered Harvard University, where his most influential teachers were Louis Agassiz and Charles W. Eliot. In 1863, William James began the study of medicine, and in 1865 he joined an expedition to the Amazon. Before long, he wrote: "If there is anything I hate, it is collect- ing." His studies constantly interrupted by ill health, James re- turned to Germany and began hearing lectures and reading voluminously in philosophy. He won his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. For four years he was an invalid in Cam- bridge, but finally, in 1873, he passed his gravest physical and spiritual crises and began the career by which he was to influ- ence so profoundly generations of American students. From 1880 to 1907 he was successively assistant professor of phi- losophy, professor of psychology and professor of philosophy at Harvard. In 1890, the publication of his Principles of Psychol- ogy brought him the acknowledged leadership in the Field of functional psychology. The selection of William James to de- liver the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh was at once a tribute to him and a reward for the university that sponsored the under- taking. These lectures, collected in this volume, have since be- come famous as the standard scientific work on the psychology of the religious impulse. Death ended his career on August 27th, 1910. To E. P. G. IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVF CONTENTS LECTURE I PAGE RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY ..... 3 Introduction: the course is not anthropological, but deals with personal documents — Questions of fact and questions of value — In point of fact, the religious are often neurotic — Criticism of medical materialism, which condemns religion on that account — Theory that re- ligion has a sexual origin refuted — All states of mind are neurally conditioned — Their significance must be tested not by their origin but by the value of their fruit* — Three criteria of value; origin useless as a criterion- Advantages of the psychopathic temperament when a superior intellect goes with it — especially for the religious life. LECTURE II CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC ^7 Futility of simple definitions of religion — No one spe- cific "religious sentiment" — Institutional and personal religion — We confine ourselves to the personal branch — Definition of religion for the purpose of these lectures — Meaning of the term "divine" — The divine is what prompts solemn reactions — Impossible to make our defi- nitions sharp — We must study the more extreme cases — Two ways of accepting the universe — Religion is more enthusiastic than philosophy — Its characteristic is en- thusiasm in solemn emotion — Its ability to overcome un- happiness — Need of such a faculty from the biological point of view. ix CONTENTS LECTURE III PACE THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 53 Percepts versus abstract concepts — Influence of the latter on belief — Kant's theological Ideas — We have a sense of reality other than that given by the special senses — Examples of "sense of presence" — The feeling of unreality — Sense of a divine presence: examples — Mys- tical experiences: examples — Other cases of sense of God's presence — Convincingness of unreasoned experi- ence— Inferiority of rationalism in establishing belief — Either enthusiasm or solemnity may preponderate in the religious attitude of individuals. LECTURES IV AND V THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS . 77 Happiness is man's chief concern — "Once-born" and "twice-born" characters — Walt Whitman — Mixed na- ture of Greek feeling — Systematic healthy-mindedness — Its reasonableness — Liberal Christianity shows it — Op- timism as encouraged 'by Popular Science — The "Mind- cure" movement — Its creed — Cases — Its doctrine of evil — Its analogy to Lutheran theology — Salvation by relaxa- tion— Its methods: suggestion — meditation — "recollec- tion"— verification — Diversity of possible schemes of adaptation to the universe — Appendix: Two mind- cure cases. LECTURES VI AND VII THE SICK SOUL . . I25 Healthy-mindedness and repentance — Essential plural- ism of the healthy-minded philosophy — Morbid-minded- ncss: its two degrees — The pain-threshold varies in indi- viduals— Insecurity of natural goods — Failure, or vain CONTENTS XI PAGI success of every life — Pessimism of all pure naturalism — Hopelessness of Greek and Roman view — Pathological unhappiness — "Anhedonia" — Querulous melancholy — Vital zest is a pure gift — Loss of it makes physical world look different — Tolstoy — Bunyan — Alline — Mor- bid fear — Such cases need a supernatural religion for relief — Antagonism of healthy-mindedness and morbid ness — The problem of evil cannot be escaped. LECTURE VIII THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNI- FICATION 163 Heterogeneous personality — Character gradually at- tains unity — Examples of divided self — The unity at- tained need not be religious — "Counter conversion" cases — Other cases — Gradual and sudden unification — Tol- stoy's recovery — Bunyan's. [86 LECTURE IX CONVERSION Case of Stephen Bradley — The psychology of charac- ter-changes— Emotional excitements make new centres of personal energy — Schematic ways of representing this — Starbuck likens conversion to normal moral ripening — Leuba's ideas — Seemingly unconvertible persons — Two types of conversion — Subconscious incubation of mo- tives— Self-surrender — Its importance in religious history — Cases. LECTURE X • CONVERSION — concluded ... 213 Cases of sudden conversion — Is suddenness essential? — No, it depends on psychological idiosyncrasy — Proved Xll CONTENTS PAQB existence of transmarginal, or subliminal, consciousness — "Automatisms" — Instantaneous conversions seem due to the possession of an active subconscious self by the subject — The value of conversion depends not on the process, but on the fruits — These are not superior in sudden conversion — Professor Coe's views — Sanctifica- tion as a result — Our psychological account does not exclude direct presence of the Deity — Sense of higher control — Relations of the emotional "faith-state" to in- tellectual beliefs — Leuba quoted — Characteristics of the faith-state: sense of truth; the world appears new — Sensory and motor automatisms — Permanency of con- versions. LECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII iiAINTLINESS . 254 Sainte-Beuve on the State of Grace — Types of charac- ter as due to the balance of impulses and inhibitions — Sovereign excitements — Irascibility — Effects of higher excitement in general — The saintly life is ruled by spir- itual excitement — This may annul sensual impulses per- manently— Probable subconscious influences involved — Mechanical scheme for representing permanent altera- tion in character — Characteristics of saintliness — Sense of reality of a higher power — Peace of mind, charity — . Equanimity, fortitude, etc. — Connection of this with re- laxation— Purity of life — Asceticism — Obedience — Pov- 1 erty — The sentiments of democracy and of humanity — ' General effects of higher excitements. LECTURES XIV AND XV THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS . 32O It must be tested by the human value of its fruits — CONTENTS Xlll PAGE l-he reality of the God must, however, also be judged — "Unfit" rehgions get eliminated by "experience" — Em- piricism is not skepticism — Individual and tribal religion — Loneliness of religious originators — Corruption fol- lows success — Extravagances — Excessive devoutness, as fanaticism — As theopathic absorption — Excessive purity — Excessive charity — The perfect man is adapted only to the perfect environment — Saints are leavens — Excesses of asceticism — Asceticism symbolically stands for the heroic life — Militarism and voluntary poverty as possible equivalents — Pros and cons of the saintly character — Saints versus "strong" men — Their social function must be considered — Abstractly the saint is the highest type, but in the present environment it may fail, so we make ourselves saints at our peril — The question of theological truth. LECTURES XVI AND XVII MYSTICISM 37> Mysticism defined — Four marks of mystic states — They form a distinct region of consciousness — Examples of their lower grades — Mysticism and alcohol — "The anaesthetic revelation" — Religious mysticism — Aspects of Nature — Consciousness of God — "Cosmic consciousness" — Yoga — Buddhistic mysticism — Sufism — Christian mys- tics— Their sense of revelation — Tonic effects of mystic states — They describe by negatives — Sense of union with the Absolute — Mysticism and music — Three conclusions — (i) Mystical states carry authority for him who has them — (2) But for no one else — (3) Nevertheless, they break down the exclusive authority of rationalistic states — They strengthen monistic and optimistic hypotheses. PAOB 421 XIV CONTENTS LECTURE XVIII PHILOSOPHY Primacy of feeling in religion, philosophy being a sec- ondary function — Intellectualism professes to escape subjective standards in her theological constructions — "Dogmatic theology" — Criticism of its account of God's attributes — "Pragmatism" as a test of the value of con- ceptions— God's metaphysical attributes have no practical significance — His moral attributes are proved by bad arguments; collapse of systematic theology — Does tran- scendental idealism fare better? Its principles — Quota- tions from John Caird — They are good as restatements of religious experience, but uncoercive as reasoned proof — What philosophy can do for religion by transforming herself into "science of religions." LECTURE XIX OTHER CHARACTERISTICS . . 448 yEsthetic elements in religion — Contrast of Catholicism and Protestantism — Sacrifice and Confession — Prayer — Religion holds that spiritual work is really effected in prayer — Three degrees of opinion as to what is effected — First degree — Second degree — Third degree — Au- tomatisms, their frequency among religious leaders — Jewish cases — Mohammed — Joseph Smith — Religion and the subconscious region in general. LECTURE XX CONCLUSIONS ... 475 Summary of religious characteristics — Men's religions need not be identical — "The science of religions" can only suggest, not proclaim, a religious creed — Is religion CONTENTS XV VA&t a "survival" of primitive thought? — Modern science rules out the concept of personality — Anthropomorphism and belief in the personal characterized pre-scientific thought — Personal forces are real, in spite of this — Scientific objects are abstractions, only individualized experiences are concrete — Religion holds by the concrete — Pri- marily religion is a biological reaction — Its simplest terms are an uneasiness and a deliverance; description of the deliverance — Question of the reality of the higher power — The author's hypotheses: i. The subconscious self as intermediating betvv'een nature and the higher region — 2. The higher region, or "God" — 3. He pro- duces real effects in nature. POSTSCRIPT 5^^ Philosophic position of the present work defined as piecemeal supernaturalism — Criticism of universalistic supernaturalism — Different principles must occasion dif- ferences in fact — What differences in fact can God's existence occasion? — The question of immortality — Question of God's uniqueness and infinity: religious ex- perience does not setde this question in the affirmative — The pluralistic hypothesis is more conformed to com- mon sense. INDEX 5^9 PREFACE THIS book would never have Wen written had I not been honored with an appointment as Giflford Lec- turer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's Religious Appetites," and the second a metaphyical one on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy," But the unexpected growth of the psycho- logical matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the de- scription of man's religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to pages 501-509, and to the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form. In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract for- mulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with con- crete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, howevei^ they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will dis- xvii XVIU PREFACE appear; for I there combine the rehgious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will. My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck, of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller of Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand, for docu- ments; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Win- centy Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for important sugges- tions and advice. Finally, to conversations with the la- mented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express. Harvard University, March, 1902. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Lecture I RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY IT is with no small amount of trepidation that I take m^ place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of Euro- pean scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired ; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularlji must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philo- sophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Eraser's Essays in Philos- ophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's class- room therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get out- grown ; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted 4 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an of- ficial here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustri- ous names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality. But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade and in- fluence the world. As regards the manner in which I shall have to adminis- ter this lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious pro- pensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural tbing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities. If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more de- veloped subjective phenomena recorded in literature pro- duced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 5 early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the re- ligious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The documents humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition — they lie along the beaten highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits admir- ably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lectur- ing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious en- tertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he, will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the- way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand. The question. What are the religious propensities.'' and the question. What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have referred. In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it.? how did it come about.-' what is its constitu 6 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE tion, origin, and history? And second, What is its impor- tance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthur- theil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual pre- occupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together. In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distin- guish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide oflhand the still further question : of what use should such a volume, with its manner of com- ing into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation ; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce an- other spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 7 passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs. I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judg- ment, because there are many religious persons — some of you now present, possibly, are among them — who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may there- fore feel first a little startled at the purely existential point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject, and may even sus- pect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of de- liberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life. Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a prejudice on your part would seriously ob- struct the due effect of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point. There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person ex- ceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances !5 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mo- hammedan. His rehgion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us Httle to study this second-hand reUgious hfe. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were •he pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in in- dividuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but ;.s an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in die pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often biiown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been sub- ject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and pre- sented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious au- thority and influence. If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects today are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in es- sence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 9 in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort: — "As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immedi- ately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes and left them with the shep- herds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and were astonished, Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice. Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I went into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, cry- ing as before. Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again, 10 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards I came to under- stand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand Chris- tians were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord." Bent as -we are on studying religion's existential condi- tions, we cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It is true that we instinc- tively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; I am myself, myself alone." The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY II since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written : "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, verac- ity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, ani- mal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sug- ar." When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely every- thing, we feel — quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform — menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold- blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more pre- ciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks. Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emo- tional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of overinstigated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion — probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of rea- soning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among cer- tain writers, of criticizing the religious emotions by show- 12 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE ing a connection between them and the sexual Hfe. Conver- sion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only in- stances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affec- tion. And the like.^ ^ As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses it- self only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few con- ceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often em- ployed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformadon may be best understood by remembering that its jons et origo was Luther's wish to marry a nun: — the effects are infinitely wider than the al- leged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true diat in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are un- disguisedly amatory — e. g., sex-deides and obscene rites in poly- theism, and ecstadc feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mysdcs. But then why not equally call religion an aber- ration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the wor- ohip of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We "hunger and thirst" after righteousness; we "find the Lord a sweet savor;" we "taste and see that he is good." "Spir- itual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments," is a sub-tide of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe. Saint Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describes the "orison of quietude": "In this state the soul is like a litde child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here. . . . Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY I3 We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an mouth, and that we should rehsh the sweetness without even know- ing that it Cometh from the Lord." And again: "Consider the httle infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from time to dme they press themselves closer by litde starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch, xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i. In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perver- sion of the respiratory funcdon. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God." God's Breath in Man is the dtle of the chief work of our best known American mysdc (Thomas Lake Harris) ; and in certain non-Chrisdan countries the foundadon of all religious discipHne consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration. These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main phenomena of rehgion, namely, melancholy and conver- sion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis diat the inter- est in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and soci- ology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct: — but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from syn- chrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the re- ligious age par excellence would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past? The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is ir 14 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic dis- position, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue. Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snufls out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ- tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal ca- tarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted ac- the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any general assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex- organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious acdvities, this final proposidon may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstrucdve: we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value. In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporadng into a vague general asserdon of the dependence, some- how, of the mind upon the body. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY I5 tion of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.' Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypoth- esis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily con- ditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degener- ate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter w^hich — and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emo- tions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content. To plead the organic causation of a religious state of ^ For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article on "les Varietes du Type devot," by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de I'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161. l6 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with deter- minate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our ^/V-beliefs, could retain any value as revela- tions of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time. It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may ac- credit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily afflic- tion, is altogether illogical and inconsistent. Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite can- did with ourselves and with the facts. When we think cer- tain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we speak disparagingly of "feverish fancies," surely the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem — for aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temper- ature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the dis- agreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we praise the RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY V] thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consist- ency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem. Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most "good" is not always most "true," when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in cor- roboration. If merely "feeling good" could decide, drunk- enness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the mo- ment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experi- ence— we shall hereafter hear much of them — that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end. It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the im- l8 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE possibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius pro- mulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category. . . . And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness." ^ Now do these authors, after having succeeded in estab- lishing to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently proceed thereupon to im- pugn the value of the fruits .f* Do they deduce a new spir- itual judgment from their new doctrine of existential con- ditions .f' Do they frankly forbid us to admire the produc- tions of genius from now onwards.? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth? No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments." But for the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to such secular produc- tions as everyone admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations. ^ J. F. Nisbet: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi., xxiv. ^ Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degetieration. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY ^9 And then it is because the rehgious manifestations have been already condemned because the critic disHkes them on internal or spiritual grounds. In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never oc- curs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are in- variably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reason-^ ableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available cri- teria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hys- terical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below. You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake — such has been the -darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the origin of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various or- igins could be discriminated from one another from this 20 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test. Origin in im- mediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccount- able impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance generally — these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way. They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Mauds- ley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write: — "What right have we to believe Nature under any obliga- tion to do her work by means of complete minds only ? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective — if indeed he were hypocrite, adul- terer, eccentric, or lunatic. . . . Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude — namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruc- tion and training among mankind." ^ ^ H. Maudsley: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 257, 256. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 21 In other words, not its origin, but the way in which it wor\s on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, need- ing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had to come to our empiricist cri- terion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances what- ever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the. only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians. "In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, "we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day. . . . There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence. . . . The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine." Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good disposi- tions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we 32 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. Says Saint Teresa: — "Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength -o the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a har- vest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often ac- cused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination. ... I showed them the jew- els which the divine hand had left with me: — they .were my actual dispositions. All those who knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the fact; this improve- ment, palpable in all respects, far from being hidden, was bril- liantly evident to all men. As for myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices, and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead, for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all that wealth." ^ I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was nec- essary, and that fewer words would have dispelled the un^ easiness which may have arisen among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its re- sults exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize your piety no more. Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave pathological questions out.!^ ' Autobiography, ch. xxviii. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 23 To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives else- where. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed. Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To under- ■ stand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its en- vironment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to the right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, "fixed ideas," so called, have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have per- formed the same service for that of the normal faculty oi belief. Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psycopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many syno- nyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior qual- ity of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that 24 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE he will make his mark and afifcct his age, than if his tem- perament were less neurotic. There is of course no special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,^ for most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the pyschopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraor- dinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or ia some way "works it of?." "What shall I think of it?" a common person says to himself about a vexed question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must I do about it.?" is the form the question tends to take. In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk any- thing in its support. 'Someone ought to do it, but why should I.'^' is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneed ami- ability. 'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce — as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough — in the same individual, we have the best possible con- dition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the ^ Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of association by similarity. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY 25 biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideai possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox. To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melan- choly which, as we shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers. Take the trance- like states of insight into truth which all religious mystics report.^ These are each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religion? melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have qua reli- gious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is hap- piness. Religious trance is trance. And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of values — who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether? I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting, even were such phe- nomena certified from on high to be the most precious of human experiences. No one organism can possibly yield ^ I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895). 26 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or eve;n diseased; and our very in- firmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic tempera- ment we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to cor- ners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thump- ing its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide for- ever from its self-satisfied possessors? If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite recep- tivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop. The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the various religious phenomena must be com- pared in order to understand them better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed "the apperceiving mass" by which we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass. I may succeed in discussing reli- gious experiences in a wider context than has been usual in university courses. Lecture II CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC MOST books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so differ- ent from one another is enough to prove that the word "reli- gion" cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends al- ways to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important to religion. If we should inquire for the essence of "government," for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, an- other police, another an army, another an assembly, an- other a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a defi- nition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were 27 28 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE unified as a thing more misleading than enhghtening. And why may not rehgion be a conception equally complex?^ Consider also the "religious sentiment" which we see referred to in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the pyschologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors attempting to specify just what en- tity it is. One man allies it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeUng of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it pos- sibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term "religious sentiment" as a collec- tive name for the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, reli- gious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; reli- gious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions of. course are psychic entities distinguish- ^ I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the futihty of all these definitions of re- ligion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 29 able from other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract "religious emotion" to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in .every religious experience without exception. As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceiv- ably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. The field of religion being as wide as this, it is mani- festly impossible that I sholild pretend to cover it. My lec- tures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. And, al- though it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose oj these lectures, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say "religion" I mean that. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will now pre- liminarily seek to mark out the field I choose. One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organiza- tion, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of 30 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE the gods. In the more personal branch of rehgion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an alto- gether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart lo heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker. Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organ- ization, to consider as little as possible the systematic the- ology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to con- fine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly con- sidered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, ^'but only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and in- stitution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element." But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion — under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain, and these ele- CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 3I merits I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself con- tinue to apply the word "religion" to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ec- clesiasticisms, and say something of its relation to them. In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesias- ticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-han quilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography, 40 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE entitled "Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man. "I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought of having to part from what has been called the pleas- ant habit of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny. I dread the in- crease of infirmities that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip av/ay as quietly and :omfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with it. "I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimed happiness — care and weari- ness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."^ This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind. For myself, I should have no objection to tailing it on the whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others, with which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we can per- fectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go. ^ Op. cit., pp. 314, 313. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 4I It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I said that personal religion, even without the- ology or ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain. You may re- member that I promised shortly to point out what those ele- ments were. In a general way I can now say what I ha(, in mind. "I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorile utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Cad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission — as Carlyle would have us — "Gad! we'd better!" — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Moral- ity pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discol- ored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the pas- sionate happiness of Christian saints. The difFerence is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between 42 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which differ- ent individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a "critical point" has been overcome. If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a difference of doctrine; rather is it a dif- ference of emotional mood that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The universe is "accepted" by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I mean. The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal des- tiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and sub- mitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same. "It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find refreshment solely in these thoughts — first that nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to transgress.^ He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 43 of our common nature, through being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has brought, if it were not useful for the vv^hole. The integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest ofif anything. And thou dost cut oflf, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way."^ Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the Theologia Germanica: — "Where men are enlightened with the true light, they re- nounce all desire and choice, and commit and commend them- selves and all things to the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say: 'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.' Such men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth into such a deep abase- ment that it seemeth to him reasonable that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath nothing to say against them. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he Vv'ho in this present tim'^. entereth into this hell, none may console him. Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the eternal Good only. And then, when the man neither careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and seek ^ Book v., ch. ix. (abridged). 44 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE eth not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for 1 man, and happy is he who truly findeth them."^ How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to accept his place in the universe is! Mar- cus Aurelius agrees to the scheme — the German theologian agrees with it. He literally abounds in agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees. Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to something like a Christian warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius: — "Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say. Dear City of Zeus?"- But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation of Christ: — "Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be accord ing as thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and ' as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things. . . . When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. 1 Chaps. X., xi. (abridged) : Winkworth's translation. 2 Book IV., §23. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 45 Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, be- hold there death and hell."^ It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in our present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one- sided, exaggerated, and intense. Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical rather than reli- gious, we find a character that is perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the prac- tically important differentia of religion for our purpose; and just what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived. A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal con- siderations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for "volunteers." And for morality life is a war, and the service of the high- ^ Benham's translation: Book III., chaps, xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso — that I know it is His agency. I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine." R. W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188. 46 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE est is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volun- teers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever ob- jective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people's aflairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination. The Christian also .'ypurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which prob- ably no other human records show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning lakes an effort of volition, the Christian •spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in the oresence of which no exertion of volition is required. The .noralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles ten;..; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all gcci well — morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his ver^f vo^'clcssness, to feel that the spirit of the universe CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 47 recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hol- lowest substitute for that weW-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not. And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willing- ness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere moral- ity, it is positively expunged and washed away. We shall see abundant examples of this happy state ol mind in later lectures of this course. We shall see how in- finitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deduc- ible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come — a gift of our organism, the physiol- ogists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say — is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by k than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command 48 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Sub- ject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world dis- owns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste. If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimen- sion of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and ever- lasting possession spread before our eyes.^ This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which I have al- ready made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple — it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of the soul's liberation from oppressive moods. ^ Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical differentia. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 49 "The simplest functions of physiological life," he writes "may be its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement — singing, dancing, drink- ing, sexual excitement — has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laugh- ter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise. . . . Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the or- ganism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul — there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it."^ But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace hap- pinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threat- ened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. Tt consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask how religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot ex^ plain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the ex- tremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher* happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture ^ The New Spirit, p. 232. 50 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we \eep our joot upon his nec\. In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view.^ We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on the nega- tive principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death — their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intol- erable. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue. Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest pos- sible form to start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway. To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with eccentricities and extremes. "How can reli- gion on the whole be the most important of all human func- tions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it ^ I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and i iend, Charles Carroll Everett. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC 5I in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and pruned away?" Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably — yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine — and you will remember that this was our definition — will prove to be both a helpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The constitution of the world we live in requires it: — "Entbehren soUst du! sollst entbehren! Das ist der ewige Gesang Der jedem an die Ohren klingt, Den, unser ganzes Leben lang Uns heiser jede Stunde singt." For when all is said and done, we are in the end abso- lutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an im- position of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus ma\es easy and felic- itous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It be- comes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call 52 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE it, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now. But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts. Lecture III THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN WERE one asked to characterize the H£e of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmo- niously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this ad- justment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish dur- ing this hour to call your attention to some of the psycho- logical peculiarities of such an attitude as this, or belief in an object which we cannot see. All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the "objects" of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit frorr- us a reaction; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an in- sult may make us angrier than the insult did when we re- ceived it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts. The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few 53 54 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our at- tention later. The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as a model. But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete reli- gious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holi- ness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Chris- tian believers.^ We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a success- ful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good. Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such ob- jects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the ^ Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us." Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 55 words 'soul," "God," "immortality," cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speak- ing they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God ; feel as if we were free ; con- sider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in pra^tischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowl- edge of what they might be, in case we were permitted pos- itively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenom- enon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever. My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particu- larly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are consider- ing, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feel- ing; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tenden- cies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward de^ scription of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance 56 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being. It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel pres- ences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emer- son which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of lis, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its sig- nificance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just. Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the back- ground for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the pos- sibilities we conceive of. They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception. This absolute determinability of our mind by abstrac- tions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space. Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 57 common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reaUty of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the per- ishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." ^ In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ulti- mate object. "Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half- metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart — the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, with- out really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.^ ^ Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527. ^Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beauti- 58 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conckision something kke this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of real- ity, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call "something there," more deep and more general than any of the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be orig- inally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be be- lieved in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be. The most curious proofs of the existence of such an un- differentiated sense of reality as this are found in expe- riences of hallucination. It often happens that an halluci- nation is imperfectly developed : the person affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual "sensible" ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence reli- gion is more peculiarly concerned. An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries: — ful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is." B. de Sl Pierre. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 59 "I have several times within the past few years felt the so- called 'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not vv'here, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert. "It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experi- ence. On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the pre- vious night's experience, when suddenly I jelt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism — and yet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the 'horrible sensation' disappeared. "On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, and I was still ab- sorbed in these when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the coming) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.' I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil. to depart, if it was not evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it 60 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state. "On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood something was indescribably stronger than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary percep- tion. Although I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual being or person." Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy. "There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that." My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to inter- pret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head. Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I . THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 6^ take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a dis- tinctly visualized hallucination — but I leave that part of the story out. "I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was per- fectly quiet, and for the time being my friends were quite for- gotten, when suddenly without a moment's warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of tension or alive- ness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray-blue ma- terial of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi- transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"-^ — and hereupon the visual hallucination came. Another informant writes: — "Quite early in the night I was awakened. ... I felt as if I had been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into the house. ... I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it was not the con- sciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I do not know how to better describe my sen- sations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence. ... I felt also at the same time a strong ^Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26. ^)2 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE feeling of superstitious dread, as if something strange and fear- ful were about to happen."^ Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following tes- timony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of auto- matic or involuntary writing: — "Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of a foreign presence, external to my body. It is some- times so definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position. This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems to recognize it." In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a })epper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an ex- ceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without inter- nal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of real- ity and spatial outwardness directly attached to it — in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized idea. Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. For the pyschologists the tracing of the organic seat of ^ E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 63 such a feeling would form a pretty problem — nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating them- selves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or "made our flesh creep" — our senses are what do so often- est — might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat. Like ail positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint: — "When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appear- ance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings a? ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excit- edly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.' "^ In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide. We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctive- ly religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these ob- jects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this ^ Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66. ^4 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have ex- tracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operation properly so- called. "Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer de- scribes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to It in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to It which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical //. It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when some- times I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 65 which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric- current. A blank was there instead of It: I couldn't find any- thing. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to con- fess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknow- able, but just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost." Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biog- raphy than the way in which seasons of lively and of dif- ficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every re- ligious person has the recollection of particular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, per- haps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind: — "I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around nie. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur."-'^ ^ Letters of Lowell, i. 75. 66 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a clergyman — I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection: — "I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill- top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep — the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is im- possible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. "My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in mc. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was,, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception, had, as it were, burst into flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the convic- THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 67 tion, gained from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any other charge. I feel that in w»iting of it I have overlaid it with words rather than pu\ it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do." Here is another document, even more definite in charac- ter, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.^ "I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramp- ing, and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God — I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it — as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creat- ure and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, ^ I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, ixom his rich collection of psychological documents. 68 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE so strongly was I still possessed by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing 'slowly the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localiza- tion. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impos- sibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my «enses, yet my consciousness perceived him." The adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often, CO states that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experi- ences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck's collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The sud- denness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doc- trine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Chris- tian friends, she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream of light. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 69 "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me,' answered my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried pas- sionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my hear' panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of hir> church, or ... to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter? . . . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment." Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly described: — "I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life. . . . Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and cor- rugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when 1 could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, includ- ing the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was s temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumi- nation which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justifi' cation for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence." •/O THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the following sample from Professor Star- buck's manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine — probably thousands of unpre- tending Christians would write an almost identical account. "God is more real to me than any thought or thing or per- son. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. [ feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our com- munion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impres- sions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste." I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes. They are also from Professor Starbuck's col- lection, and their number might be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven years old : — "God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers. Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertain- ing come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Some- thing over a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst per- plexity. When the trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture: 'My grace is sufficient for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear this quo- tation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 7I little details all the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very contrary to my ambitions and plans." Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seven- teen : — "Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalms with me. . . . And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to get with him and generally feel his presence." I let a few other cases follow at random : — "God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being." — "There are times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes di- rect and overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault." — "I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms." Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital atti- tude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is ad- dressed to other matters and he no longer represents hei features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through. 72 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reahty, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more con- vincing than results established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any marked de- gree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of re- ality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief. The opinion op- posed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as rationalism. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ul- timately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (i) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intel- lectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result. Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which ration- alism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquac- ity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 7^ rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your im- pulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have pre- pared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely \nows that that result must be truer than any logic-chop- ping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we hjiow to-day that he is nevermore that mere external in- ventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest hi? "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfac- tion, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being. The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticu- late feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the pres- ence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quota- 74 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE tions, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith. Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is bet- ter that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact. So much for our sense of the reality of the religious ob- jects. Let me now say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken. We have already agreed that they are solemn; and we have seen reason to think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may result in extreme cases from abso- lute self-surrender. The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows. In the litera- ture of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been em- phasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does reli- gious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes sec- ondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man's religion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remain materially THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 75 within the hmits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to em- phasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes. The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliver- ance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and tb: omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? — deeper than hell; what canst thou know?'.' There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious joy. "In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret, if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more. . . . God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we may pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not! . . . What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?"^ If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the bur- den be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds ^ Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. ^6 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the sol- emnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any "habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,^ "is worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so-called "Civilization," as these things are now organ- ized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine re- ligions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating and unreason- ing way in which we feel that we must inflict our civiliza- tion upon "lower" races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Is- lam spreading its religion by the sword. In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be con- sidered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order to deny its ade- quacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too com- plex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures. ■> In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, /loston, 1886, pp. 91, laa. Lectures IV and V THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY- MINDEDNESS IF we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to en- dure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and un- happiness seem to be the poles round which the interest re- volves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious ex- ercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may produce the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of eX' periencing religion are new manners of producing happi- ness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of hap- piness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be. With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happi- ness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true — such, 77 yS THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE rightly or wrongly, is one of the "immediate inferences" of the religious logic used by ordinary men. "The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer,^ "may be experienced in its reality — indeed only experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable feeling of happiness which is con- nected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether f)roper feeling for us to have here be- low, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore hap- piness is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start." In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day. In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaim- able. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is of- fered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the ref- ormation are lavishly accused by the church writers of an- tinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate re- fusal to think ill of life has not been ideaKzed by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed ^C. Hilty: Gliick, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 79 all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis jac — if you but love [God], you may do as you incline — is morally one of the profoundest of obser- vations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but their be- lief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of free- dom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth cen- tury anti-christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficient- ly, is absolutely good. It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old. whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man ot God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden. "God has two families of children on this earth," says Fran- cis W. Newman,^ 'Hhe once-born and the twice-born" and the once-born he describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world. Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not look back into them- selves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfec ^ The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edidon, 1852, pp 89, 91. 8o THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE tions: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves at all. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists.^ He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the dis- ordered world of rnan, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship." In the Romish Church such characters find a more con- genial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitari- anism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another — here are a couple or characteristic pas- sages from Parker's correspondence." "Orthodox scholars say: 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true — God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and ^ I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up to God." ^JoHN Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 8l try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much 'health in me'; and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul." In another letter Parker writes^ "I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; and if some- times they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and- something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass, ... up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of sweet- ness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the religious." Another good expression of the "once-born" type of con- sciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preach- er and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars. I quote a part of it: — "I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion' is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. . . . I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to 82 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed Hfe because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. . . . A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly in- capable of good."^ One can but recognize in such writers as these the pres- ence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-patholog- ical. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momen- tary humility seems cut oflF from them as by a kind of con- genital anzesthesia." ' Starbuck: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306. - "I know not to what physical laws philosophers vidll some day refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre, and accord- ingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude — each of them more optimistic than the last. This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adoles- cence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtsefif expresses it well: — "In this depression an'd dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated ■md sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodadng. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased — no, not exacdy that — I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agree- able, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find my- self happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this— my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all." Journal de Marie BashkirtsefT, i. 67. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 83 The supreme contemporary example of such an inabiUty to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by him- self, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, some- times quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these men- tal states could be absent in him. After long observation, how- ever, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nation- ality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations — not even against any animals, in- sects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never 84 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it."^ Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile ele- ments. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited indi- vidual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good. Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actual- ly formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propa- gation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn ;^ hymns are written by oth- ers in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly com- pared with the founder of the Christian religion, not alto- gether to the advantage of the latter. Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word now- adays means sometimes the mere natural animal man with- out a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your gen- uine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show. ^ R. M. Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged. - I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and pub- lished monthly at Philadelphia. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 85 "I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self- contained, I stand and look at them long and long; They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."^ No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say : — "Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou. . . . Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string."^ Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to ^ Song of Myself, 32. ^ Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation. 86 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE make them insist, as so many of us insist, that what imme- diately appears as evil must be "good in the making," or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature— Walt Whitman's verse, "What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect," would have been mere silliness to them. — nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent "another and a better world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophis- try and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feel- ing. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist, ^ and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets. If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more in- voluntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy-minded- ness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things se- lects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy- mindedness, conceiving gcx^d as the essential and universal ^ "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humihty still rankled in his breast. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 87 aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so sim- ple a criticism. In the first place, happmess, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against distur- bance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reaUty when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up. But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfect- ly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entire- ly to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufEerer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern. The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in,, it is 88 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously em- phasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a com- paratively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs. In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persua- sion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the his- tory of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and pas- sionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some di- ^■ection. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomin- qtion, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS 89 which the human being welcomes as the crowning experi- ence of his hfe. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure. The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a re- ligious attitude is therefore consonant with important cur- rents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our at- tention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never men tioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.^ The advance of Hberalism, so-called, in Christianity, dur- ing the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmonious- ly related. We have now whole congregations whose preach' ers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem de- voted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salva- tion of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular" attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian char- acter. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change. ^ "As I. go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a be- wildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic — or msnadic — foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me." R. L. Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355. 90 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that "theory of evolution" which, gather- ing momentum for a century, has within the past twenty- five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-mind- ed so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find "evolutionism" interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had al- ready begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian schem^e. As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse-meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary fype. Q. What does Religion mean to you? A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, conse- quently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and mo- THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 9I rality. The men who do not go to church or have any rehgious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and ser- monizing are pernicious — they teach us to rely on some super- natural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I ^(fftotaliy disbelieve in a God. The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both men- tally and physically, I v/ould just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die — there being no immortality in either case. Q. What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc? A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh. Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared provi- dential? A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintend- ing kind. A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince any one of this fact. Q. What things wor\ most strongly on your emotions? A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc. Of songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, America, Marseil- laise, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sun- days into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I re- gard as the deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence. Q. What is your notion of sin? A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, inciden- tal to man's development not being yet advanced enough. Mor- 92 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE bidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a miUion of years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin. Q. What is your temperament? A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all If we arc in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clear- ly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science. To my mind a current far more important and interest- ing religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards heakhy-mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day — I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain — and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the "Mind-cure movement." There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing. It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reach- ed the stage, for example, when the demand for its litera- ture is great enough for insincere stufT, mechanically pro- duced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers— a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until I religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 93 One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the foui Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England tran' scendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science eva lutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most character- istic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiratior^ much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.' Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount. The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life- long invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adop- tion of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regenera- tion of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The in- direct influence of this has been great. The mind-cure prin- ciples are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health, vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Com- 1 "Cautionary Verses for Children": this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reacdon against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier pari of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America. 94 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE plaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of hfe. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moon- struck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all. The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intim.ately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.-^ It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind-curcrs' ideas. For our immediate purpose, the impor- tant point is that so large a number should exist who can ^ I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, espe- cially the former. Mr. Dresser's works are published by G. P. Put- nam's Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood's by Lee & Shepard, Boston. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 95 be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect." 2 Lest my own testimonj' be suspected, I will quote another re- porter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on "die Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures" is pub- lished in the American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This cridc, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind-cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and die end of his essay contains an inter esdng physiological speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the re- print). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes: "In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many caseT are of diseases that liave been diagnosed and ti'eated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and edu' cation have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been amehorated, and even cured. , . . We have ti-aced the mental clement through primitive medi> cine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and witchcraft We are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental thera- peutics— Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceiv- able that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that many fail urcs are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, other^ wise the failures would have ended the delusion. . . . Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never ca^i in the very namre of things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the prac- tical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease. . . . We do find sufficient evi- dence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attimde would reheve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of death to many a 96 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensa- tions, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has al- ways considered jrowardness to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of the beast in it is fear; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion. "Fear," to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deter- rent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a posi- tive deterrent, and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word jearthought to stand for the unprofitable element of fore- thought, and have defined the word 'worry' as jearthought in contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined fearthought as the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestion of inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnnecessary, and therefore not respectable things."-^ victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adher- ence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to allevia-ting ills that are unprevent- able" (pp. 33, 34 of reprint). ^ Horace Fletcher: Happiness as found in Forethought minus Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, i897, PP- 21-25, abridged. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS g') The "misery-habit," the "martyr-habit," engendered by the prevalent "fearthought," get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers: — "Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social conventions or customs and al- leged requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children's diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike; while crown- ing all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line of particular fears and trouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, as- ideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains as- sociated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one sit: in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pes- simisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Brad- ley's 'unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.' "Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumer- able volunteers from daily life — the fear of accident, the pos- sibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forth- with fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow . . . sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering. "-"^ "Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited ^H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38. gS THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification. . . . Think of the millions of sensitive and re- sponsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though imconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity." ^ Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Chris- nan terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely I heir notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordi- Aary Christians."^ Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less diver- gent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man ap- 1 Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion tlirough Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54. - Whether k differs so much from Christ's own notion is for die exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind-curers do. "What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist?" asks Harnack, and says it is this: "'The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.' That is the 'coming of the kingdom,' or rather in these sav- ing works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of tliis work of redemption, but Jestis points to that as ihe sense and seal of his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sendmentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills; he never spends dme in asking whether the sick one 'deserves' to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympadiize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that ad- vance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well." Das Wesen des Cliristenthums, 1900, p. 39. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 99 pears in the mind-cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the sublim- inal self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view: — "The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infi- nite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipo- tence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree. "The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for har- mony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery to the power- 100 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE house of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward."^ Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers from correspondents— the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the In- finite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. "The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or de- pression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: 'I and my Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark ? "This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are to-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be ^ R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I h? vf '_• strung scattered passages together. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS lOI sick? — since 'Greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against us.' " My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement: — "Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always break- ing down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insan- ity; besides having many other troubles, especialy of the diges- tive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doc- tors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never re- covered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me. "I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this con- sciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without. "I hav€ come to disregard the meaning of this attitude foi bodily health as such, because that comes of itself, as an inci- dental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seek- ing of the kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our 102 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE hearts, so that all else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you' — as quite incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of our being. "When I say that we commonly make the object of our life 'hat which we should not work for primarily, I mean many jhings which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, ■iuch as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such ihings should be results, not objects. I would also include pleas- ares of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them — I mean conven- tionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various develop- ment, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities." Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment — they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying. "I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year. [Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: 'You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.' These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, t88i). The healer said: 'There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was there for me in this way: 'There is noth- ing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely depend- ent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS IO3 shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience.' That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to my- self: 'The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.' By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: 'I am soul, spirit, just one with God's Thought of me,' and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years [the distress-turns had usually recurred about two o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mentai suggestions of Truth, which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them; they came about two weeks apart. "ist. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me. "2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well. "3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and re- fused to even look at my old self in this form. "4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge. "5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being, by constantly af- firming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) / expressed health continuously throughout my whole body. "In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my igno ranee I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures \ have learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child." 104 '^^^ VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and 1 must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God's life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's message which in these very GifTord lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish re- ligious philosophers.^ But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffer- 1 The Cairds, for example. In Edward Cairo's Glasgow Lectures of 1890-92 passages like this abound: — "The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that 'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,' passes with scarce a break into the announcement that 'the kingdom of God is among you'; and the importance of this announcement \s asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference in ]{ind aetween the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previ- ous reign of division, and 'the least in the kingdom of heaven.' The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be 'perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.' The sense of alienadon and distance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel iust in propordon as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere nadonal divinity, but as a God of jusdce who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and the typi- cal form of Chrisdan prayer points to the abolidon of the contrast between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: 'As in heaven, so on earth.' The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Good- ness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpower the con- sciousness of oneness. The terms 'Son' and 'Father' at once state die opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a principle of reconciliation." The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS IO5 ing, timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no specula- tive explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a "mystery" or "problem," or in "laying to heart" the lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left be- hind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind- cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good? After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has de- veloped a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the Didteti\ der Seele into the shade. This system is wholly and exclu- sively compacted of optimism: "Pessimism leads to weak- ness. Optimism leads to power." "Thoughts are things," as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, per- tinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts art- I06 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE | "forces," and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, | one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from else- where for the realization of one's desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one's side by opening one's own mind to their influx. On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, "What shall I do to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You are saved now, if you would but believe it." And the mind-curers come with pre- cisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with them; and "What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?" is the form of their question. And the answer is: "You are well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it." "The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence," says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, "God is well, and so are you. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being." The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, fcx)lish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be des- tined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extrava- gance of many of its manifestations ^) to play a part almost ^ It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes more and more the form of mind-cure experience and THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS IO7 as great in the evolution o£ the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day. But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some of the members of this academic audience. Such con- temporary vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enorm.ous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet — our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are iu' capable of taking part in anything like them ourselves. Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of meth- odistic conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure move- ment seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom — at any rate at a certain stage in their development — a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects. (08 IHE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day and night," they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads \o nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them twofold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight. Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralisiic method, by the "surrender", of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the par- ticular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Some- thing must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundandy see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves ■on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power. Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what di- vides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS IO9 to cast doubt on its reality. They hnow; for they have actu- ally jelt the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will. A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night sHpping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a des- pairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agonal would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the heredi^^ tary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its pre- cautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save. The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of re- generation by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indis- tinguishable from fhe Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the com- bined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenom- ena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.-^ ^ The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanadon (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own "subcon. scious" self), the moment the isoladng barriers of mistrust sx\i tlO THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE When we lake up the phenomena of revivahstic conver- sion, we shall learn something more about all this. Mean- while I will say a brief word about the mind-curer's meth- ods. They arc of course largely suggestive. The suggestive in- fluence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiri- tual education. But the word "suggestion," having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in m.any quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend ofl all inquiry into the varying suscepti- bilities of individual cases. "Suggestion" is only another name for the power of ideas, so jar as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word "suggestion" as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. God- dard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental thera- peutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our re- ligious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done." A.nd this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Chris- anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually) "higher" ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results. — Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS III tianity does absolutely nothing, or did nothing until mind- cure came to the rescue."^ ^ Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in tlie Catholic Church, of earning "merit." "Illness," says a good Catholic writer P. Lejeune: Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), "is the most excellent corporeal mortifications, the mortifi- cation which one has not one's self chosen, which is imposed di- rectly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. 'If other mortifications are of silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is! ... I do not hesitate to say that padence in a long illness is mortificadon's very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.' " According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away. Of course there have been excepdons to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt's Life by Ziindel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical char- acter, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly "Leaves of Healing" were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he de- nounces the cures wrought in other sects as "diabolical counterfeits" of his own exclusively "Divine Healing," must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms. 112 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in find- ing a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings? The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime sugges- tive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these ele- ments of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards, "con- cerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that fhey may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true •ihat is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead ■saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were -all dead." ^ The next condition of success is the apparent existence. In large numbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Cathol- icism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type ^ Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS II3 of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world. Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant coun- tries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxa- tion, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at random : — "The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most strongly insists — the devel- opment namely from within outward, from small to great.' Consequently one's thought should be centred on the ideal out- come, even though this trust be literally like a step in the dark.^ To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, this is called 'entering the silence.' "^ "The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer."* One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking ^ H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 46. 2 Dresser: Living by the Spirit, 58. ^ Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 33. ^ Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214. 114 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his dif- ficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which he expected a certain answer, he would re- main utterly passive until the reply came, and never once through many years' experience did he find himself disap- pointed or misled."^ Wherein, I should like to know, does tliis intrinsically differ from the practice of "recollection" which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline.'' Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contempla- tion. "It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and affection for him. . . . Would you escape from every ill? Never lose this recollection of God, neither in pros- perity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the diffi- culty or the importance of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot practice this exercise con- tinuously, at least make yourself as familiar with it as pos- sible; and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your soul."^ ^ Trine: p. 117. - Quoted by Lejeune: Introd. a. la Vie Mystique, 1899, p, 66. THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS II5 All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both com- munions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances: — "High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, pro- moted, and strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful. "The soul's real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we will, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift our- selves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and recep- tivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it v/ill flow in as natur- ally as air inclines to a vacuum. . . . Whenever the thought is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this whole- some and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great ad- vantage. If one who has never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought-forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the 'still, small voice' is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are Il6 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul contact with the Parent- Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain."^ When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will under- go so deep an immersion into these exalted states of con- sciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprink- ling may aflfect you will have long since passed away — • doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down pour encourager les autres. You will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of "union" form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have ac- quaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical re- flection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life. In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the re- lation of religion to science on the one hand, and to pri- meval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons to-day— "scientists" or "positivists," they are fond of calling themselves— who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened 1 Henry Woon: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged). THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 11'/ examples has long since left behind and out-grown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will prob- ably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of in- dividual ends. For him, even external nature obeys indiv- idual needs and claims, just as if these were so many ele- mentary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiologi- cal, and psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and gen- eral in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science's conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be cor- roborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal apd universal. But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically op- posite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your in- dividual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure movement spreads Il8 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science's authority, it carries on an aggressive v^orfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and weapons. Believing tha; 'a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its ob- servation. How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is one: — "One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being) : 'There is nothing but God, and all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.' Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day." • The next case not only illustrates experiment and verifi- cation, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account. "I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and 1 had not been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feel- ing increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that pre- cede an attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mintl-curc teachings that ^ had been listening to all the winter TH'E RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS Up thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself, on my way home I met a friend, and / refrained with some effort from teUing her how I felt. That was the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how I felt. Then fol- lowed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. "I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.' I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all was well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth under- standing. There was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and faith. "I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but when I woke up in the morning, / was well." These are exceedingly trivial instances,^ but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to themselves to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than everj one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom h« calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupu- lous for those who can get their savage and primitive phil- ^ See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends. 120 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE osophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim? I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided afiFair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (concepfual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many sys- tems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of dis- ease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents cer- tain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidendy neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus ap- proach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analy- THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 121 tical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quater- nions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour tc hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces^ seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channfel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.^ The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content my- self to-day with this very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention. APPENDIX (See note to p. 119.) Case I. "My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of im- mediate and great exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no ^ Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse in- tegrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world's truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience. 122 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE or ill result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it; I had no great hope of getting any good from it — it was a chance I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, or thought they hacj got, great help; the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted was that of an- other person's thought or feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still together. I believed from the start in the possibility of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I thought telep- athy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play. "I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing, it but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful ex- pectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a mat- THE RELIGION OF HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS 127, ter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one's conclusions on, but I have alv/ays felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state; and secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an excited imagination, or a consciously re-' ceived suggestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the- result of my receiving telephathically, ant! upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate con- sciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as ner- vous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body through- out; and I believe that the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres, can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable dififerences in the results ob- tained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective. That these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that as the hcalirtg action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane of the nor- mally unconscious mind, so the strongest and most effective im- pressions are those which it receives, in some as yet unknown, subtle way, directly from a healthier mind whose state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces." i 124 THE VARIE'TIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Case II. "At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis. This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it. All feelings of irritability dis- appeared. Even the expression of my face changed noticeably. "I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with con- fidence and inner calm. "I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimina- tion of selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sen- sual forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the immaneme >i G'.h< »ad the Divinity of man's true, inner «elf. Lectures VI and VII THE SICK SOUL AT our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitu- tional, incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crys- tallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calcula- tions, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin. Spinoza's philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spin- oza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an "inadequate" knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When men make mistakes, he says — 125 126 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE "One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and re- pentance to help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as every one does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter close- ly, we shall Find that not only are they not good, but on the con- trary deleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful arc these and evil, inasmuch as they form a particular kind of sadness; and the dis- advantages of sadness," he continues, "I have already proved, and shown that we should strive to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind." '■ Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness has always come forward with its mild- er interpretation. Repentance according to such healthy- minded Christians means getting away fj'om the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of keeping healthy- mindedness on top. By it a man's accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purg- ing operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had some very healthy- minded ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his con- ception of God. "When I was a monk," he says, "I thought that I was utterly cast away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, ^ Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x. I THE SICK SOUL I27 if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had rightly understood these sentences of Paul: 'The flesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would do,' I should not have so miserably tor- mented myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now commonly I do, 'Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle there- of.' I remember that Staupitz was wont to say, 'I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform it. Unless, therefore, God be fa vorable and merciful unto me for Christ's sake, I shall not be able, w^ith all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.' This (of Staupitz's) was not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They look unto Christ their reconciler, who gave his life for their sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in their flesh is not laid to their charge^ but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in the mean while xhej fight in spirit against the flesh, lest they should fulfill the lusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity yet are they not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of life, and the works which are done according tc their calling, displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith." 1 ^Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged). T28 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, MoUnos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy-minded opinion of repent- ance : — "When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse in- stead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical juggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tourna- ment with others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his fall.'' Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thy- self fallen once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have given thee, that is, a loving con- fidence in the divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use — not to lose time, not to dis- turb thyself, and reap no good." ^ Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this 2 MoLiNos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps, xvii., xviii. (abridged). THE SICK SOUL I29 more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it be- fore turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay. If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difliculty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than Allrin-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tend- ency to become pantheistic and m.onistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say poly- theistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a uni- verse composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this lattei case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally - overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the diiiiculty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an Individual, and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part what- ever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be that individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite iv ^30 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and al- though it would be premature to say that there is no specu- lative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only obvious escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggre- gate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or abso- lute right to live v/ith the rest, and which we might con- ceivably hope to see got rid of at last. Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have de- scribed it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy- mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.-^ Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and not to be pinned in, or pre- served, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very mem- ory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so Ear from being co-extensive with the whole actual, is a mere extract from tlie actual, marked by its deliverance ^I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure I writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their atti- tude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ,deal part. THE SICK SOUL 13! from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementi- tious stuff. Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident — so much "dirt," as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gos- pel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not un- like the method of all science; and now here we find mind- cure as the champion of a perfecdy definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention at such length. Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those persons who cannot so swifdy throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere ani- mal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the i:$2 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rear- rangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in de- tail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in- our natural subjectivity, and never *-o be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.-^ These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study. Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus wc speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to in- dicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low "difference- threshold" — his mind easily steps over it into the conscious- ness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a "misery- * Cf. }. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim. THE SICK SOUL 133 threshold," and find it quickly overpassed by the conscious- ness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne in- scribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritancs fatally send them over. Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other ? This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will became a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to the healthy-mind- ed, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe! — God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may no! open a profounder view and put into our hands a mor( complicated key to the meaning of the situation. To begin with, how ca7i things so insecure as the success- ful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every foun- ^34 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE tain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiflF of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. Of course the music can commence again; — and again and again — at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precari- ousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident. Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mind- edness as never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, "Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a fragile fic- tion? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting. When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this wise, how must it be with less successful men? THE SICK SOUL I35 "I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against tht course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing bur pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of m) 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever." What single-handed man was ever on the whole as suc- cessful as Luther? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure. "I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forth- with and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest." — And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added: "O God, grant that it may come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow." — The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: "Doctor, I v/ish you may live forty years to come." "Mad- am," replied he, "rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise." Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is indeed one element in human destiny," Rob- ert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are no^ 136 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted."^ And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and diought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life's significance is reached?^ But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human being's sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over the misery-threshold, and the good qual- ity of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust tind disappointment be the real goods which our souls re- quire? Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness: — "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. . . . The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. ^ He adcK witli characteristic healtliy-mindedness: "Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits." 2 The God of many men is little more than dieir court of appeal against die damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of wordi left over after our sins and errors have been told off — our capacity of acknowledging and regretdng them is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in actti and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from widiout, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All- knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So die need of a God very definitely emerges from tliis sort of experience of life. THE SICK SOUL 13^ Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun. . . . Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many." In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contra- diction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it. To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contempla- tion engenders, the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: "Stufif and nonsense, get out into the open air!" or "Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be all right ere- long, if you will only drop your morbidness!" But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and arc well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. "The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness," said a friend of min. whose consciousness was of this sort, "and nothing can con- sole me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible." And so with most of us: a little cool- ing down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of 138 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quar- rel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an in- sidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doc- tors have revealed it; and the khowleds;e knocks the satis- faction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our com- mon experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; — and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the con- trary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of al' i: THE SICK SOUL I39 permanent meaning which for pure naturahsm and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling. For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skat- ing, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks — Homer's flow of en- thusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,^ and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessi- mists.^ The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows ^ E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: "Nothing tlien is more wretched any- where than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth." ^E.g., Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades." See also the almost identical passage in CEdipus in Colonus, 1225. — The An- thology is full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground — why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?" — "How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is thu 140 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joy- ousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that Brahmans, Budd- hists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation. Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direc- tion. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-and-ashes state of mind. The whole race of mortals." — "For death we are all cherished and fat- tened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered." The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachry- mosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the oudook of diose Hellenes blackly pessimistic. THE SICK SOUL I4I Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sUre to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul.^ They mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man — Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an un- reconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Com- pared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity. Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to judge any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety. 1 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: "By the word 'happiness' bvery human being un- derstands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term contentment. What educadon should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of con- tentment. Woman's heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into work ing. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.' 142 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a niore radical pessimism than any- thing that we have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed ofl from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all senti- ment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded en- thusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous consti- tution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and mdividual, I can now help myself out with personal docu- ments. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface. One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depres- sion. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. THE SICK SOUL I43 Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to desig. jiate this condition. "The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia" he writes, "has been very httle studied, but it exists. A young girl was smitten with a hver disease which for some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any affec- tion for her father and mother. She would have played with her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic dis- ease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emo' tional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid." ^ Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be turned from with dis- gust. A tem_porary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recol. lections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into 4 state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus describes: — "I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start, thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Poly- technic school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Sein*"- was pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swal ^ Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54. 144 ^^^ VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE lowed up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desola- tion, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there. "But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love — all these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither per- ceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity." ^ ^ A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following: — An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her modve for the act. To her parents she writes: — "Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come. ... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head." To her brother she writes: "Good-by forever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do. THE SICK SOUL I45 So much for melancholy in the aense of incapacity foi joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various char- acters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepi- dation, fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much re- spect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case of melan- choly on which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum. "I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and mor- ally. Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by night mares, dreadful visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atro- cious fear, presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all! What have I done to de- serve this excess of severity? Under what form will this feai crush me ? What would I not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie awake all night, suffer without inter- ruption— such is the fine legacy I have received from my mo ther! What I fail to understand is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have ... I am tired of living, so am willing to die. . . . Life may he sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter." S. A. K. Strahan; Suicide and Insanity, 2d edidon, London, 1894, p. 131. 146' THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE known so far has been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing hilt suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent enough — I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I ask pity? I am de- fenseless against the invisible enemy who is tightening his coils iround me. I should be no better armed against him even if I jaw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil cake him! Death, death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise, hav- ing neither brain nor thoughts left. O God! what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an even- mg and a morning; and how true and right I was when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed the cud of bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than glad- ness— it is one long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many more years!" ^ This letter shows two things. First, you see how the en- tire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And second- ly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construc- tion of religious systems. Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, ^ RouBiNoviTCH ET TouLousE: La Melancolie, 1897, P- ^7^, abridged. THE SICK SOUL 14}' a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two char- acters which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life's values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to a gnav^^ing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark on each of these two points. First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general. It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire en- tirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deduc- ible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject's being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavor- able, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without sig- nificance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may ap- pear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does no'. 148 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE oomc, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of tiie creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts — gifts to us, from sources some- times low and sometimes high; but almost always non- logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their sur- face passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting re- ceives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery. Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistin- guishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues. In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religi- ous regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent con- sequence of the change operated in the subject is a trans- . figuration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven