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As
regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I
am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions,
nor an anthropologist. Psychology
is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be
at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental
constitution. It would seem,
therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to
invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If
the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must
confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in
literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works of
piety and autobiography. Interesting
as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks
earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more
completely evolved and perfect forms. It
follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those
of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to
give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives.
These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or
else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The documents humains which we shall find most instructive
need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition--they lie
along the beaten highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally
from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack
of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and
paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some time
will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to
the value of my conclusions. It
is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here
in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will
make a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine.
Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much
more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter
in hand.
The
question, What are the religious propensities?
and the question, What is their philosophic significance?
are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point
of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed
confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the
documents and materials to which I have referred.
In
recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry
concerning anything. First,
what is the nature of it? how did it come about?
what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance,
now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an
existential judgment or proposition. The
answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a
Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment.
Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other.
They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind
combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them
together.
In
the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two
orders of question. Every
religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural
antecedents. What is nowadays
called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from
this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church.
Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring
forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds,
when they delivered their utterances? These
are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the
answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use
should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,
be to us as a guide to life and a revelation?
To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some
sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be
which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would
be what I just called a spiritual judgment.
Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce
another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth.
Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book,
to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free
caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic
errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably
fare ill at our hands. But if,
on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a
revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition,
if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons
wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more
favorable. You see that the
existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value;
and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the
existential with the spiritual problem.
With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view,
and some another, of the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their
spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs.
I
make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because there
are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly, are among
them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may
therefore feel first a little startled at the purely existential point of
view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious
experience must be considered. When
I handle them biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious
facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so
sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully
expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such
a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a
prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of
what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point.
There
can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively
pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.
I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the
conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian,
or Mohammedan. His religion has
been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to
fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.
It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life.
We must make search rather for the original experiences which were
the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated
conduct. These experiences we
can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit,
but as an acute fever rather. But
such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like
many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for
commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often
shown symptoms of nervous instability.
Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have
been subject to abnormal psychical visitations.
Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility.
Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy
during a part of their career. They
have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and
frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and
presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as
pathological. Often, moreover,
these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their
religious authority and influence.
If
you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished
by the person of George Fox. The
Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to
overpraise. In a day of shams,
it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return
to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in
England. So far as our
Christian sects today are evolving into liberality, they are simply
reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long
ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual
sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound.
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. Immediately
the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither.
Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to
walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go.
As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge
and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield where, in a great field,
shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then
was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes.
I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a
fire in me. So I put off my
shoes and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and
were astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got
within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to
the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying
with a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!
It being market day, I went into the market-place, and to and fro in
the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody
city of Lichfield! And no one
laid hands on me. As I went
thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood
running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of
blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went
out of the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them some
money, and took my shoes of them again.
But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I
did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should
or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do: then, after I had washed
my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this a deep consideration came upon
me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it
The bloody city! For though the
parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much blood
had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet there was no
more than had befallen many other places.
But afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's
time a thousand Christians were martyr'd in Lichfield.
So I was to go, without my shoes, through the channel of their blood,
and into the pool of their blood in the market-place, that I might raise up
the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a
thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets.
So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the
Lord."
Bent
as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot possibly
ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.
We
must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men.
It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to
which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as
any other object is handled. The
first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with
something else. But any object
that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also
as if it must be sui generis and unique.
Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if
it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus
dispose of it. "I am no
such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
The
next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing
originates. Spinoza says:
"I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a
question of lines, of planes, and of solids."
And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their
properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural
things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with
the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its
three angles should be equal to two right angles.
Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English
literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes
no matter. They always have
their causes. There are causes
for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular
movement, animal heat. Vice and
virtue are products like vitriol and sugar."
When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the
existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel--quite apart from
our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program,
in view of what the authors are actually able to perform--menaced and
negated in the springs of our innermost life.
Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our
soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in
explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their
significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the
useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps
the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone
if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental
people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances.
Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is
so emotional. Fanny's
extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of 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 reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays
among certain writers, of criticizing the religious emotions by showing a
connection between them and the sexual life.
Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.
The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only
instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray.
For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an
imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the
like.[1]
[1]
As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion
shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially
and by innuendo. It seems to me
that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of
religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the
famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by
remembering that its fons et origo was Luther's wish to marry a nun:--the
effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part
opposite in nature. It is true
that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly
amatory--e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic
feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mystics.
But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive
function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by
the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist?
Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life
affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind
is strongly stirred to expression. Language
drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature
as is language drawn from the sexual life.
We "hunger and thirst" after righteousness; we "find
the Lord a sweet savor;" we "taste and see that he is good."
"Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of
both testaments," is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer,
and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of
from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.
Saint
Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describes the "orison of
quietude": "In this
state the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother to
caress him whilst he is still in her arms makes her milk distill into his
mouth without his even moving his lips.
So it is here. . . . Our Lord desires that our will should be
satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and
that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from
the Lord." And
again: "Consider the little infants, united and joined to the
breasts of their nursing mothers you will see that from time to time they
press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking
prompts them. Even so, during
its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer
union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine
sweetness." Chemin de la
Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.
In
fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the
respiratory function. The Bible
is full of the language of respiratory oppression:
"Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from
thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my
roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so
my soul panteth after thee, O my God:"
God's Breath in Man is the title of the chief work of our best known
American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris), and in certain non-Christian countries
the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the
inspiration and expiration.
These
arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the
sexual theory. But the
champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no
analogue elsewhere. The two
main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will
say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous
with the development of sexual life. To
which the retort again is easy. Even
were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not),
it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which
awakens during adolescence. One
might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics,
physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up
during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a
perversion of the sexual instinct:--but that would be too absurd.
Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be
done with the fact that the religious age par excellence would seem to be
old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past?
The
plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the
immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it
is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness.
Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties
concerned, and acts impelled to. Any
GENERAL assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is
complete hostility and contrast. If
now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to
their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs
make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on
religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true; but at
any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no
consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value.
In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the
spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the
whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague general
assertion of the dependence, SOMEHOW, of the mind upon the body.
We
are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting
states of mind for which we have an antipathy.
We all use it to some degree in 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 disposition, we feel outraged
and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our
mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living
truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold
its tongue.
Medical
materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system
of thought which we are considering. Medical
materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to
Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an
epileptic. It snuffs out Saint
Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.
George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for
spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.
Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal
catarrh. All such mental
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 action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of
all such personages is successfully undermined.[2]
[2]
For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an
article on "les varietes du Type devot," by Dr.
Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
Let
us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way.
Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to
hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental
states upon bodily conditions must be 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 degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly
auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which--and the rest.
But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of
mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual
significance? According to the
general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one
of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some
organic process as its condition. Scientific
theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are;
and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see
"the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as
decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about
his soul. When it alters in one
way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way,
we get the atheist form of mind. So
of all our 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 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 determinate sorts of physiological change.
Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific
doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations
of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state
of 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 accredit them; and its attempt to discredit
the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and
liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is
altogether illogical and inconsistent.
Let
us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and
with the facts. When we think
certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we
know concerning their organic antecedents?
No! it is always for two entirely different reasons.
It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it
is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.
When we speak disparagingly of "feverish fancies," surely
the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem--for aught we
know to the contrary, 103 degrees or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much
more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the
more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.
It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their
inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.
When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar
chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment.
We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms.
It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps
them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their
serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.
Now
the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang
together. Inner happiness and
serviceability do not always agree. What
immediately feels most "good" is not always most "true,"
when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience.
The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic
instance in corroboration. If
merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the
supremely valid human experience. But
its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into
an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time.
The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the
uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments.
There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience--we shall
hereafter hear much of them--that carry an enormous sense of inner authority
and illumination with them when they come.
But they come seldom, and they do not come to 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
impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory
of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors.
"Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many
branches of the neuropathic tree."
"Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of
hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral
insanity." "Whenever
a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently
illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of
profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category. . . .
And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius,
the greater the unsoundness."[3]
[3]
J. F. Nisbet: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi., xxiv.
Now
do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own
satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently
proceed thereupon to impugn the VALUE of the fruits?
Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of
existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions
of genius from now onwards? and
say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No!
their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and hold
their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical consistency,
medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw.
One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value
of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art,
namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using
medical arguments.[4] But for
the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical line
of attack either confines itself to such secular productions as everyone
admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively
to religious manifestations. And
then it is because the religious manifestations have been already condemned
because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds.
[4]
Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.
In
the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to
refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution.
Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no
matter what may be their author's neurological type.
It should be no otherwise with religious opinions.
Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly
passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily;
and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to
our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.
Immediate
luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness
are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous
system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the
trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be
contemptible. And conversely if
her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how
hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she
was with us here below.
You
see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which
the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our
search for truth. Dogmatic
philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from
appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be
protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all
mistake--such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists.
It is clear that the ORIGIN of the truth would be an admirable
criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated
from one another from this point
of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always
been a favorite test. Origin in
immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural
revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in
direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and
warning; origin in automatic utterance generally--these origins have been
stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find
represented in religious history. The
medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly
turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in
a destructive instead of an accreditive way.
They
are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as
supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the
argument from origin is under discussion.
But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is
too obviously insufficient. Dr.
Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion
on grounds of origin. Yet he
finds himself forced to write:--
"What
right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means
of complete minds only? She may
find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.
It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which
it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a
cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly
defective--if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic. .
. . Home we come again, then,
to the old and last resort of certitude--namely the common assent of
mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among
mankind."[5]
[5]
H. Maudsley: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 256, 257.
In
other words, not its origin, but THE WAY IN WHICH IT WORKS ON THE WHOLE, is
Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief.
This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest
insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end.
Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently
silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too
fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant,
still less as divine. In the
history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such
messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as
the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious
person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a
difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best
directors of conscience. In the
end it had to come to our empiricist criterion:
By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.
Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections is an elaborate
working out of this thesis. The
ROOTS of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us.
No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace.
Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we
are genuinely Christians.
"In
forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, we should
certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use
of when we come to stand before him at the last day. . . . There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence
of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most
decisive evidence. . . . The
degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in
which our experience is spiritual and divine."
Catholic
writers are equally emphatic. The
good dispositions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor
leave behind them are the only marks by which we <22> may be sure they
are not possible deceptions of the tempter.
Says Saint Teresa:--
"Like
imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but
leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the
imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she
reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas
a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual
riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength.
I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of
being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination. . .
. I showed them the jewels
which the divine hand had left with me:--they were my actual dispositions.
All those who knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore
witness to the fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from
being hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men.
As for myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon were
its author, he could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an
expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices,
and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead, for I saw
clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all
that wealth."[6]
[6]
Autobiography, ch. xxviii.
I
fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that fewer
words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen among some
of you as I announced my pathological programme.
At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by
its results exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid
origin will scandalize your piety no more.
Still,
you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final spiritual
estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with so much
existential study of its conditions? Why
not simply leave pathological questions out?
To
this I reply in two ways. First,
I say, irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on; and I say,
secondly, that it always leads to a better understanding of a thing's
significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions its equivalents
and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere.
Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation
which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by contrast
ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist, by learning at the
same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed.
Insane
conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the
mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual
surroundings. They play the
part in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the
anatomy of the body. To
understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and
in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations.
The study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists
the key to their comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has
been the key to the right comprehension of perception.
Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, "fixed ideas,"
so called, have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal
will; and obsessions and delusions have performed the same service for that
of the normal faculty of belief.
Similarly,
the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of which I
already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena.
Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental
balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by
which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which,
when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it
more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his
temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no special affinity between crankiness as
such and superior intellect,[7] for most psychopaths have feeble intellects,
and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the
psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds
itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character.
The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility.
He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions.
His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and
when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in some way
"works it off." "What
shall I think of it?" a common person says to himself about a vexed
question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must I do about
it?" is the form the question tends to take.
In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I
read the following passage: "Plenty
of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves
to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support.
'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever reechoed
phrase of weak-kneed amiability. '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 condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the
<25> biographical dictionaries. Such
men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect.
Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse,
upon their companions or their age. It
is they who get counted when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke
statistics to defend their paradox.
[7]
Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to
consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of
association by similarity.
To
pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall see,
constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution.
Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.
Take the trancelike states of insight into truth which all religious
mystics report.[8] These are
each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much
wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have qua
religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious
happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance.
And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded
away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the
moment we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in
judging of values--who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the
distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of
religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can
with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing
to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if
they were outside of nature's order altogether?
I
hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this supposition.
As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena,
that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting, even were such
phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of human
experiences. No one organism
can possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth.
Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very
infirmities help us unexpectedly. In
the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua
non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis
which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of
metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of
the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament
should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the
universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever
offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven
that it hasn't a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to
hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
[8]
I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the
Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).
If
there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be
that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the
requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the
matter of religion and neuroticism drop.
The
mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the various
religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them better,
forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed "the apperceiving
mass" by which we comprehend them.
The only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures to
possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass.
I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context
than has been usual in university courses.
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