Varieties Reborn

An updated classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, revised and abridged. Table of Contents and Prefaces.

Table of Contents

Preface

Redactor’s Preface

Lecture I –– Religion and Neurology

Lecture II ––  Defining the Topic

Lecture III ––  Reality of the Unseen

Lectures IV and V ––  The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Lectures VI and VII ––  The Sick Soul

Lecture VIII ––  The Divided Self and its Unification

Lecture IX ––  Conversion

Lecture X ––  Conversion—Concluded

Lectures XI, XII, and XIII ––  Saintliness

Lectures XIV and XV ––  The Value of Saintliness

Lectures XVI and XVII ––  Mysticism

Lecture XVIII ––  Philosophy

Lecture XIX ––  Other Characteristics

Lecture XX ––  Conclusions

Postscript

Preface

This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on ‘Man’s Religious Appetites,’ and the second a metaphysical one on ‘Their Satisfaction through Philosophy.’ But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the description 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 formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete 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, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there combine the religious 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.

William James, Harvard University, 1902

Redactor’s Preface

William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience for decades has been becoming less and less accessible to a general readership because of its dense language. In places the book is impenetrable. William James can write clear-sky sentences, yet he can also write fogbanks of Latinate verbiage.

Rewriting Varieties began as a spiritual exercise – going through the text line by line as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the book. I used common English terms when possible and switched passive voice to active whenever it caught my attention. An 1886 edition of Webster’s dictionary helped me to be sure of what James intended to say with certain words. Early on the idea came to quote author Flannery O’Connor. Pause before tinkering with the master. Is it okay to update some of James’s old, long-winded and trite sources? Would the author mind if a devoted admirer updated his work? Probably not. A young Carl Jung met James at a conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909, and forty years later wrote that he ‘was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices.’[1]

It has been my aim to be as unobtrusive as possible with new material. Joseph Campbell, John Coltrane, LSD, or the Rolling Stones are never brought into the conversation to shock the reader, but only to help make William James’s meaning clear to contemporary readers, or maybe to provide some comic relief. On one occasion a stanza from a boring Tennyson poem gave way to a humorous quotation from baseball legend Yogi Berra. Checking James’s references and reading his letters to friends and family developed in me a deep affection for the man, and also a credo: to be always true to the author’s spirit, intent and sensibility. It wasn’t until the first of his two lectures on mysticism that James cited Swami Vivekananda, who made his yoga lectures delivered in New York City in 1895 into a book.[2] An epigraph following the title page in that book makes a good summary of James’s message in Varieties:

Each soul is potentially divine.

The goal is to manifest this divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal.

Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy, by one, or more or all of these––and be free.

This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

On the eve of delivering his last lecture in the first series in Edinburgh in 1901, James wrote a friend back home in Massachusetts[3] that mystical or religious consciousness makes us ‘convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness.’ James added that the messages and inspirations we receive from our subliminal regions ‘melt our hearts and communicate significance and value to everything and make us happy.’ Who could help loving such an adorable man? For this project I prayed for the ability to subsume my identity in his personality.

Anonymous – Bennington, Vermont – 2024

Lecture I – Religion and Neurology

We Americans are accustomed to listening to Europeans for enlightenment, so the honor is all mine in delivering a series of lectures here in the sacred halls of the University of Edinburgh. I am neither a scholar of religions, nor an historian, nor an anthropologist – but mainly a psychologist. Together we will study everyday spiritual feelings and impulses as described by people from all walks of life, but mostly by those who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives.

It helps to mark the difference between a person’s religious impulse and its deeper meaning, with the first being a fact, and the second involving a judgment of quality. In taking an objective look at various spiritual experiences, it seems practical to suspend our judgment of each case until we have considered a fair number of them. A greater quantity of samples will likely improve the quality of our analysis. If we follow the best practices of scientific methodology we do not have to waste our energies in ill-informed debates on the value of this or that religious text or dogma in relation to a particular case of psychic rearrangement via conversion experience.

Spiritual seekers tend to be exceptional and eccentric. Pursued to extremes, the religious life makes its devotees neurotic, whether they be Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim. Religious leaders often have been subject to extraordinary psychic events such as mystical revelations. Invariably they have been persons of heightened emotional sensibility. We ordinarily classify all sorts of trances, visions and heard voices as pathological, yet these same peculiarities usually give religious pioneers their authority and influence.

For a concrete example there can be no better choice than George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion, which is impossible to overpraise. In a day of scams, the Quaker religion offered truth rooted in spiritual consciousness, much like the original gospel truth of early Christianity. Fox could think clearly and make his unique spiritual visions easy to grasp by many people. Everyone who met him, from Oliver Cromwell to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet Fox was a deep psychopath. His journal abounds in entries such as this:

... the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, ‘Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!’ So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice ... afterwards I came to understand that in Emperor Diocletian’s time a thousand Christians were martyred 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... So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.[1]

We aim here to study religion or spirituality as people experience them, including pathological aspects as in the case of George Fox. Our instincts may balk at seeing religion handled as coarsely as a butcher’s order wrapped in brown paper, for the mind wants to classify our highest ideals as unique. Probably a crab would be upset to hear us class it simply as a crustacean. I am no such thing, it would say – I am myself, myself alone.

Our intellect wants to find the root cause of whatever we’re studying. The 17^th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza said he would analyze human actions and appetites as if solving a problem in geometry, that our feelings arise by their nature, just as the nature of a triangle is to have interior angles totaling 180 degrees. Author Flannery O’Connor said in a letter to a friend in 1955 that ‘the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints.’[2]

French historian Hippolyte Taine said that it makes no difference whether facts are moral or physical, but that:

the search for causes must follow the collection of facts. It matters not what the facts may be, whether physical or moral, they always spring from causes; there are causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as well as for digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on which it depends. We must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts underlie moral qualities the same as we ascertain those that underlie physical qualities...[3]

Most of us recoil from such a cold-blooded view, feeling that it threatens our inner spiritual life and mocks our soul’s vital secrets. To put our noblest passions on the same biological level as enzymes seems unreasonable if not insulting. For example, one may say that a woman believes in immortality because she is sentimental by nature, that stress causes another person to be obsessed with detail, or that eating too much sugar aggravates someone’s bipolar condition. An example of the same kind of reasoning, common in the early 20^th century, is to criticize religious emotions or a conversion experience as a crisis of puberty and adolescence. By this logic the self-induced suffering of saints and the devotion of missionaries are only cases of an overly developed parental instinct.

As with many fads in pop psychology, people support this idea of bodily causes not so much by scientific methods as by hints that common sense lends it belief. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. Psychiatry pioneer Sigmund Freud believed that repressed memories and emotions, predominantly sexual in origin, dominate the subconscious. His one-time disciple, Carl Jung, eventually came to believe that Freud was wrong in claiming sex to be the main drive in a person’s life. For example, Jung said that the bond between mother and child was mainly based on love and nurturing, not on a latent incestuous attraction, as Freud claimed.

The effects of spiritual enlightenment reach much farther than indicated by its alleged causes, and are mostly opposite in nature. True, some religious phenomena are unmistakably sexual, as in erotic carvings on Hindu temples, or feelings of ecstatic union with Christ among some mystics. We could just as well cite worship of the wine god Bacchus or of the farming goddess Ceres and say the spiritual impulse is born of our appetites for food and drink. Religious language speaks in terms of everyday life, and as our mind and spirit are housed in the body, so we hunger for truth, and thirst for the promised land of milk and honey. The Bible also is full of phrases about breathing: ‘as the deer gasps for breath by the brook, so my soul pants for God’. Zen Buddhist meditation practice centers on regulating one’s breathing.

These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory, whose champions say that melancholy and conversion most often occur in adolescence with the development of sexual life. But this is selective reasoning, for our entire higher mental life awakens during teenage years, not just our sexuality. One might just as well say that any interest in science or philosophy, which springs up during adolescent years along with interest in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct — but that would be too absurd. Recall, too, that the best spiritual time of life would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual urge is past.

Just look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness to see how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, and what we find most often is complete contrast. The whole theory evaporates into a vague assertion of the dependence, somehow, of the mind upon the body. We all know this method of discrediting states of mind that bother us. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose thinking we regard as unsound. But when other people criticize our own inspirations by saying they are ‘nothing but’ expressions of our natural attitudes, we feel hurt. We know that our flights of fancy have substantive value, that for us they reveal living truth, and we wish that all this medical materialism would stop.

Medical materialism is a good name for this too simple-minded system of thought, which dismisses Saint Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus as an epileptic fit, and Saint Teresa’s ecstasy as hysteria, and Saint Francis’s idealism as the symptom of hereditary degeneracy. This reasoning then concludes that biological causes disqualify the spiritual authority of all such persons.

Let us look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology finds definite psycho-physical connections to hold good and assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be total. 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 once had an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure, but how can such a mental history decide spiritual significance?

According to the general assumption just referred to, every state of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, has some organic process as its condition. However, scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions, so our raptures as well as our hypotheses, our longings, questions and beliefs – all are equally organic, whether religious or not. It is therefore illogical to say the bodily base of a religious state of mind disproves its claim to superior spiritual value. Such reasoning is arbitrary unless one has already worked out a theory connecting spiritual values in general with specific physiological change.

Of course, medical materialism draws no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. By ordinary spiritual judgment it deems some states of mind to be inwardly superior to others, and revealing to us more truth.

Let us play fair in this whole matter and be candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, it is either because we take an immediate delight in them, or because we believe them to be useful to us in life. When we dismiss fevered dreams of glory as meaningless, we do not base our scorn on the person’s body temperature, but rather on the visions’ disagreeableness, or on their inability to bear critical scrutiny. Similarly, when we praise healthy-minded ideas, chemical metabolism has nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. The character of inner contentment in the thoughts stamps them as good, or else they fit other of our opinions and needs.

However, inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most good is not always most true when measured against experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic case in support. If merely feeling good could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But the revelations of a boozy night do not stand up to sober examination, burning off like fog in the morning sun. The gulf between the two criteria of feeling and fact is the uncertainty that still colors many of our spiritual judgments.

There are moments of mystical experience —we shall soon hear much of them — that carry a strong sense of inner authority and illumination when they come. But they come seldom, and not to everyone, and the rest of life makes either no connection with them or tends to contradict more than confirm them. Some persons follow the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to stay safe with the group consensus, and the difference accounts for the lack of harmony in the wide range of people’s spiritual judgments. No merely physical test could ever bridge the gap.

The theory of a pathological causation of genius shows the impossibility of holding strictly to medical tests. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell said that nature is only responsible for a certain amount of a person’s genius, not all:

IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play at that level, and, all things being equal, it's probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter. (Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player only has to be tall enough – and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold.[4]

Genius is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree, said Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a Paris psychiatrist fascinated by the similarity between madness and dreams. After establishing that works of genius are fruits of disease, does such an author proceed to discount the value of the fruits? Scottish writer John Ferguson Nisbet said, ‘Whenever a man's life 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.’[5] Do such thinkers say that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth? Do they forbid us to admire the products of genius? No, their spiritual instincts are too strong. People who try to negate the value of genius with medical arguments usually confine their attacks to works that everyone admits are eccentric, or to religious manifestations that they dislike on psychological grounds.

In the natural sciences and industrial arts no one ever tries to refute opinions by showing up their author’s neurotic constitution. They test opinions by logic and by experiment, as it should be with religious opinions. Their value can only be weighed by direct spiritual judgment based on our own immediate feeling and on how they fit with our moral needs and the rest of what we hold as true. An immediate shining quality, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous disposition of the most placid cow, and it would not now save her theology if these other tests should show it to be contemptible. But if her theology can stand these other tests, it should make no difference how hysterical or off balance Saint Teresa may have been.

Here we must rely upon the general principles of empirical philosophy in our search for truth. People have long sought a test for truth, a scientific procedure that could protect us against mistakes in judgment. The origin of the truth has always been a favorite test. Was the truth revealed by intuition? Did the pope or king decree it so? Did the truth appear in a mystical vision, or did the holy spirit impart it by direct possession? Such origin stories have served as birth certificates for the truth of many opinions represented in religious history. It is only natural that medical materialists would turn the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of a positive way. Their talk of pathological origin works 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.

English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley rebuts supernatural religion on grounds of origin, yet says: 

What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? ... 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 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.[6]

In other words, not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Maudsley’s final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion. People who insist most on supernatural origin have also been forced to use this idea in the end. It has always been difficult to discriminate between the sentimental messages and the really divine experiences. In the end we 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 person’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 believers. ‘The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine,’ Edwards writes.[7]

Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions that a vision, or voice leave behind are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:

mere operations of the imagination only weaken the soul ... whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields ... 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...[8]

After so much discussion you must all be ready now to judge religious life by its results exclusively, yet may still ask: Why not simply leave pathological questions out? To this I reply in two ways. First, curiosity leads one on; and second, studying exaggerated and perverted cases leads to better understanding of the subject as a whole. Examining corruptions helps define the good and true.

Insane conditions 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 become familiar with the whole range of its variations. The study of hallucinations has been key to comprehending normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to understanding perception. Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, so-called ‘fixed ideas’ have thrown 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.

Here is another taste of that parallel level of awareness, as described by a kindred spirit, Hungarian philosopher and systems theorist Ervin Laszlo:

Intuitive people have always known that the real universe is more than a world of inert, non-conscious matter moving randomly in passive space... The information field that links quanta and galaxies in the physical universe and cells and organisms in the biosphere also links the brains and minds of humans in the sociosphere... [and] creates the human information pool that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious and Teilhard de Chardin the noösphere –– and that scientists such as Erwin Schrödinger, David Bohm, William James, and Henry Stapp have not hesitated to discuss and to affirm.[9]

Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts to class it with pathological phenomena. Borderland insanity, eccentricity, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, and psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called), have certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that they will make their mark and affect their age, than if their temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no special affinity between odd behavior as such and superior intellect, for most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character.

Eccentric persons have extraordinary emotional susceptibility. They are liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. Their conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when they get a new idea they have no rest till they proclaim it or work it off. What shall I think of it? a common person says to himself about a vexed question; but a sensitive mind asks, What must I do about it? Teacher and activist Annie Besant in her autobiography said:

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 springing forward to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.[10]

True enough, and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopath. When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual we have perfect conditions for producing an effective genius. Such persons 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 researchers invoke statistics to defend their paradox.

For example, South African activist, prisoner, and statesman Nelson Mandela recounted in his autobiography how the injustice of apartheid gradually seeped into his very being:

At first, as a student, I wanted freedom only for myself, the transitory freedoms of being able to stay out at night, read what I pleased, and go where I chose. Later, as a young man in Johannesburg, I yearned for the basic and honorable freedoms of achieving my potential, of earning my keep, of marrying and having a family — the freedom not to be obstructed in a lawful life. But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free. I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.[11]

To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy that constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution. Take the happiness conferred by religious belief. Take the trance-like states of insight into truth reported by all religious mystics.[12] These are all special cases of human experience of much wider scope.

Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have to qualify as 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 – then we are likely to see the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances. We will judge far better by comparing religious cases as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance than by pretending they are 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. Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen expressed this phenomenon well in his 1992 song, Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in[13]

In the psychopathic temperament we have emotionality, the sine qua non for moral perception. We have the intensity and tendency to emphasis, which are the essence of practical moral force. And we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism, which carry one’s interests beyond the sensible world. In an interview with journalist Bill Moyers, mythologist Joseph Campbell said:

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality. And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive, that’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves.[14]

What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe that your robust 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? If there is such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament furnishes the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may drop the matter of religion and neurotic pathology.

The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, forms ‘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.

Lecture II – Defining the Topic

Most books on the philosophy of religion begin by trying to define its essence. Some of these would-be definitions may come before us later in this course. Meanwhile, the large number of different explanations prove that the word ‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or idea. It is a collective term.

The theorizing mind always tends to oversimplify its materials, which is the root of all the dogmatic thinking that has overtaken both philosophy and religion. Let us not fall into a one-sided view of our subject. We likely will find no one essence, but many characteristics important to religion. If we should inquire for the essence of ‘government,’ for example, one man might say public safety, another security, another a system of laws – yet no government can exist without all these elements. The people who know governments best are the ones who trouble themselves least about a definition. Enjoying intimate knowledge of all the particularities of government, they would regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And may not religion be a conception equally complex?  

Consider also the ‘religious sentiment’ referred to in many books as if it were a single mental entity. In the psychologies and philosophies of religion we find authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One person roots it in feelings of dependence, and others derive it from fear or the sexual life, while still others identify it with a sense of the infinite. Such different ways of conceiving religion ought to arouse doubt as to whether religious sentiment can be one specific thing. The moment we are willing to treat the term religious sentiment as a collective phrase for the many emotions aroused, we see that it probably contains nothing psychologically specific.

There is religious fear, love, awe, joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object. Religious fear is only the ordinary fear of engaging with our innermost selves. As author Marianne Williamson said:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.[15]

Religious awe, on the other hand, is the same organic thrill that we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge – only it comes upon us in a moment of clarity when we pause at a scenic overlook on the highway of life. As concrete states of mind made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions. However, there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract ‘religious emotion’ to exist as a distinct elementary state of mind present in every religious experience. In place of a single elementary religious emotion there seems to be a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, and similarly there might be no one essential kind of religious object, and no essential kind of religious act.

Given such a wide field of religion, it is impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. Although it would be silly to set up an abstract definition of religion’s essence to defend against all comers, this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly. Let me now mark out the field I choose.

At the outset we are struck by a great divide between institutional and personal religion, between the ecclesiastical organization and the spiritual seeker. If ruled by fear we can define religion as the art of winning the favor of the gods. But if centering our focus on the worshippers, then their inner leanings form the center of interest – their worries, their helplessness, their incompleteness. The favor of God and any theology are still essential features of the story now, but the acts of worship and sacrifice are personal, not ritual. The individual’s transformation comes to the fore, while the ecclesiastical trappings sink to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between human and Creator.

In these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional side, its systematic theology and ideas about the divine, in order to confine myself to personal religion pure and simple. As our sole focus, personal religion may seem to some of you too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. It is a part of religion, but only its unorganized rudiment you will say. We had better call it human conscience or morality than religion. The name ‘religion’ should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element. But if you say this it will only show how much the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names.

Call it conscience or morality and not religion — under either name it will be worthy of our study. I think it will prove to contain elements that morality pure and simple does not, and so I will continue to apply the word ‘religion’ to it. In the last lecture I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, 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 ecclesiasticism. Established churches live second-hand upon tradition, but the founders of every church owed their power originally to their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mohammed, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case. Personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to deem it incomplete.

Other elements of religion predate personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual practices that it inspires are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. Despite many anthropologists contraposing religion and magic, the whole system of thought that leads to magic, fetishism, and superstition may just as well be called primitive science as primitive religion. The question again becomes a game of semantics. In any case, our knowledge of early stages of thought and feeling is so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not be worthwhile.

Religion for our purposes shall mean the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual persons in their solitude as they perceive themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be moral, physical, or ritual, out of religion in the sense in which we take it theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or rituals at all.

We escape many controversial issues by this willful definition of our field. A chance of controversy still remains if we define the word ‘divine’ in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought we usually call religious and yet which do not positively assume a God, as with Buddhism. Popularly the Buddha stands in place of a God, but in a strict sense the Buddhist system is atheistic. Transcendental idealism also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in form, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult.

In his address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 that made Ralph Waldo Emerson famous, the plain expression of this worship of abstract laws made the scandal of the performance:

These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. ... If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being.[16]

Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order, both moral and within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe is a mere quality like the brilliance of an eye or the softness of a baby’s skin, or whether it is a self-conscious life like the act of seeing or feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson’s pages. Transcendentalism quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world’s balance straight. Emerson expressed this faith in words as fine as anything in literature: 

If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range with it, or be pulverized by the recoil.[17]

Now it would be absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie such expressions of faith are unworthy to be called religious experiences. The appeals that Emersonian optimism and Buddhist pessimism both make to the individual – and the responses they draw – are mostly the same as the best Christian practices. We must therefore call these godless or quasi-godless creeds religions. When we speak of individuals’ relation to what they consider the divine, we must interpret the term divine very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.

But treated as a general quality, the term ‘godlike’ becomes too vague, for the many gods in religious history have ranged from comic tricksters to wrathful judges. What godlike quality draws us in and makes our relation to it determine our character as religious people? For one thing, we conceive gods to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. They embrace the first and last word in the way of truth. We might treat as godlike whatever is most primal, enveloping and deeply true, and might identify our religion with our attitude toward what we feel to be the truth.

We can defend such a definition. Religion is a person’s total reaction to life, so why not call that a religion? Total reactions differ from casual reactions, and total attitudes differ from usual or professional attitudes. To reach the inner core of a person we must go beyond the surface existence and reach down to that sense of the cosmos as an everlasting presence, which to some degree everyone possesses.

The world appeals to our individual temperament and our sense of it makes us either busy or lazy, bubbly or flat. Our reaction to life, often half-conscious, is the completest of our answers to the question, ‘What is the character of this universe?’ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian and activist, defined the role of religious philosophy in terms of such questions:

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion––it's message becomes meaningless. Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in. The primary task of philosophy of religion is to rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer. The inquiry must proceed both by delving into the consciousness of man as well as by delving into the teachings and attitudes of the religious tradition.[18]

Our spirit expresses our individual sense of the world in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may be, they yet belong to the general sphere of the religious life, and so should generically be classed as religious reactions. A colleague of mine said of an ardent atheist student that he ‘believes in No–God, and he worships him,’ and that people who shout down Christianity often seem psychologically indistinguishable from religious zealots. But such a broad use of the word religion would be unhelpful, however defensible it might be on logical grounds. Among people who sneer at life, a few hold such attitudes as final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of language too much to call such scoffers religious, even though from the point of view of critical philosophy they might seem perfectly reasonable in their approach to life.

Voltaire, for example, wrote to a friend at the age of 73 and said ‘weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over.’ Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock, to say he exhibits a religious spirit would be odd. Yet for that moment it is Voltaire’s reaction to the whole of life. ‘All is vanity’ is the relieving phrase in all difficult crises for this mode of thought.

French writer Ernest Renan said we must hold to duty, even against the evidence:

Good humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us... I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous, but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us.[19] 

Surely we would have to reevaluate all the usual associations of the word religion if attitudes of irony and cynicism were also denoted by the name. For most people religion signifies a serious state of mind. If a single phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be: All is not vanity in this universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.

Religion as commonly understood favors gravity, not comedy. But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions. The tragedy is realized as cleansing with a clear end in sight. We will see plenty of religious melancholy in a future lecture, but we cannot call melancholy religious when the sufferer simply kicks and screams like a pig being slaughtered. The sadness of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche often seems ennobling, but is almost as often only peevishness. The sallies of the two German authors remind one of the sick shrieks of two dying rats. They lack the note of purging shame or guilt that religious sadness usually implies.

A religious attitude must carry something solemn or joyful, serious or tender. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being weighty phenomena that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose to narrow our definition once more by having the word divine mean for us not merely the true and real, but that which the individual feels impelled to respond to deeply and gravely, and not by a curse or joke. But solemnity comes in various shades, and however we define religion we are dealing with a field of experience where we can draw no single, sharp conception. The pretense of being rigorously scientific or exact in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of our task.

Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity of the object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt. Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is religious, or moral, or philosophical, is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly characterized, which would render it hardly worthy of our study.

We will focus on these more energetic states, letting the minor notes and the uncertain border go. It was the extremer cases that I had in mind when saying that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain. In a general way I can now discuss those elements.

‘I accept the universe’ is reported to have been a favorite saying of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, which led Thomas Carlyle to say, ‘Gad! she’d better!’ At bottom both morality and religion ask 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 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 or with enthusiastic assent?

Morality accepts the reigning law, but may obey with a heavy heart and never stop feeling the weight of duty. In contrast, strong and fully developed religion never feels service as a burden. Dull submission falls away, replaced by a cheerful mood of welcome. It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference whether one accepts the universe in drab resignation to necessity, or with passionate happiness. The difference is as great as that between sitting and walking, or between listening to the radio and playing the piano. A gradual psychic shift –  however slow and with however many intermediate stages – still ends with the before and after representing two discontinuous psychological universes, with the person so blessed having passed through a critical point or center of gravity between them.

If we compare the stoic outlook with Christian thinking we see much more than a difference of doctrine. More than emotional mood separates them. Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that orders life and his words have a frosty chill that you rarely find in Jewish or Christian religious writing. All these writers accept the universe, but how devoid of passion is the spirit of the Roman emperor! Compare his fine sentence: ‘If gods care not for me or my children, there is a reason for it,’[20] with Job’s cry: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!’ and you immediately see the difference I mean. The world soul to which the Stoics entrust their personal destiny is there to be respected and submitted to, but Job’s God is there to be loved.

The difference in emotional temperature is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics, though the outcome of accepting life uncomplainingly may seem to be much the same. Compare the stoic mood with that of the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica: ‘when people neither care for nor desire anything but the eternal Good alone, and seek not themselves nor their own things, but the honor of God only, they enjoy all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and are in heaven.’ The impulse of the Christian writer to accept his place in the universe is much more active and positive. Marcus Aurelius agrees to the scheme — the German theologian agrees with it, literally abounds in agreement and runs out to embrace the divine decrees.

Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to something like a warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Everything harmonizes with me that is harmonious to you, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for you.’ 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 written in 1420 by Thomas à Kempis: ‘Lord, you know what is best; let this or that be according as you will. Give what you will, so much as you will, when you will. Do with me as you know best, and as shall be most to your honor. Place me where you will, and freely work your will with me in all things...’[21]

When studying an organ it is a good rule in physiology to ask what function it performs that no other organ could possibly do. The same maxim holds good in our present quest. The essence of religious experiences must be a quality in them that we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be easiest to notice in the most extreme and intense experiences. When we compare intense experiences with ones of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical rather than religious, we find a perfectly distinct character. That character can act as the genetic marker of religion for our purpose, and can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an everyday believer with that of a plain teacher of morals.

A life is brave, moral, or philosophical in proportion as it is less swayed by petty personal considerations and more by generous ends, even if they bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it taps our better natures. For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is like a cosmic patriotism that calls for volunteers.

Even sick people, unable to be militant physically, can carry on the moral fight. They can willfully disregard their own future, whether in this world or the next. They can ignore their present problems and immerse themselves in a project to benefit others. They can follow public news, and sympathize with other people’s affairs. They can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about their miseries. They can contemplate ideal aspects of life, and practice acceptance, patience and tolerance. Such people live on the loftiest, largest plane. They are high-hearted free people and not pining victims.

And yet they lack what mystics and recluse saints have in abundance that makes them human beings of an altogether different type. A spiritually mature person also spurns the distressed and mumbling sick-room attitude. Many saints ignore diseased conditions of their bodies. But whereas high-minded spurning takes an effort of will, religiously inspired disregard results from the excitement of higher emotions whereby no willpower is required. The moralists must hold their breath and keep their muscles tense, and so long as they can hold this athletic pose all goes well — morality suffices.

But the athletic grip eventually loosens even in the most hardy soul when the organism begins to decay or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest willpower and effort to sick and weak people is like suggesting they climb the Matterhorn. They crave to be consoled in their powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and supports them, decaying and failing as they are. We are all such helpless failures in the end. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs down the swiftest of us.

And whenever we feel doom impending, such a sense of the vanity and conditionality of our service careers comes over us that all our morality appears like a bandage on a sore it can never cure. All our good deeds seem a hollow substitute for the wellbeing that our lives ought to be grounded in. Here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into its hands. There is a state of mind known to religious people but to no others in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and storms of life.

In this state of mind, the storm we most dreaded has become our safe harbor, 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. Whereas morality holds off fear, the spiritual mindset turns fear to dust and washes it away.

Abundant examples of this happy state of mind will come in later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate religion can be in its highest flights. Like love, ambition, jealousy and every instinctive impulse, it adds to life an enchantment that is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come — a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say — is either there or not there for us. Some people can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a person on command.

Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to people’s range of life. It gives them a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost and the world disowns them, it redeems and brings to life an interior world that otherwise would be a wasteland. If religion is to mean anything definite, we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this eagerness to embrace where morality only bows its head and yields. It ought to mean this new reach of freedom, with the struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and life and nature in all their beauty spread before our eyes. 

Once more, there are plenty of somber folk whose religious life lacks this rapturous quality. 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 to study first in order to get at its typical characteristics – its DNA markers, if you will. This sort of happiness we find only in religion. It differs from all mere animal happiness, all simple enjoyment of the moment, by the element of solemnity or gravity.

Solemnity is hard to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are clear enough. A serious 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 some bitter in its sweetness, and we intimately consent to a solemn sorrow. A few writers forget that supreme happiness is the prerogative of religion and call all happiness, as such, religious. British physician Havelock Ellis, for example, identified religion with any liberation from oppressive moods: ‘Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise.’

Identification of religion with every form of happiness leaves out the essential peculiarity of spiritual joy. We experience more common happiness as a relief, a momentary escape from troubles. But religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It 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 explain the matter. It is religion’s secret, and to understand it you must have been a religious person of the extremer type. As author Jack London said, ‘There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.’[22]

In future examples, even of the healthiest-minded religious consciousness, we shall see this complex sacrificial constitution in which a higher happiness holds a sadness in check. The Louvre has a picture by Guido Reni of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The fiend being underfoot brings out the picture’s allegorical meaning: The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which the demon, the negative or tragic principle, is found, which makes such consciousness rich in emotion.

Later in these lectures 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 negative principle, on humiliation and privation, on the thought of suffering and death. Their souls grow happier in inverse proportion to the intolerableness of their outward condition. Only religious emotion can bring a person to this peculiar pass. That’s why when we ask about the value of religion for human life we ought to seek the answer among these more extreme examples.

Starting our study of the phenomenon in its acute form allows us to shade down as much as we please later. And if these cases seem repulsive to our ordinary senses and we still feel compelled to acknowledge religion’s value and treat it with respect, they will have proved its value for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may proceed to trace the legitimate boundaries of religion’s influence.

We make our task difficult by choosing to deal so much with eccentricities and extremes. You may ask how religion can be the most important of all human functions if every manifestation of it in turn has to be corrected and sobered down and pruned away. Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably. But I believe that something like it will have to be our final contention.

The personal attitude that people feel impelled to take up towards what they apprehend to be the divine — and you will remember that this was our definition — will prove to be both an admission of helplessness and a service-inspiring affirmation. 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 mercy and letting go, as shown by the American poet Alan Dugan in Love Song: I and Thou:

 God damned it. This is hell,

     but I planned it. I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

     will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

     to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

     I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.[23]

In the end we all absolutely depend on the universe. We are drawn and pressed into sacrifices and surrenders, deliberately accepted as our only permanent positions of repose. In those states of mind that fall short of religion, we submit to the surrender as a necessity, and undergo the sacrifice without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, we positively embrace surrender and service –  adopting even unnecessary sacrifices that may increase our happiness.

Religion makes easy what in any case is needed, and if it is the only way to accomplish this result, its vital importance in life stands clear beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function that no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the biological point of view this is a conclusion to which we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration as I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.

But to foreshadow the conclusion of our investigations is one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture I propose that we begin our journey by addressing the concrete facts.

Lecture III – Reality of the Unseen

The life of religion consists of believing in an unseen order and aligning ourselves with that ideal as a way to achieve our peak human potential. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of belief in an object that we cannot see. All our attitudes – moral, practical, emotional or religious – are due to the objects of our consciousness, whatever we believe to exist along with ourselves, whether real or ideal. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our mind.

In either case they elicit from us a reaction, and reactions due to thoughts are often as strong as those due to physical stimuli. They may even be stronger. The memory of an insult can make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than at the moment of making them, and in general our wise and moral life is based on how material sensations may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of more remote facts.

The more concrete objects of most people’s religion, the gods whom they worship, are known to them only in idea. Very few believers have experienced a sensible vision of their deity, though enough miraculous appearances of this sort are on record to merit our attention later. The instrumentality of pure ideas exerts the main force of the Christian religion, for example. Nothing in the individual’s experience serves as a direct model.

In addition to the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract ideas that prove to have equal power. God’s various attributes of holiness, justice, mercy, etc., have all proved great sources of inspiration for believers. Mystical authorities in all religions insist on the absence of definite sensible images, a blank slate, as essential to contemplation of the higher divine truths. As Vietnamese Thièn Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn said:

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing here and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.[24]         

As we shall see in later lectures, such contemplations powerfully benefit the believer’s subsequent attitude, as we expect of them. Immanuel Kant said that objects of belief such as God, the design of creation, the soul and the afterlife are not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense content to work with, and as the words soul, God and immortality cover no distinct sense whatever, it follows theoretically that they are devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our performance in life.

We can act as if there is a God; feel as if we are free; consider Nature as if she is full of special designs; lay plans as if we are immortal – and we then find that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves to be a practical way of knowing through not-knowing. Kant assures us of the strange phenomenon of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of about which it can form no idea.

Such an exaggerated example illustrates the quirk of human nature that we are considering. We can attach a sentiment of reality so strongly to the object of belief that our whole life becomes polarized, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in. At the same time, paradoxically, that thing can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. Imagine our spirit as a bar of iron being subject to a magnetic field – suddenly all our molecular magnetic dipoles turn in the same direction. Such a bar of iron would struggle to describe the power that stirred it so strongly, yet every atom would testify to its sway in life.

Ideas of pure reason can make us feel presences that we are powerless to articulate. Indeed, all sorts of higher abstractions carry a similar untouchable appeal. The whole world of concrete objects swims in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas that lend it its significance, the pool giving meaning to the idea of a swimmer. As time, space and the web of reality that holds them connect all things, so do abstract and essential goodness, beauty and strength soak through all things right and meaningful.

These and other equally abstract ideas form the background for all our facts, the fountainhead of all possibilities. Such ideas give to every special thing its ‘nature’. Everything we know is what it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at these bodiless entities, but we grasp all other things by their means. In conceiving and classifying the world we should be stricken helpless in so far as we might lose these mental handles on reality.

Ideas rule our minds – this is a basic fact of being human. We want to be polarized and magnetized, and so turn to ideas that either pull all our spiritual magnetic dipoles in the same direction, or jolt them into disarray and hand us a chore to realign ourselves with a perceived right order. Various abstract concepts become as real to us as people, and we turn toward them and from them in turn as we do with family members – the uncle with whom we love to argue about capitalism, the cousin who insists that education gradually replaces belief in God with a belief in science, that the two are incompatible.

Ideas are beings as real in the noösphere as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space. Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling that the doctrine of the reality of the ideal world 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 perishing beauties of the earth.

In the often-quoted passage in his Banquet as translated by Benjamin Jowett, Plato says: ‘And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices 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 Neoplatonic 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 that are spreading throughout the world today under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object.

Science in many minds is taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the laws of nature as objective facts to be revered. But let us not rush to judge such an attitude as misdirected religious feeling. The scientific mind today often has more openness to mystery than religion does, said Franciscan priest Richard Rohr:

For example, it is willing to speak of dark matter, dark holes, chaos theory, fractals (the part replicates the whole), string theory, dark energy, and the atomic structure of all material things, which seems totally counter intuitive. Scientists ‘believe’ in many things like electromagnetism, radioactivity, field theory, and various organisms such as viruses and bacteria before they can actually ‘prove’ they exist. They know them first by their effects, or the evidence, and then argue backward to their existence. Isn’t this how good theologians have often tried to “prove” the existence of God?[25]

The Greek gods may have been symbolic personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which we classify the natural world – Zeus ruling the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Gaia the Earth. Even now we speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature are human. Never mind for now the Greek gods and their origin. But our examples lead us to conclude that there is a sense of reality in the human consciousness, a sixth sense deeper than any of the ordinary senses by which psychology supposes us to perceive reality. We might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and influence our behavior by first exciting this sense of reality. In that case anything else, any idea that might similarly excite it, would appear real as do objects of sense. If a religious notion touches this reality-feeling, we tend to believe it in in spite of criticism, even though it might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable. Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be such unsubstantial entities.

Experiences of hallucination offer the most curious proofs that such an undifferentiated sense of reality exists. It often happens that an hallucination develops imperfectly: the person affected will feel a ‘presence’ in the room, facing a 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 known in any of the usual ‘sensible’ ways.

Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned. An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He told me of feeling on three successive nights his arm grasped while alone in his bed, each occasion more abhorrent than the previous one:

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 perception. 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 an experience such as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so, and the same correspondent told me that at other times he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it filled him with joy. My friend does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret 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, please understand that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research has featured many similar accounts of the sense of presence. Professor Flournoy of Geneva relayed testimony of a lady who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing, who said, ‘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.’

In an earlier book of mine I cited 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 pepper 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 exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal 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 reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it — in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized idea.

Such cases, taken along with others too tedious for quotation, seem to prove the existence in our minds of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. Tracing the neurobiology of such a feeling would form a pretty problem for psychologists — nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were girding themselves for action. Whatsoever thus excited our nerves, or ‘made our flesh creep’ — our senses do so most often — might then appear real and present, even if only 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 neurophysical mechanics.

Like all 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 see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly 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,’ said Madame Ackermann in her autobiography.[26]

In another lecture we shall see how in morbid depression such a sense of the unreality of things may become an unbearable pain, and even lead to suicide.

Many persons possess the objects of their religious belief not in the form of mere conceptions, but as quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As people’s sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the individual believers alternate between warmth and coldness in their faith. Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person recalls a particular crisis in which a more direct vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence, swept in and overwhelmed their usual state of belief.

In James Russell Lowell’s correspondence he describes an experience of this kind:

... 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 me. 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.[27]

Consider a more developed experience from a clergyman in Professor Edwin Diller Starbuck’s manuscript collection: ‘I remember the night and almost the very spot on the hilltop 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.’

Here is a Swiss account, even more definite in character, translated from the French original in Professor Flournoy’s rich collection of psychological documents: 

‘... 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. ... I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God ... 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 sometime be called to bear witness more conspicuously.’

We most often apply the adjective ‘mystical’ to states of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say. Of the more habitual sense of God’s presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine—probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account: ‘God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I 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 communion is delightful.’

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 attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense of the other being in the world. Lovers have this sense of the continuous being of their idols, even when their attention is addressed to other matters and they no longer represent the beloved’s features. They cannot forget; the beloved uninterruptedly affects them through and through.

I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, 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 convincing 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 degree; 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 reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can persuade you.

A philosophy opposed to mysticism is sometimes spoken of as rationalism, which insists that all our beliefs ought to find articulate grounds for themselves. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) 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 intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science is its result.

Nevertheless, if we look on our whole mental life as it exists, on life apart from learning and science, and what people inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the rational part is relatively superficial. It is the part with prestige, for it has the command of language, 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 mute intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.

If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the articulate level of rationalism. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your intuitions, have prepared the premises of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result. Something in you absolutely knows that the intuitive result must be truer than any logic-borne rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalist 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, today 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 know today that he is nevermore that external inventor of contrivances intended to make manifest his glory, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear in words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exists, that deity must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.

In the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate 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 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 people feel the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments will not change their faith. Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is better 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 objects. 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 absolute 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 literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn.

The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but nonetheless religious history shows the part that joy has ever more tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary, sometimes secondary, 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 broad view it demands.

Stated in the completest possible terms, a person’s religion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of 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 within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally somber and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.

The constitutionally somber religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flex and contraction are not wholly checked. It would be childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and pranks, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on the wing. Lie low, rather, lie low, for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job the impotence of man and the 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?’ Some people bitterly relish the truth of this conviction, which for them may be as near as they can get to feeling religious joy.

If we turn to the natural optimist, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden is altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such people give us definitions that seem to the somber minds to leave out all the solemnity 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 flex, no bowing of the head. Any habitual and regulated admiration is worthy to be called a religion, said Professor John Robert Seeley, who accordingly thinks that our music, science, and our so-called civilization, as these things are now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time.[28]

As naturalist Loren Eiseley said:

Of late years, however, I have come to suspect that the mystery may just as well be solved in a carved and intricate seedcase, out of which the life has flown, as in the seed itself.... I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of a Scotch theologue, ‘is not as natural as it looks.’ I have learned this in a small suburban field, after a good many years spent in much wilder places upon far less fantastic quests.[29]

In my last lecture I quoted the ultra-radical opinion of Havelock Ellis that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise because it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking, which is far too complex to be decided offhand. I propose accordingly that we make religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.

Lectures IV and V – The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Happiness is probably our chief concern as human beings. How to gain, how to keep, and how to recover happiness are for most people the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces our moral life from the experiences of pleasure and pain that different kinds of conduct bring, a standard that is of even keener interest in relation to the religious life. We need not go so far as to say that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise, but we can admit that any enduring enjoyment may produce gratitude for the gift of such a happy existence.

We also can acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion provide new inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, a journey all the more attractive to a person for whom natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves to be. People tend to regard the happiness arising from a religious belief as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes people feel happy, they usually adopt it. Such a belief ought to be true, therefore it is true – rightly or wrongly, ordinary religious logic infers this proof. Swiss lay theologian and writer Carl Hilty in 1890 published a book, Happiness, in which he said:

The very truths of religion remain unproved unless the moral power which issues from them provides their proof. That which has power must have reality. No other proof of reality is final. Even our senses could not convince us, if our experience and the experience of all other men did not assure us that we could—not unconditionally, but under normal conditions—trust them not to deceive. That which brings conviction to one is his experience, and that which rouses in him the desire and the inward disposition to believe in his own experience is the testimony of others who have had that experience themselves.[30]

In the next hour we will consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day.

In many persons happiness comes in the stardust of our being, a cosmic emotion in the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy, but those who positively refuse to feel unhappiness, who consider it 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 the sinister theologies into which they may have been born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine.

Long before the Reformation, church leaders accused heretics of antinomian practices, that is, acting as if grace releases Christians from obligation to observe the moral law. The deliberate refusal to think ill of life has probably always been idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine’s maxim, dilige et quod vis fac—love, and do what you will —is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet is open to abuse as a license for behavior that goes beyond conventional morality. According to their characters such people have been kind or uncaring or even cruel, but their belief has been systematic enough to form a definite religious attitude. God for them was a giver of freedom, which gift overcame the sting of evil.

Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were of this spirit, of which there are of course infinite varieties. Philosophers and writers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot also were of this optimistic type, as were many leaders of the 18th century anti-Christian movement. Their influence grew from an authoritative feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her enough, is absolutely good. We all likely have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities lie with flowers and birds rather than with dark human passions. Such individuals can think no ill of God or any person. Holy gladness fills their hearts from the outset, and they need no deliverance from any pre-existing burden.

English classics scholar and moral philosopher Francis W. Newman described the once-born happy type as not knowing the fear of God, but only the animating spirit of a beautiful harmonious world: ‘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.’[31] The Roman Catholic Church offers such characters a more congenial soil to grow in than does Protestantism, whose outlook has been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism happy souls have been abundant enough, and in their recent liberal developments minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example.

Another good expression of the once-born type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the lyrics of Pharrell Williams’s hit song ‘Happy,’ which swept the world in 2014:

Here come bad news talking this and that (Yeah)

Well give me all you got, don't hold back (Yeah)

Well I should probably warn you I'll be just fine (Yeah)

No offense to you don't waste your time

Here's why

Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof

(Because I'm happy)

Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth

(Because I'm happy)

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you

(Because I'm happy)

Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do[32]

One recognizes in such writers the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anesthesia. This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. As his disciple Richard Maurice Bucke said:

When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history, or against any trades or occupations—not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else.[33]

Walt Whitman holds a high place in literature because of his refusal to entertain any shrinking emotions. He only allowed himself to express expansive sentiments, and did so in the first person, not in a conceited way, but vicariously for all men. A passionate and mystic gratitude for the meaning of life suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death and all things are divinely good.

Thus do many people regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has influenced them with his love of comrades, with his gladness that he and they exist. Whitman is often spoken of as a pagan, which sometimes means the natural animal man without a sense of sin, and sometimes 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 one who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. Whitman is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom:

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.[34]

No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman, for even in Homeric times their consciousness was full of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles hears Priam’s young son, Lycaon, sue for mercy, he stops to say: ‘Ah, friend, you too must die: why lament so? Patroclus too is dead, who was better far than you.... Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There comes a time when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear, or arrow.’ Achilles then 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 sadness and gladness unmingled and entire.

Instinctive good they did not reckon sin, nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of us insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be ‘good in the making,’ or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They did not deny 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 seemed silly to them. Nor did they invent a better world of the imagination in order to escape from those ills.

This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all misleading moral argument and strain, lends a passionate dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And Whitman’s outpourings lack this quality. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant, his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist that diminishes its effect on many readers already well-disposed towards optimism and willing to admit that he is a genuine prophet.

If healthy-mindedness is the tendency to look on all things and find them good, we should distinguish between an involuntary and a voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. Involuntary healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. Its systematical version, meanwhile, is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects one aspect as the essence and disregards the other aspects. Conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision. This might seem a difficult feat to perform for the intellectually sincere person honest about facts, but the situation is too complex for so simple a criticism.

Like every other emotional state, happiness is blind and insensible to opposing facts. This is its instinctive means for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more feel real than the thought of good can gain hold when melancholy rules. Persons actively happy, from whatever cause, simply cannot believe in evil. They must ignore evil, and to the bystander may seem perversely to shut their eyes to it and hush it up. But more than this, the hushing up of evil may grow into a deliberate religious policy.

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way people take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight. The sting of evil often departs and turns into a relish when after seeking to shun it we agree to turn about and face it cheerfully. People are bound to adopt this way of escape from many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert their peace. Refuse to admit their badness, despise their power, ignore them – turn your eye away and the facts may still exist, but their evil character is no more. Since your thoughts about them make them evil or good, the ruling of your thoughts then proves to be your principal concern.

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic outlook thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, optimism continues to spread throughout the person. Not only does the human instinct for self-protection keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have new weight. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, but mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, crying, whining 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? The poor-me attitude only grips and perpetuates the trouble that occasioned it and increases the total negativity of the situation.

At all costs then we should reduce the sway of that bad mood, spot it in ourselves and others and never tolerate it. But it is impossible to discipline the subjective sphere without at the same time emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to meet these needs. Recall that mystical insight sometimes says that the total framework of reality must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of 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 purpose.

All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one insensible to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, and a lover throws the usual cautions to the winds. When the passion is extreme a person may actually glory in suffering. Provided the suffering be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states the ordinary contrast of good and bad seems to be swallowed up in a higher realm, an all-powerful excitement that engulfs the evil, and which people welcome as the crowning experience of their life. This is truly to live, they say, and exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.

The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all more or less cultivate a positive attitude, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can. The slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded, these we shuffle out of sight and never mention. The worlds we make in literature and in society are a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.

The advance of liberalism in Christianity during the past 50 years may be called a victory of healthy-mindedness over the doom and gloom of the old hellfire theology. Many preachers now make little of sin rather than magnifying our consciousness of it. They ignore or deny eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. Such preachers think it sick and pathetic to aim at saving our own souls, believing the ideal of Christian character better developed with an optimistic, hearty attitude. Forget whether or not they are right, but note the change.

The persons to whom I refer have for the most part still kept their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of having given up its more pessimistic theological elements. The theory of evolution lays the ground for a new religion of Nature that has entirely displaced Christianity for many people. The idea of universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general improvement and progress, a doctrine so perfectly suited to the religious needs of the healthy-minded that it might have been created for their use. People already feeling alienated from the harshness and irrationality of orthodox Christianity embrace this new scientifically vetted evolution as a substitute faith.

As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck’s circular of questions. The writer’s reaction on the whole nature of things is systematic and reflective, and loyally binds him to inner ideals. Asked what religion means to him, he said:

It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. ... I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious— they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I totally disbelieve in a God. The God idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally and physically, I would 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. ... Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite. He is an excellent example of the optimism that may be encouraged by popular science.

A religious influence far more important and interesting than that from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that 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 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 absorbed a number of tributary influences, and is now a genuine religious power. The demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be supplied by publishers—a phenomenon probably not observed until a religion has got past its insecure beginnings.

One of the doctrinal sources of mind-cure is the four Gospels, another is New England transcendentalism, and another is the idealism of 18^th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who said that our minds and thoughts constitute reality, a theory consistent with the thinking of many leading physicists three centuries later. For example, British mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose is one of several scientists to say that mechanics alone cannot explain consciousness. In a 2019 interview Penrose said:

Consciousness is an integral part of what one needs to make quantum mechanics make sense, in a way that alternative things become superimposed, as quantum mechanics would say, where one or the other happens. In that process of one or the other happening there is an element of proto-consciousness, we claim. So in that sense, proto-consciousness is fundamental to the universe.[35]

Yet another source for the mind-cure movement is spiritualism, the doctrine that all that exists is spirit or soul, which talks of law, progress and development. Another source is the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken. Finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously cautionary states of mind.  Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples. Mind-cure might be called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety that marked the earlier part of the 19^th century in the evangelical circles of England and America. The blind have been made to see, the lame to walk, and life-long invalids have had their health restored.

The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. Many who never supposed it possible have deliberately adopted a healthy-minded attitude, which in turn has helped them regenerate their character. The movement has restored cheerfulness to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind-cure principles so pervade the air that one catches their spirit everywhere. One hears of the ‘gospel of relaxation,’ of the ‘don’t worry movement,’ of people who repeat to themselves, ‘youth, health, vigor!’ as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are practically forbidden in many households, and many people consider it bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences of life.

These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results did not exist. But striking results abound, so we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them. Failure is part of life. We can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read. Practical results have spurred the movement’s spread, and the practical character of the American people has never been better shown than by this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, being so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. The medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning to open their eyes, if hesitantly, to the importance of mind-cure.

The movement is 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 many who cannot be influenced by mind-cure ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that a great number of people can be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.

Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard of Clark University, who concludes that the cases of mind-cure are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion. Goddard said:

People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured. ... We have traced the mental element through primitive medicine and folk-medicine of today, 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.[36]

Mind-cure shares the same general basis of all religious experience, the fact of our dual nature connecting with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which we may learn to live more habitually. The lower sphere is that of the instincts and desires, of egotism, doubt and the primal personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered unreasoning selfishness 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.

This naming of fear gives an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion, which remains evident a century later. For example, German-born spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said that fear has played a role in our evolution but should not in any way guide our emotions:

The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know that you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger - just a minimum of intelligence and common sense. For such practical matters, it is useful to apply the lessons learned in the past. Now if someone threatened you with fire or with physical violence, you might experience something like fear. This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but not the psychological condition of fear that we are talking about here. The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.[37]

Although the disciples of mind-cure often use Christian terminology, their belief diverges from that of ordinary Christians. For example, many theologians in the late 18^th and early 20^th centuries said that the teachings of Jesus had been diluted by early Greek and Roman influences, that Jesus felt about evil and disease much as the mind-curers and called sickness what it was and health the same, never describing a beneficent infliction or saying that evil has a healthy use. Here we see a precursor of later popular movements such as the Oxford Group that called for a return to the ‘true’ Christianity as practiced by Jesus and by followers in the first century after his death and resurrection.

The mind-cure notion of our higher nature also differs from Christian belief, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in us appears in the mind-cure philosophy as chiefly subconscious, through which we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner self. As different writers variously express this view we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, and of vedantism, the Brahmin study of reliable and valid means by which people gain true knowledge. Lastly, we see mind-cure express the modern psychology of the subliminal self.

A quotation or two from American mystic and teacher Ralph Waldo Trine will put us at the central point of view:

The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all.... 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.[38]

Let me now pass from these abstract 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, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. She said that feeling separated from the divine energy that we call God is the underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, and depression, and that anyone who can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence to be as one with their Creator has no further need of healer, or of healing:

This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and ... disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. ... [and] 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. ... 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.

My second correspondent, also a woman, said she had been very ill and on the verge of insanity, but never recovered permanently till the ‘New Thought’ took possession of her. What impressed her most was learning that we must be in ‘absolutely constant relation or mental touch with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God,’ a lesson unknowable unless we live it into ourselves by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, she said, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning:

I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health as such, because that comes of itself, as an incidental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the spirit. ... When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects.

Here is a more concrete case, also that of a woman, and one that expresses many varieties of the state of mind we are studying:

I had been a sufferer from childhood till my 40th year. I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: ‘You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.’ These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.’ I could not accept all she said, but ... that day I commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself: ‘The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years ... I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to me like stepping-stones.

But I risk tiring you by so many examples, and must lead you back to philosophic generalities. You see already how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers. But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timid and finite consciousness, the mind-curers profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a mystery or problem, or in taking 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 Avidya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science, 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 anyone who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good? After all, it is the life that tells, and mind-cure has developed a system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown into the shade all previous literature of similar efforts, such as Zur Diätetik der Seele (Dietetics of the Soul, 1838), a popular book by Austrian physician and poet Ernst von Feuchtersleben.

Mind-cure is comprised wholly and exclusively of optimism. ‘Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism leads to power,’ or ‘thoughts are things,’ as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages. If you think 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, doggedly pursued. Every person has free access to this path to the divine.

Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are ‘forces,’ and by virtue of the law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires, and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s side by opening one’s own mind to their sway.

On the whole, the mind-cure movement shares its psychological grounding with 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 that you are saved now, if you would but believe it. And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with them, and ‘What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?’ is the form of their question. And the answer is: ‘You ARE well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.’ One of the authors whom I have already quoted said, the whole matter may be summed up in one sentence: ‘GOD IS WELL, AND SO ARE YOU. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.’

The earlier gospels met the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind, which gave force to their message. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface. Seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day.

But I may begin to annoy some members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I beg you to have patience. These lectures should emphasize to your mind the enormous diversity of spiritual life enjoyed by different people. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads, resulting in really different types of religious experience. 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 clerical-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally ‘correct’ type) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

The history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of Methodist-like conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at a certain stage in their development—a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed.

Official moralists tell us never to let up on our search for chances to develop character. Be vigilant night and day, they tell us; hold your passive tendencies in check and shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent. But the persons I speak of say all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them twice the children of hell they were before. The tense attitude of willingness becomes 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 is by an anti-moralistic method, by the surrender of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should now be the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which 17^th century German mystic and theologian Jacob Böhme wrote. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy, and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the subject an impression that he has been acted 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 spiritual transformation is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They know; for they have actually felt the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.

Revivalist preachers often tell the story of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch that stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loosen their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we trust absolutely in them and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.

The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena that follow 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 cause.

The theistic explanation says that divine grace creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation, which is that of most mind-curers, says that the moment you remove the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety is when you merge the narrower private self into the wider spirit of the universe, which is your own subconscious self. The medical-materialistic view says that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting out of physiologically higher ones that seek to regulate yet only succeed in inhibiting results. Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here.

When we take up the phenomena of revivalist-style conversion we shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind-cure methods. They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the word ‘suggestion’, having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to be used to fend off inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases, and to dampen investigation generally. Suggestion is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove effective over belief and conduct.

Ideas that work on some people prove ineffective with others. Ideas that have power at some times and in some human surroundings do not at other times and in other situations. The ideas of Christian churches do not have therapeutic power today, however they may have worked in earlier centuries. When asking why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, merely waving the word ‘suggestion’ as a banner enlightens no one.

Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning ‘merit.’ A good Catholic writer, Paul Lejeune, said that:

Illness is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one's self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ [Monsignor] Gay says, ‘this one is of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.[39]

According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away.

Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt's biography by Friedrich Zuendel gives 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 character, and in this part of his work followed no previous model.[40] In Chicago today we have the case of John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher who publishes weekly ‘Leaves of Healing,’ and denounces the cures wrought in other sects as diabolical counterfeits.’ 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.

Dr. Henry H. Goddard of Clark University credits faith cures to ordinary suggestion, and concludes by saying that ‘popular Christianity has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.’ And this in spite of popular Christianity having done absolutely nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.[41]

Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation, something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning merit. Some such church wardens would say that disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away. Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale. Almost all the great saints have more or less performed such miracles. 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.

To be suggestive, an idea must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind-cure gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church had left hardened. The suggestion has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings?

The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive power 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. The 18^th century revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards said, ‘We may pray concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away, if ... these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead.’ Edwards dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.

The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination well represented in the world. Finally, mind-cure has made what in our Protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice.

I quote some passages at random from Horatio Willis Dresser, a New Thought religious leader and author in Boston at the turn of the 20^th century, who insisted that the individual should develop from within outward, from small to great. Learning to direct the mind requires concentration and self-control, and meditation helps one ‘enter the silence’ that is favorable to spiritual thoughts, Dresser said. Ralph Waldo Trine said people can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of their own thoughts about them and realizing that there and everywhere the spirit of infinite life, love, wisdom, peace, power and plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading. This is the spirit of continual prayer, he said.[42] All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that whereof they tell.

Compare again some mind-cure ideas, this time from Henry Wood:

High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. ... The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we WILL, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence...[43]  

When we reach the subject of mysticism you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself. The cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away—doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down to encourage others. You will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of union form a perfectly definite class of experiences by which certain persons may live in a deeper sense than they ever know with anything else.
This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life.

In a later lecture I will discuss the relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons today—scientists or positivists, as 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 that humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that primitive thought conceives of everything under the form of personality. Savages think that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For the savage, even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers.

These positivists say that science, on the other hand, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive result of elemental forces—physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical—all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science’s conceptions practically, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and they say that you will always be corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal.

But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, it says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the mind-cure movement spreading as it does, not by proclamation and assertion, but by palpable experiential results.

American TV personality and media producer Oprah Winfrey in a 1991 interview described her own experience believing in her star, in her own will to believe, with the focus on artistic fulfillment rather than personal health:

I truly believe that thoughts are the greatest vehicle to change power and success in the world. Everything begins with thoughts. The chair that we are sitting in, the room that we are in, all started because somebody thought it. I thought of The Color Purple for myself. I know this is going to sound strange to you. I read the book. I got so many copies of that book. I passed the book around to everybody I knew. If I was on the bus, I’d pass it out to people. And when I heard that there was going to be a movie, I started talking it up for myself. I didn’t know Quincy Jones or Steven Spielberg, or how on Earth I would get in this movie. I’d never acted in my life. But I felt it so intensely that I had to be a part of that movie. I really do believe that I created it for myself. I wanted it more than anything in the world, and would have done anything to do it, anything to do it.[44]

Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority, the mind-cure movement carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own peculiar methods and weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.

How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives I have quoted. 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 mold to get such results (for not everyone can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than everyone can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupulous for those who can get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics.

What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim? I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than allowed for by any sect, even the scientific sect. All our verifications are but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed. Why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?

The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different people, and will each time give some characteristic benefit to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of benefit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.

Evidently, then, science and religion are both genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to those who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently, neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, analytical geometry, algebra, calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field today. Numbers of educated people still find it the most direct experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality. 

Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.

The case of mind-cure lay so ready to hand that I could not resist using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself today 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.

Lectures VI and VII – The Sick Soul

At our last meeting we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the one with a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, the born optimist. We saw how this sensibility may become the basis for a religion that sees goodness as the essential thing in life for a rational being. This religion directs people to settle their scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically refusing to take them to heart, by ignoring them, or even by denying that they exist. Evil is a disease, and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease that only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, often preached as good for one’s character, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to act right, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.

Spinoza weaves this sort of healthy-mindedness into his philosophy, which has been one secret of its fascination. Those whom reason leads, according to Spinoza, are led altogether by the influence of good over their mind. Knowledge of evil is an ‘inadequate’ knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When people make mistakes, he says:

One might expect the gnawing of conscience and repentance to help get them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as everyone does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary harmful 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.[45]

Repentance of sins has been the critical religious act for Christians since the beginning, and healthy-mindedness has always come forward with its milder interpretation. According to such healthy-minded Christians repentance means getting away from 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 person’s accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that they may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free they feel after the purge.

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 conception of God:

When I was a monk I thought that I was utterly cast away if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. ... I should not have so miserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now I commonly do, ‘Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.’[46]

One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, Miguel de Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy-minded opinion of repentance. The central tenet of Quietism is calm acceptance of human weakness, leaving a moral or ethical lapse behind us and moving on to do our best without dwelling on the fault. In contrast with such healthy-minded views as these stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning is most clear to us when we take these aspects to heart.

We have now to address this more morbid view of 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 before 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 difficulty 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 All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact. This has been at variance with popular or practical theism, the latter of which has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate.

In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But in the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty 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 whatever 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 today, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time.

Although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative 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. Allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential. Evil might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and we might conceivably hope to see it got rid of at last.

The gospel of healthy-mindedness casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher agrees with Hegel that everything actual is rational, and that dialectically evil must have a function in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort. Evil is emphatically irrational and not to be penned in, preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth, healthy-mindedness adherents say. It is a pure abomination, an alien unreality, a waste element to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal is a mere extract from the whole of reality, and is marked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased and inferior stuff.

Many mind-cure proponents’ monistic writings are inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown to be illogical in the experiences of union with a higher Presence. The higher Presence need not be the absolute whole of things; it is enough for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part. There are elements of the universe that 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—matter out of place. Remember 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 gospel thus appears once more 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 like the method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world.

Let us now turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly 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 animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a maladjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the 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 their essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement 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 detail, while the Germanic races have tended to think of sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ingrained in our natural subjectivity and never to be removed by superficial piecemeal operations. For example, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, ‘Sin is, in short, the consequence of man’s inclination to usurp the prerogatives of God, to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, thus making destructive use of his freedom by not observing the limits to which a creaturely freedom is bound.’[47]

These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and we shall find this more extreme way of feeling far 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. The threshold of a person’s consciousness indicates the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse their 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 wakened. In contrast, 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 consciousness of the differences in question.

Similarly, we might speak of a pain-threshold, a fear-threshold, a misery-threshold, and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness 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 people who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over. We even perceive this invisible dividing line in the animal kingdom, as observed, for example, by that most spiritual of naturalists, John Muir:

The voices of most songbirds, however joyous, suffer a long winter eclipse; but the Ouzel sings on through all the seasons and every kind of storm. … It is pitiful to see wee frost-pinched sparrows on cold mornings in the mountain groves shaking the snow from their feathers, and hopping about as if anxious to be cheery, then hastening back to their hidings out of the wind, puffing out their breast feathers over their toes, and subsiding among the leaves, cold and breathless, while the snow continues to fall, and there is no sign of clearing. But the Ouzel never calls forth a single touch of pity; not because he is strong to endure, but rather because he seems to live a charmed life beyond the reach of every influence that makes endurance necessary.[48]

Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on the easier side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This question about the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need arises naturally at this point, and will became a serious challenge before we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness.

Let us then 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 feeling of human helplessness may open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.

To begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. Even the healthiest and most prosperous chain of existence has many links of illness, danger, and disaster. Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff 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-wire stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. Of course the music can commence again—and again and again—at intervals. But the healthy-minded person is left conscious of the precariousness of life. It is a bell with a crack, drawing its breath by chance and by luck.

Even if healthy-minded people never experienced any of these sobering intervals, any reflective beings still must generalize and class their own lot with that of others. Doing so must show that any escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. They 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 fiction? Is not their joy in it vulgar, much like the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success. But take the happiest persons, the ones most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten their innermost consciousness is one of failure. Either their achievements fall far short of their ideals, or else they have secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which they inwardly know themselves to be found wanting.

When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this way, how must it be with less successful people? He wrote in 1824, ‘I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 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.’

Who was ever on the whole as successful 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 forthwith 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 today, for the Judgment to come tomorrow.’ The Dowager Elect, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come. ‘Madam,’ 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 life’s path 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 humanity share bonds 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.

Robert Louis Stevenson said, ‘Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.’ And our nature being thus rooted in failure, no wonder theologians have held it to be essential, and thought that we only reach a sense of life’s deeper significance through personal experience of humiliation.

The God of many people is little more than their court of appeal against the damning judgment of their failures in the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left after our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity to acknowledge and regret them is the germ of a better self. But the world deals with us in fact, not in potential, and of this hidden germ it takes no account. Then we turn to the all-knowing power who knows our bad, but also knows the good in us, and is just. We cast ourselves with repentance on his mercy. Only by an all-knowing God can we finally be judged. So the need for a God emerges from such life experience.

But this is only the first stage of world-weariness. Increase the human being’s sensitivity, carry them a little farther over the misery-threshold, and thus spoil the good quality of any successful moments when they occur. All natural goods perish. Riches fly away; fame is a sigh; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods that our souls require? Back of everything is the great specter of universal death, the all-encompassing void.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he takes 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 befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; as the one dies, so dies 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. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the Sun.[49]

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 contradiction. The air of the tomb surrounds it. To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joy-destroying chill engendered by such a contemplation, the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying ‘Snap out of it.’

But in all seriousness, can such simple talk 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. That we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; that we now for a moment live and are 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 that flies beyond the bounty 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 mine whose consciousness was of this sort, ‘and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.’ And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of 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 quarrel 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 there, and the skull will grin at the banquet. In the practical life of individuals, we know how their whole gloom or delight 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 seem, its glow and luster vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. The present hour always owes part of its appeal to the background of possibilities associated with it.

Let our common 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 we breathe in—and our days pass by with zest, they stir with prospects, and thrill with remoter values. Place round our common experiences on the contrary a curdling sense of doom, an absence of all permanent meaning, and the thrill stops short or turns to an anxious trembling.

Evolutionary naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, puts mankind in a position similar to that of a group of people living on a frozen lake. Surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, they know that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day draws near when to be drowned ignominiously will be their common fate. The merrier the skating, 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 engendered by the religion of nature. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks— Homer’s flow of enthusiasm 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 ultimate reality they became unmitigated pessimists. The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows 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 joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall see that Brahmins, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, twice-born people whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation.

As Homer said, ‘For of all creatures that breathe and move on earth, none is more to be pitied than a man.’[50] Theognis of Megara said, ‘The best lot of all for man is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning Sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may, and lie under a goodly heap of earth.’[51] Sophocles’ plays are full of pessimistic utterances, and he has an almost identical passage in Oedipus in Colonus: ‘Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.’[52]

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not discovered 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 dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key. 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 more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. Nevertheless, the outlook of those Hellenes was blackly pessimistic.

Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were as far as the Greek mind advanced in that direction. The Epicurean sought not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness, believing strong happiness always linked with pain­. They rather choose to hug the safe shore, and not to indulge in deeper raptures.

The Stoic believed that the only genuine good that life can yield is the free possession of one’s own soul; all other goods are lies. Each of these philosophies despairs of nature’s gifts. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic, and each proposes a way to be free from the resultant dust-and-ashes state of mind. The 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 inherent in primitive intoxication with sense-happiness. 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 are probably archetypes marking a definite stage in the evolution of the world-sick soul.

 A worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg wrote in a letter to me that every human being understands something different from the word ‘happiness’: ‘It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise person is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term contentment. What education 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 contentment.’

These two types 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 human — Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing refinement of character, and Stoicism exhibiting moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their formulas for equanimity are expedients that 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. The surest way to the rapturous happiness of the twice-born is usually through a more radical pessimism than anything we have yet considered. We have seen how the luster and enchantment of life may diminish. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment 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 become the prey of a pathological melancholy.

We even find such characters in literature, as with Emmeline Grangerford, as described by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. ... She warn’t particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker—the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once ...[53]

As the healthy-minded enthusiasts succeed in ignoring evil’s very existence, so the subjects of melancholy are driven to ignore all good whatever ­–– for them it may no longer be real at all. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is rare in people with a normal nervous constitution, and one seldom finds it in healthy subjects even when they are victims of the most atrocious bad fate. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its 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 individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. 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 depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness. discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition, citing the case of a young girl stricken with a liver disease that for some time left her feeling no affection for her father and mother, nor taking the least pleasure in playing with her doll. What formerly convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest her. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, an early 19^th century French psychiatrist, observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate suffering from hepatic disease who manifested complete absence of emotional reaction. He took no pleasure in going to the theater, which he normally enjoyed, and reported that the thought of his home, wife, and children moved him as little as a theorem of Euclid.[54]

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 disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the French philosopher and Catholic priest, Father Joseph Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a 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 Polytechnic school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, 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. ... But perhaps 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. ... I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection.[55]

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 motive 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 goodbye 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 someday 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.... Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter.[56]

So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for 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 characters, 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, trepidation, fear. Sufferers may rebel or submit, may accuse themselves, or accuse outside powers; and may or may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why they should so have to suffer.

Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much respect. 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 melancholy 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 morally.... What have I done to deserve this excess of severity? ... 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 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 but suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. ... Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness—it is one long agony until the grave.... Do you think that these are not strong enough reasons for suicide?[57]

This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire 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. Secondly, you see how the complaining 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 construction of religious systems.

Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, 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 characters that 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 his altered and estranged aspect of the world stimulated Tolstoy’s intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length, but before doing so 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 entirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer situation and the sentiments it may provoke. These feelings 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 unfavorable, 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 significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear imbued 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 not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the 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 their life. The same phenomenon is true with fear, indignation, jealousy, ambition, or 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 arising from these passions is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts—gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high, but almost always nonlogical and beyond our control.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance and mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and healthy?

Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit, illustrate how the spirit blows where it will. The world endows with equal dispassion all the gifts alike, as the stage set indifferently receives whatever lights may be shined upon it by the lighting director. 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 indistinguishable 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 religious regeneration, we shall see that a frequent consequence of the change is a transfiguration of the face of nature in the person’s eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In cases of depression there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.

I cull the following examples from the work of George Dumas, La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900: It is as if I lived in another century, says one asylum patient.—I see everything through a cloud, says another, things are not as they were, and I am changed.—I see, says a third, I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything.—Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world.—There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression.—I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things.—Such are expressions that naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed state.[58]

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.

At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy began to have moments of perplexity, as if he knew not how to live, or what to do. His usual excitement and interest had ceased. Life had been enchanting, but was now flat sober, or more than sober, dead. Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. The questions Why? and What next? began to beset him more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable, that he could easily find the answers if he would take the time. But as the questions became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, his death. These questions, Why?, Wherefore?, and What for? found no response. Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer, and he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice— ‘and from such a way,’ he says, ‘I can learn nothing, after what I now know;’ or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts—which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life. Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect, Tolstoy said:

Yet, while my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed—a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas—in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement—but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of someone.[59]

Of the intellectual and emotional process that, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.

When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restoration to integrity. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute—is not the simple, ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health. When redeemed, the sufferers are saved by what seems to them a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than they could enjoy before.

We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in literature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over the condition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.

I here print a number of detached passages continuously from Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners:

And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hellfire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. I was both a burden and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own.[60]

Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly described the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its beginning. The type was similar to Bunyan’s:

Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. ... When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their place![61]

Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness. The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear. A good example comes from my own experience as a young man, a case of bad nervous condition which nonetheless offers the merit of extreme simplicity:

While in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article, when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear combined with each other.

That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind (I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.

Asked to explain more fully what I meant by these last words, I can only say that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like ‘The eternal God is my refuge,’ etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,’ ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ etc., I think I should have grown really insane.[62]

There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe; and in one or another of these three ways it always is that our original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.

In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless it will sound real in the ears of victims such as these. The deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that may be why the coarser religions, frenzied with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.

Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in ratholes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.

From our perspective as impartial observers, what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons, far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose, and so far as it works there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes. Even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine – the evil facts that it refuses to recognize are a genuine portion of reality, and may be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

Normal life contains moments as bad as any of those that fill insane melancholy, moments in which radical evil gets its turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years hold fast to the struggling body of some living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us today. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

For example, a Muslim native of India related the following:

It was about eleven o’clock at night... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, Ho hai! involuntarily reechoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same Ho hai! was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village...[63]

It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils serve higher forms of good, but there may be forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or refusal to notice is the only practical resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to pay any attention to sorrow, pain, and death, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.

The most complete religions would seem to have the best-developed pessimistic elements. Buddhism and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately, from now onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which we have recently been dwelling on.

Lecture VIII –– The Divided Self and Its Unification

The last lecture was a painful look at evil as a pervasive element of the world. At the close of it we saw the contrast between the two ways of seeing life that characterize what we called the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once, and the sick souls, who must be born again in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions of our universe. In the religion of the once-born the world is a simple affair, with accounts kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account.

In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a manifold mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount, and transient, but hides a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, natural good gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good. Renunciation and despair of natural good are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure soul-saving, the two types violently contrast, though here the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the flesh and blood human beings whom we often meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference. You understand, for example, the disdain of the Methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist. You likewise share with the healthy-minded an aversion to what seems the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, who dies to live, and makes paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth.

The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be inconsistency or a conflicting mish-mash of parts in the native temperament of the person, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution. For example, French novelist Alphonse Daudet said:

Homo duplex, homo duplex! The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, He is dead, he is dead! While my first self wept, my second self thought, How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre. I was then fourteen years old. This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks![64]

Some people are born with a harmonious inner constitution that is well balanced from the outset. Their impulses mesh with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions stay within reasonable bounds, and regrets do not much trouble their lives. Others live in conflict with themselves, from merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy that may be inconvenient in the extreme.

Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity, I find a good example in the autobiography of Annie Besant, a British socialist and Theosophist:

I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoelace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string... I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public.[65]

This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree of diversity of character may make havoc of the subject's life. There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of work to repair misdemeanors and mistakes. Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance—the incompatible and antagonistic character traits of ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.[66]

This explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make the inner diversity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A superior degenerate is simply a person of sensibility in many directions who finds more than common difficulty in keeping their spiritual house in order because their feelings and impulses are both keen and contrary. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, morbid dreads, and inhibitions that beset the psychopathic temperament, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, ‘Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!’ which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, ‘I will not, I will not,’ he impulsively said, ‘Let him go if he will,’ and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called, of which we must soon speak more directly.

All of us develop our character mainly by straightening out and unifying the inner self. This job becomes more intense in direct proportion to our emotional intensity, and is most challenging if we are psychopathic. Feelings high and low, impulses good or bad, begin as a comparative chaos within us, and a healthy, integrated personality evolves when these disparate emotions form a stable system of functions in right subordination. The period of order-making and struggle often makes a person unhappy. If the person has a tender conscience open to the religious touch, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relation to one's creator and the appointer of one's spiritual fate. This religious melancholy and conviction of sin have played a large part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The individual’s interior becomes a battleground for what they feel to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1958 described this dichotomy as being between our conscious and unconscious selves:

For more than fifty years we have known, or could have known, that there is an unconscious as a counterbalance to consciousness. Medical psychology has furnished all the necessary empirical and experimental proofs of this. There is an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and its contents. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. We still go on thinking and acting as before, as if we were simplex and not duplex. Accordingly, we imagine ourselves to be innocuous, reasonable and humane. We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious. ... Virtually everything depends on the human soul and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the attacks of wild animals nor by natural catastrophes nor by the danger of worldwide epidemics but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire and radioactivity.[67]

Wrong living, impotent aspirations; ‘What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,’ as Saint Paul said. One is mysteriously the heir to self-loathing, self-despair – an unintelligible and intolerable burden. Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine's case is a classic example. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life. Finally, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, Paul heard a voice in the garden say, ‘Take and read,’ and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, ‘not in chambering and wantonness,’ etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.

Augustine's psychological genius has given an unsurpassed account of the trouble of having a divided self:

My new will was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. It was myself indeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in myself.... Still bound to earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled by them.... And I made another effort, and almost succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it, hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the habitual evil held me more than the better life I had not tried.[68]

Augustine perfectly describes the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and irrupt into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this higher excitability.

I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist whose melancholy we covered in my last lecture. The poor youth's sins were of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress:

Thus for many months when I was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart, but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was! ... and all this while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went, for I did not think there was any sin in my conduct when I was among carnal company because I did not take any satisfaction there, but only followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons. But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar night and day.[69]

Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner unity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of the peculiarities of the process of unification when it occurs. Personal integration may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new intellectual insights, or through experiences we shall later designate as mystical. However it comes, it brings a characteristic relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mold. Happiness! Happiness! Religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most enduring happiness. But finding religion is only one of many ways to reach unity, and the process of fixing inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process that may take place with any mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form.

The religious types of regeneration we are about to study are only one species of a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be away from religion into disbelief, or away from moral strictness into freedom and license. Or some new stimulus or passion in the individual's life, such as love, revenge, or patriotic devotion. Any or all these instances may have the same psychological event resulting in stability and equilibrium succeeding a period of storm, stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new person may also be born either gradually or suddenly.

The French philosopher Théodore Simon Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own ‘counter-conversion,’ as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has been well styled by Starbuck. Jouffroy's doubts had long harassed him; but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the illusions he had lost:

Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions that until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible. Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too strong,—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go of everything.... I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, somber and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought that had exiled me, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life.[70]

In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote:

A young man, it appears, wasted, in two or three years, a large patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put an end to his life; but... [instead] sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute.... He promptly seized every opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the meanness of occupation or appearance.... He speedily but cautiously turned his first gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an inveterate miser, worth £60,000.[71]

Let me turn now to the kind of religious case that immediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, an account of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy-mindedness of a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy-minded type. It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that a friend told him of the self-control attained by the Japanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline, and that the first step is to get rid of anger and worry. Fletcher doubted the possibility, but his friend insisted that if it was possible for the Japanese, it ought to be possible to Westerners. On his way back to his hotel he could think of nothing but the phrase ‘get rid of,’ over and over:

... and the idea must have continued to possess me during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, ‘If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all?’ I felt the strength of the argument and at once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.... There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them has presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of elimination.[72]

The older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis and crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways in which inner unification may occur, one gradual, the other sudden. Tolstoy and Bunyan may again serve us as examples of the gradual way, though it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these windings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not reveal their total secret.

Pursuing his unending questioning, Tolstoy seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with 0 = 0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows possible again, Tolstoy concluded. In two years Tolstoy came to the settled conviction that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.

As I interpret his melancholy, it was not due only to a chance physical causation, but to the clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the complications and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying. For him the eternal truths lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis lay in getting his soul in order, discovering its genuine habitat and vocation, and escaping from falsehoods into ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, most of us may feel as if it might be better if we could.

Bunyan's recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ. Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic constitution and the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-conformity, his life was turned to active use. He became a peacemaker and doer of good, and the immortal Allegory that he wrote has brought the very spirit of religious patience home to many readers.

But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe many levels deep. They both realized a good that broke the effective edge of their sadness, yet the sadness lived on as a leitmotif in the song of faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness by which such extreme sadness could be overcome.

Tolstoy does well to talk of faith as that by which men live, for it is a stimulus, an excitement, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that at other times made life seem unbearable. For Tolstoy's perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church; the vain conceit of the professions; the meanness and cruelty that goes with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. Bunyan also left this world to the enemy. The hue of resolution is there, but the full flood of ecstatic liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan's soul.

These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the phenomenon technically called Conversion. In the next lecture I shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.

Lecture IX – Conversion

Conversion denotes the process, gradual or sudden, wherein a person who feels divided, and consciously wrong and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right and happy by getting hold of religious or spiritual realities. Phrases for this personal transformation include to be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, or to ‘get’ religion. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring about such a moral change.

Before entering upon a more detailed study of the process, let me enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related in a scarce American pamphlet. This case shows how these inner alterations may reveal one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of character lay disposed in a series of layers, a subconscious world of whose existence we have no anticipatory knowledge.

Bradley thought that he already had been fully converted at the age of fourteen in 1820, whereby he ‘rejoiced with trembling,’ and wanted all mankind to share his love of God. Nine years later Bradley heard of a revival of religion in his neighborhood. Many of the young converts would come to him in meeting and ask if he had religion, to which he said he hoped so. This did not appear to satisfy them; they said they knew they had it. He requested them to pray for him, thinking that if he had not got religion after so long a time professing to be a Christian, that it was time he had. One Sunday evening, after attending a particularly solemn and fearful Methodist sermon on judgement day, he ‘began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit,’ – a racing heartbeat made him at first think something was wrong, though he felt no pain.

He began to feel exceedingly happy, which happiness ‘took complete possession’ of his soul, and did not stop until he felt unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the meantime, while thus exercised, a thought arose in his mind, what can it mean? The following morning he decided not to tell his parents about the experience until he had first looked into the Bible. He went directly to the shelf and looked into at the eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed almost to speak and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if his feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. ‘After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion, which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in public before,’ he said.

So much for Bradley and his conversion, whose effect upon his later life we gain no information. Now for a more detailed survey of what constitutes the conversion process. Open the chapter on association of any book on psychology and you will read that a person’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each aim awakens a specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates, and if the aims and excitements are distinct, their groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present and engrosses a person’s interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from the mental field.

Office workers who go camping in the wilderness change their system of ideas from top to bottom. The usual anxieties lapse into the background entirely; routine habits are replaced by the habits of a child of nature, and those who knew the people only as busy managers would not recognize them as campers. If now they should never go back to town, and never again let business or professional interests to dominate their thinking, they would be permanently transformed people. Our ordinary changes of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them so rapidly succeeds another. However, when one aim grows so stable as to expel its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to marvel at the phenomenon as a transformation.

These alternations are the most complete ways in which a self may be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of way and instigates activity, while the others are only pious wishes, and never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine's aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another would be the chief executive in his full pride of office, wondering whether it was not all vanity, and the life of a woodchopper not the more wholesome destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere whimsies. They exist on the remote outskirts of the mind, and the real self of individuals, the center of their energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes on, we experience a constant change of interests, and a consequent change of rank in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central consciousness.

I remember, for instance, that one evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper about Lord Gifford's will founding these four lectureships. At that time I did not think of being a teacher of philosophy, and what I listened to was as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper place and center. When I say soul, you need not take me in the ontological sense unless you prefer to, for although language of the science of being is instinctive in such matters, Buddhists or followers of philosopher David Hume’s theory of empirical causation can perfectly well describe the facts. For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness. Each field of consciousness has a focal part, or sub-field, that contains the excitement and serves as the center from which aims can be drawn.

Talking of this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it from the rest, words like here and now, me and mine; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions there, then, that, etc. But a here can change to a there, and vice versa, and what was mine and not mine change their places. What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters. Things hot and vital to us today may become cold tomorrow. It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies. The hot centers of our dynamic energy contrast with the cold parts, which leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness. Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no importance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own experience the facts which I seek to designate by it.

Now the emotional interest may swing between hot and cold, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain system. And then, if the change be a religious one, we call it a conversion, especially if it be by crisis, or sudden. Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in individuals’ consciousness, the group of ideas to which they devote themselves, and from which they work, call it the habitual center of personal energy. It makes a great difference to people whether one set of ideas, or another, be the center of their energy; and it makes a great difference whether those ideas become central or remain peripheral in them. To say that people are ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in their consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual center of energy.

Now if you ask of psychology just how the excitement shifts in a person’s mental system, and why aims that were peripheral become at a certain moment central, psychology leads us to reply that although we can give a general description of what happens, we are unable in a given case to account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an observer nor the person who undergoes the process can explain how particular experiences are able to change one's center of energy so decisively, or why the change so often occurs only after the subject is in extreme emotional circumstances.

We repeatedly have a thought, or perform an act, but one random day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act suddenly turns into a moral impossibility. There are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones, and when one grows hot and alive within us everything has to re-orient itself to the new reality. We may say that the heat means that the motor efficacy of the idea, long deferred, is now operative, but such talk misses the point of why the impulse to change now moves us to act. Our explanations then get so vague and general that one realizes again the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon. In the end we fall back on the much-used symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium.

A mind is a system of ideas, each idea arousing an excitement, and each tending either impulsive or inhibitive. The ideas mutually check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies change as the person ages. Interstitial change may undermine or weaken a mental system, just as it may do so to a building, and yet for a time the mind keeps upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or any occasion that reveals the organic change, can make the whole fabric fall together. Then the center of gravity settles into a more stable attitude. The new ideas that take center stage seem to lock in, and the new structure remains permanent.

Formed associations of ideas and habits usually slow such changes of equilibrium. New information speeds the changes, and the gradual mutation of our instincts and propensities has an enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously or half unconsciously. And when you get people in whom the subconscious life—of which I must speak more fully soon—is largely developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get cases of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to them and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel. Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are very powerful in precipitating mental rearrangements. Everybody knows the sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, anger or the like can seize upon a person. Hope, happiness, and all emotions characteristic of conversion can be equally powerful. And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Edwin D. Starbuck of California showed via statistical survey how closely the ordinary conversion occurring in young people brought up in evangelical circles parallels the normal adolescent growth into a larger spiritual life. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same: a sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And the result is the same: a happy relief and objectivity as self-confidence increases through adjustment of the faculties to a wider outlook.

In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from evangelist revival examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and molting-time of adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences that astonish the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revival-type conversion. The analogy is complete, and Starbuck soundly concluded that conversion is in essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the small universe of youth to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. Starbuck also said that ‘conviction of sin’ phenomena last about one-fifth as long as the periods of adolescent storm and stress, but are much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them:

Theology takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of storm and stress.... The essential distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the period by bringing the person to a definite crisis.[73]

Starbuck mainly has in mind here conversions of ordinary persons who have been kept true to a pre-appointed type by instruction, appeal, and example. They affect a particular form as a result of suggestion and imitation. If they went through their growth crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable), its particulars would be different. People in Catholic lands, for example, and in Episcopalian sects, feel no such anxiety and conviction of sin as is usual in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual needs less emphasis on personal acceptance of salvation.

No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards:

Experience plainly shows that God’s spirit is unsearchable and untraceable in some of the best of Christians, in the method of his operations, in their conversion. Nor does the Spirit of God proceed discernibly in the steps of a particular established scheme, one half so often as is imagined. A scheme of what is necessary, and according to a rule already received and established by common opinion, has a vast, (though to many a very insensible) influence in forming persons’ notions of the steps and method of their own experiences.[74]

But every imitative phenomenon must have its original, and I propose that for the future we keep to the more first-hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found in sporadic adult cases. James H. Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of conversion, subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as the feeling of un-wholeness, of moral imperfection, accompanied by the yearning for the peace of unity. The word ‘religion’ is getting more and more to signify the conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and its release, he said, with the sin ranging from drunkenness to spiritual pride, the sense of which may crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of any physical misery.[75]

This description covers an immense number of cases. One good example is that of Samuel H. Hadley, who after his conversion became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. He became a homeless, friendless, dying alcoholic who had pawned or sold everything that would buy a drink. Hadley had promised himself that before he became a tramp he would make his home at the bottom of the river, but had never imagined that the crisis would him unable to walk even one quarter of the way to the river. As he sat in a Harlem saloon thinking on his plight, he was suddenly overwhelmed with God consciousness. The following evening he went to the rescue mission and heard many people testify of their salvation, which inspired him to ask God to save him:

[I] seemed to feel some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner's friend. I walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen before morning. ... From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and I have been trying to do mine.’[76]

Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of drunkards' conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. But in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, it corresponds to the subjectively centered form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one—you remember Tolstoy's case. So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the center of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible, or their inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in origin. Inhibitive beliefs about the world may check the natural tendency of religious faculties to expand. Many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, now find themselves frozen in pessimistic and materialistic beliefs. Some people let themselves be cowed by the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, and so become afraid to use their instincts. Many persons never overcome such inhibitions. To the end of their days they refuse to believe, and their personal energy never gets to its religious center, which remains inactive until death.

In other persons the trouble is more profound. There are people unfeeling on the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to reckless animal spirits, so the spiritually barren nature may admire and envy faith in others, but can never experience the enthusiasm and peace of those who are temperamentally qualified for faith. All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw may take place, some bolt be shot back in the most barren breast, and the person’s hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.

Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings that lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A music teacher says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: Stop trying and it will do itself![77]

There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the volitional type and the type by self-surrender respectively. In the willed type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is abundantly illustrated by Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth of our physical bodies does. Starbuck said:

An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays itself through him—when he loses himself in some great contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we are studying.[78]

We shall soon hear still more remarkable illustrations of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term ‘unconscious cerebration,’ which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective ‘unconscious,’ being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term subconscious or subliminal.

Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples, but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often startling.

I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radical. Even the most voluntarily built-up regeneration has passages of partial self-surrender interposed; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will has done its utmost to bring one close to the complete unification desired, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self-surrender becomes then indispensable.

St. John of the Cross says that a person who can see a little will resist being helped, but people who can’t see at all will stretch out their arms and be led to places that they don’t know. This behavior illustrates the phenomenon of admitting our powerlessness, which opens the way for God to enter our lives.

Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account—so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all—of the reasons why self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the minds of candidates for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the sin from which they are eager to escape; and, second, the positive ideal which they long to embody. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the sin almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is more escaping from hell than striving towards righteousness.[79]

Bill Wilson, who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio in June 1935, experienced a sudden conversion while in Towns Hospital in New York the previous December. He had ruined a promising career in the financial markets, had gradually sunk farther and farther into alcoholic misery, and was close to being committed to an institution when saved at the last moment. Wilson related the experience over twenty years later at a gathering in St. Louis:

My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the very bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything! Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, So this is the God of the preachers! A great peace stole over me and I thought, No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world. ...

More light on this came the next day. It was Ebby [a friend], I think, who brought me a copy of William James’ [sic] Varieties of Religious Experience. It was rather difficult reading for me, but I devoured it from cover to cover. Spiritual experiences, James thought, could have objective reality; almost like gifts from the blue, they could transform people. Some were sudden brilliant illuminations; others came on very gradually. Some flowed out of religious channels; others did not. But nearly all had the great common denominators of pain, suffering, calamity. Complete hopelessness and deflation at depth were almost always required to make the recipient ready. The significance of all this burst upon me. Deflation at depth yes, that was it. Exactly thathad happened to me.[80]

A person’s conscious wit and will strive towards an ideal, yet aim at something only dimly imagined. Yet all the while the inner forces of organic ripening march towards their result, and the person’s intentional efforts let loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement. All these deeper forces tend towards a definite psychic rearrangement, one decidedly different from what the subject consciously conceives and determines. Voluntary efforts that are slightly off true aim may consequently hinder the desired result.

Starbuck says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self in posse which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing center. What then must the person do? Saint Thérèse of Lisieux said to embrace imperfection, for that gives you the chance to let God take you as you are. Starbuck says the person must relax, fall back on the larger Power and let it finish in its own way the work begun. Describing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal center and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the rising of some objects above, and the sinking of others below the conscious threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible event. Starbuck is right when he says that self-surrender and new determination, though seeming at first sight to be such different experiences, are really the same thing. ‘Man's extremity is God's opportunity’ is the theological way of putting this need of self-surrender, while the physiological description would be, ‘Let one do all in one's power, and one's nervous system will do the rest.’ Both statements acknowledge the same fact.[81]

To state it in terms of our own symbolism, when the new center of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated long enough to be just ready to open into flower, ‘hands off’ is the only rule: it must blossom without help. We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. Throwing our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers more ideal than we are, and which hold our fate, requires self-surrender as the vital turning-point into the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of rituals and sacraments.

The whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted mainly in greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure liberalism or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the medieval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and Quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by individuals in their forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory rituals.

Psychology and religion up to this point both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individuals that bring redemption to their life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as subconscious, and speaking of their effects as due to incubation, or a subconscious thinking-through of the troubles, implies that they do not transcend the individual's personality. Herein the science diverges from the theology, which insists that the effects are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while. Continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.

Let us further consider the psychology of self-surrender. When you find persons living on the ragged edge of their consciousness, trapped in their sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell them that all is well –– don’t worry, be happy –– you seem to speak pure absurdity. Their only positive consciousness tells them that all is not well, and the better way you offer sounds as if you proposed to them to believe in a lie. The will to believe cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

There are only two ways to get rid of anger, worry, despair, or other undesirable emotions. One is that an opposite feeling should overpower us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop. We drop down, give up, and don't care any longer. Our emotional centers go on strike, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. We know that this state of temporary exhaustion often forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of faith cannot enter. But let the former faint away, even for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, once in may stay.

Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis of 1739 in the following words:

Here, in a mournful melancholy state I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray—though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless—for near half an hour; then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. ... My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce reflected that there was such a creature as myself. ... I felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with a different aspect...[82]

I have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious emotion hitherto habitual. In many if not most reports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous, yet they also often speak as if the higher drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But often there seems little doubt that both conditions—subconscious ripening of the one emotion and exhaustion of the other—must have happened simultaneously in order to produce the result. But beyond all question there are people in whom the higher condition bursts through all barriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood. These cases of instantaneous conversion are the most striking and memorable cases. We have heard one of them at length, but had better reserve the other cases and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.

Lecture X – Conversions (Concluded)

In this lecture we will finish the subject of Conversion, first considering those striking instantaneous cases of which Saint Paul’s is the most eminent. These snap conversions are often accompanied by huge inner upheavals that create a new emotional landscape, and that instant in time divides the suffering self from the free person liberated by the spiritual experience. Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious experience, owing partly to the role it has played in Protestant theology, and we should study it conscientiously on that account. Allow me to cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first. As Harvard biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one’s previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in.

The next case is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba, printed in the article already cited. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman, who took to drink and made his living as a journalist instead of as a minister, disappointing his family. In his words:

I was converted in my own bedroom in my father's rectory house at precisely three o'clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In fact, God was not in my thoughts that day.’ A quiet moment with a religious book found him suddenly moved: ‘I was now in God's presence ... feeling all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. ...What could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent. ... Then there crept in upon me so gently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after all? ... No words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty-four hours.[83]

So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion's fruits. I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but you see how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion can be to those who have the experience. Throughout the height of it they seem to themselves passive spectators of an astounding process performed upon them from above. There is too much evidence of this for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, theology says, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us and we partake of the very substance of the Deity.

That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for in this view, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not dogmatically, and a short time before his death, John Wesley wrote that among 652 members of his Society, every one of them without a single exception declared that their deliverance from sin had been instantaneous. Wesley said:

Had half of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was gradually wrought in them, I should have believed this, with regard to them, and thought that some were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneous work.[84]

All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ's blood, the sacraments, and ordinary religious duties are supposed to suffice for the individual's salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there has been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, and Christ's sacrifice is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthier-minded, on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individual models that it deems typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically the more complete.

In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of thinking led. In spite of saints of the once-born type existing, despite that there may be a gradual growth in holiness without a cataclysm, in spite of the obvious role of mere natural goodness in the scheme of salvation, revivalism has always assumed that only its type of religious experience can be perfect. You must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and only then be miraculously released. It is natural that those who personally have met such an experience should feel it as a miracle rather than a natural process. The subjects of instantaneous conversions often hear voices, see lights, or witness visions. They may experience automatic motor phenomena, and it always seems to them after the surrender of the personal will as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover, the sense of renewal, safety, and rightness can be so marvelous and joyful as to warrant belief in a radically new nature. Conversion is not putting in a patch of holiness, but weaving holiness into all the person’s powers, principles, and practice. Sincere converts feel made of new material; from the soles of their feet to the crowns of their heads they are new people.

Bill J. Leonard, a professor of Baptist studies and church history at Wake Forest School of Divinity, in a 2015 lecture shared an anecdote of instantaneous conversion:

... heard the testimony of a 20-something Appalachian named Adam, who recounted a life of –– this is his word –– youthful screw-ups, cooking meth, drinking hard, driving fast, all brought to a cathartic end by a pickup crash in which he and his friends were all spared from what should have been certain death. Realizing the grace of that terrible moment, Adam says, quote, he received Christ as his personal Lord and Savior in a dramatic conversion, much to the delight of his Free Will Baptist mother, who shouted God's praises, he said, all over the house. Adam calls it a miracle of God. Now he preaches at the county jail, where he knows he would have wound up, but for the fact that none of his friends died in the wreck. And the judge, like Jesus, gave him a second chance. Adam got saved hard, he says. A conversion story so transforming that one of the seminarians in our class observed, even the Presbyterian students were brought to tears.[85]

Such quotations well express well the doctrinal interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation may have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies, they have been an original and unborrowed experience in countless individual instances. Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down the human liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of our most curious peculiarities.

What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present more than in any change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes of human beings, even among the apparently born again, of which the one class really partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of our interior life?

Before proceeding to answer this question, please listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of centers of personal energy and the lighting up of new crises of emotion, phenomena partly due to conscious processes of thought and will, but also largely due to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. Let us now consider in a more concrete way the subconscious region in which such processes of flowering may occur. I only regret that my limits of time here force me to be so brief.

The expression ‘field of consciousness’ has only recently come into vogue in psychology, supplanting the single ‘idea’ supposed to be a definitely outlined thing and the most important unit of mental life. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness. As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its center of interest, around which the objects of which we are less conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.

Different individuals enjoy varying levels of keenness of perception, depending on their makeup. Great organizing geniuses usually enjoy vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole program of future operations appears dotted out, its rays pointing the way to advance. Ordinary people never see this magnificent and inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their way from point to point, and often stop entirely. Certain diseases reduce consciousness to a mere spark, with no memory of the past or thought of the future, and narrow the present down to one simple emotion or sensation of the body.

This field formula marks the haziness of the margin. Unaware as we may be of the matter in the margin, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next focus of our attention. The subconscious surrounds us like a magnetic field, inside of which our center of energy turns like a compass needle, as the present phase of consciousness slides into its successor. Our whole store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire network of residual powers, impulses, and knowledge that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. The porous and imprecise nature of the border between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life makes it hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.

The ordinary psychology, fully admitting the difficulty in defining the marginal area, nevertheless takes for granted that all the consciousness the person now has exists in the field of the moment, however hazy the map. Second, psychology says that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all. And having reached this point, please recall what I said in my last lecture about the subconscious life, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant by such a statement.

The most important step forward in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual center and margin, but an addition to it of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. Unlike other advances in psychology, this discovery reveals to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step forward in psychology can make any such claim as this. In particular, this discovery of a subliminal consciousness casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. Accounts of the evidence for such a consciousness is set forth in many recent books, Alfred Binet's Alterations of Personality being as good a one as any to recommend.[86]

Our demonstrations so far have been rather limited and eccentric, consisting of unusually suggestible hypnosis subjects and hysteric patients. Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree. The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subjects themselves may not understand even while uttering it.

Generalizing this phenomenon, Frederic Myers has given the name of automatism, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to uprushes into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind. The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act—ordinary or eccentric, it makes no difference—after waking from the hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have instructed that the act must ensue, they perform it. But in so doing they have no recollection of your suggestion, and always improvise a pretext for the behavior if the act was eccentric. It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, with no inkling on the subject's part of its source.

The wonderful explorations by Alfred Binet, Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, reveal to us whole systems of underground life in the shape of painful memories. These haunting memories lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness and irrupting thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind.

Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patient immediately gets well. The symptoms were automatisms, in Myers's sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy tales when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy. The path having been once opened by these first observers, similar observations have been made elsewhere and collectively throw a new light upon our natural constitution.

These new observations also make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting the unknown after the analogy of the known, hereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of all to learn whether it is an explosion into the fields of ordinary consciousness of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore, for its source in the subject's subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories have to be extracted from the patient's subliminal mind by a number of ingenious methods. In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the source by analogy also should be in subliminal regions, areas of the subconscious that improvements in our methods may be able to tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed, but the assumption involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of people must play their part.

The reader will here please note that in my exclusive reliance in the last lecture on the subconscious incubation of motives deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted principles of explanation as far as one can. Psychologists now admit the subliminal region is a place that exists for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether unconsciously or consciously registered), and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining such a tension that they may at times enter consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is scientific to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reaching the bursting point. But candor obliges me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results for which it is hard to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation. Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture III were of this order; and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to the subject of mysticism. The cases of  Bradley and Ratisbonne, and possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained. The result then could be ascribed either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a discharging lesion like that of epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the latter case named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in order that you may realize that the subject is really complex. But I shall keep myself as far as possible at present to the more scientific view; and only as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That subconscious incubation explains a great number of them, there can be no doubt.

And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous conversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, and of being effected by a higher control. Forget for the moment the question of their value for the future spiritual life of the individual, and consider them on their psychological side exclusively. Many peculiarities in these sudden transformations remind us of what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of the other.

 Instead, it might be a simple psychological peculiarity, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences may come, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness. I do not see why Methodists or persons of strict piety need object to such a view. Recall one of the conclusions in my very first lecture, in which I argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.

Well, how is it with these fruits? If we skip the class of preeminent saints whose halos light up history, and consider only the ordinary recipients of instantaneous conversion, you will probably agree that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature flashes like lightning from them, or sets them apart from people who have never experienced that favor. If a suddenly converted person is entirely different from a natural one, partaking directly of the divine substance, there should be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the lowliest specimen of this genus. Such a signal characteristic would prove that person more excellent than even the most highly gifted among mere natural mortals. But notoriously there is no such radiance. Converted people as a class are indistinguishable from natural persons; indeed, some once-born people even excel some converted ones in their fruits, and no one could pick one from the other by random sample.

Believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had to admit that there is no unmistakable characteristic distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices, visions, and sudden insights into the meaning of scripture texts, all may come naturally, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit in the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine servant of God, the patient heart, the love of oneself eradicated––characteristics also found in those who pass no crisis, and even outside of Christianity altogether. Throughout Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections there is not one decisive trait that unmistakably separates the blessings of a snap conversion from what may possibly be only a high degree of natural goodness. In fact, his book unwittingly argues in favor of the thesis that no great gulf exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and regeneration are matters of degree.

Whatever differences there may be between these classes of human beings, a conversion is often extraordinarily momentous to the individual who gets converted. There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a flood but goes above one's head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest center of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher someone else's center may be. A small salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts for the person experiencing it, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelism look discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all? If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural individuals and converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes.

The forms of regenerative change have no general spiritual significance, but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck's laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe, has analyzed the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for conversion, and the results confirm the view that sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose transformation had been striking, defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth, however rapid.[87]

Candidates for conversion at revivals are often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his seventy-seven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a subclass which he calls spontaneous, that is, fertile in self-suggestions, as distinguished from a passive subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking transformation belonged. He infers that self-suggestion of impossibility prevents the influence upon these persons of an environment which, on the more passive subjects, easily brings the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are difficult in these regions, and Coe's numbers are small. But his methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect, and seem to justify his conclusion. He concludes that a person with pronounced emotional sensibility, tendency to automatisms, and passive suggestibility will likely experience a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind, if exposed to a converting influence.

Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of a sudden conversion? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says, for ‘the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of how it happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained.’ The subject of a snap conversion often gains an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level in which impossible things have become possible, with new energy and endurance. The personality is changed, the person is born anew, whether or not their psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to the metamorphosis. Sanctification is the technical name of this result, and we shall soon see examples of it.

In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself. I do believe that if the Subject has no liability to such subconscious activity, or if their conscious fields have a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, any conversion must be gradual, and resemble any simple growth into new habits. Possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or porous margin, is thus a necessary condition of becoming converted in the instantaneous way.

Referring a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the possibility of the direct presence of the Deity altogether –– as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the subliminal, their ordinary sense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account for all their usual automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy subliminal might remain ajar or open.

Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature in conversion might in some cases be interpreted as the orthodox do: forces transcending finite individuals might impress them, on condition of their being what we may call subliminal human specimens. But in any case the value of these forces would have to be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than diabolical. This is the way in which I prefer you to see the topic until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope to gather these dropped threads into more definitive conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly should not sway us to exclude all notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door.

Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of higher control. It is not always present, but very often. We saw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of his own conversion in the summer of 1827. He wrote:

My sadness was without limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external acts to the most secret thoughts... It was then that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource save in some influence from without. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature.[88]

Such experiences show how well Protestant theology fits with the structure of the mind. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resources. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and divine grace through Christ's sacrifice is such a gift. Luther said that God is the God of the miserable and oppressed, even of those that are brought to nothing, and that a sense of our own righteousness can block divine action in our souls. Even when reduced to despair we bargain, promising to change our ways if saved from damnation. ‘If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given?’ said Luther.[89] In other words, the more lost you are, the more you are the very being whom Christ’s sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal experience.

As Protestants are not all sick souls, reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion. But the wildfire contagiousness of his view of Christianity, when it was a new and quickening thing, shows how well that view fits the deeper parts of our human mental structure. Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But the other part of Luther's faith is far more vital, something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance that I, this individual I, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever. Professor Leuba rightly asserts that the conceptual belief about Christ's work is really accessory and non-essential, and that the ‘joyous conviction’ can also come by many other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith par excellence. When the sense of estrangement breaks down, the individual lives in the universal life, at one with God, nature and humanity:

That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions. On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions.[90]

The characteristics of the affective experience, which should be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity unless one has been through the experience one's self. The central characteristic is the loss of all worry, the sense that all is ultimately well, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty of God's grace, justification, and salvation is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians. However, this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same—you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate, and many might be cited where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing center of this state of mind. The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says, and usually the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.

A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. An appearance of newness beautifies every object, the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world that is experienced by melancholy patients. This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the most common entries in conversion records. Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:

After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.[91]

Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, recorded his sense of newness thus: ‘I said to the Lord:

Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart for what he had done for a poor sinner like me... I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.[92]

Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I take the two following from Starbuck's manuscript collection. One woman said, ‘It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy.’ The next case is that of a man, who said, ‘When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed changed.’

This man's case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling an element at revivals since these became a regular means of gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi-miraculous proofs of power on the part of the Holy Ghost, but great divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against critics, and their value has long been matter of debate even within the revivalist-type denominations.[93]

The automatisms have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes a conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation must be ascribed to the subject's having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the subject's own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck's correspondents writes, for instance, that ‘the subject works his emotions up to the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest degree.’

One form of sensory automatism deserves special notice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms, to use the term of the psychologists. Saint Paul's blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort, as does Constantine's cross in the sky. The last case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain. Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. Revivalist preacher Charles G. Finney, later president of Oberlin College, gave a powerful description of his own spiritual enlightenment as a young man studying law:

Mr. Gale, my minister, was standing at the door of the church, and as I came up, all at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me, in a manner most marvelous. The day was just beginning to dawn. But all at once a light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me to the ground. In this light it seemed as if I could see that all nature praised and worshipped God except man. This light seemed to be like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It was too intense for the eyes. I recollect casting my eyes down and breaking into a flood of tears, in view of the fact that mankind did not praise God. I think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on his way to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I could not have endured long.[94]

Such reports of photisms are indeed common. Here is one from Starbuck's collection, where the light appeared evidently external: ‘Realization of conversion was very vivid, like a ton's weight being lifted from my heart; a strange light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark); a conscious supreme bliss...’ Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called peyote mescal by the Mexicans: ‘When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.’ These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, but for many converts the light is literal as well as figurative.

The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis is the ecstasy of happiness produced. We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add one more. Charles G. Finney’s is vivid:

Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings. No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.

Before I close this lecture, please allow me one word on the question of the transiency or permanence of these abrupt conversions. Knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, some of you make of these your apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile at so much hysterics. Psychologically, as well as religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shifts of character to higher levels. People lapse from every level—we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is well known not to be irrevocable, for instance, yet it reveals new flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its significance to men and women, whatever be its duration.

So with the conversion experience. That it should for even a short time show a human being the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity, this is what constitutes its importance, an importance that backsliding cannot diminish, although persistence might increase it. As a matter of fact, all the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which I have quoted, have been permanent. The most dubious case, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure, was the case of Ratisbonne. Yet those few minutes shaped his whole future. He gave up his project of marriage, became a priest, and founded at Jerusalem a mission for the conversion of the Jews. He showed no tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by the peculiar circumstances of his conversion, and in short remained an exemplary son of the Church until he died.

The only statistics I know of on the duration of conversions are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston. They embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical church-members, more than half being Methodists. According to the statement of the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the cases, 93 percent. of the women, 77 percent. of the men. Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 percent. are relapses from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of sentiment. Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith. Starbuck concludes that conversion brings with it ‘a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate.... In other words, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines.’

Lectures XI, XII, and XIII –– Saintliness

The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What were the practical fruits of such happy conversions as those we heard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens, for we began this empirical inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness, but to attain a spiritual judgment on the total value and positive meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness we have seen. First we must describe the fruits of the religious life, and then judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts.
This descriptive task ought to be the most pleasant portion of our business in these lectures. Some parts of it may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience are the finest things that history has to show. Here is the genuinely strenuous life, and to look at examples of such people encourages and uplifts us, refreshing us with clean moral air.

Our highest flights of charity and devotion, of patience and bravery, have been based on religious ideals. I can do no better than quote French literary historian Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve on the results of conversion or the state of grace:

Through all the different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which help to produce this state [of grace] ... it is easy to recognize that it is fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits... there is veritably a single fundamental and identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received grace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one's self, accompanied with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother...[95]

Sainte-Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in mind, the instructive ones that we also should consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from other people that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin, therefore, by asking a general psychological question as to what inner conditions may make one human character differ so extremely from another. I reply at once that where character is concerned, apart from the intellect, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in our differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement, and in the different impulses and inhibitions which these bring in their train. Let me make this more clear.

Our moral and practical attitude at any given time is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. Yes! yes! say the impulses; No! no! say the inhibitions. Few people realize how constantly this factor of inhibition contains and molds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids trapped within the cavity of a jar. The influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more free and easy. But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face covered with shaving cream because a house across the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if it be a question of saving her baby's life or her own.

Take self-indulgent people’s lives in general. They will yield to every inhibition set by their disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds them obedient to its no. But make a parent of them, and what have you? Possessed by a caring instinct, they now confront disturbed sleep, weariness, and toil without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive power of pain over them is extinguished wherever the child’s interests are at stake. The inconveniences endured for this child’s sake have become subsumed in the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.

This is an example of what you have already heard of as the expulsive power of a higher affection. But be the affection high or low, it makes no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In one of Henry Drummond's discourses he tells of an inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains. The tiger's habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new center for his character.

Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are mixed together. In that case one hears both yeses and noes, and the will is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him towards various courses if his comrades offer examples. His person becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away. The fury of his comrades' charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitions are quelled. Their pleas to resist are not only not heard, they do not exist. ‘To hell with wife, to hell with child, My aims are for far higher things; Let them beg, if they’ve nothing to eat—My Emperor, my Emperor captured!’ cries the grenadier, frantic to save the day; and men trapped in a burning theatre have been known to cut their way through the crowd with knives.[96]

In other words, great passions reduce to nothing the ordinary inhibitions set by conscience. And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not be overpowered by some other emotion, provided that other emotion be intense enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a higher affection. If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in order—we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us. Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.

One mode of emotional excitability has a peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions, and that is anger. What in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper, in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience and grim determination. An earnest person is willing to live with energy, even though the energy brings pain. Whether it means pain to other people or pain to one’s self makes little difference. When the temper runs high, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger, for as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes anger so valuable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights can be trampled with ferocious pleasure the moment they get in the way of a sacred cause. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. We take a stern joy in the contraction and desolation; and weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for such sacrifice, of which one's own inferior self and its soft habits must often be the targets. 

So far I have spoken of temporary changes produced by shifting excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of character of different persons are also explained in a similar way. In an individual liable to strong emotion, whole ranges of inhibition habitually vanish, which in other persons remain effective, and other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn capacity for certain emotions, their life differs strangely from that of ordinary people, for none of the usual deterrents check the impulse. If we take a person who only wants to be a great lover or fighter and compare them to an individual for whom the desired passion is a gift of nature, we see how voluntary action is inferior to instinctive action. The struggling one has to overcome inhibitions, while the person with the innate passion seems not to feel them at all, as if born free of all that inner friction and nervous waste. To a George Fox, who founded the Quakers, or to Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, or to radical abolitionist John Brown, the obstacles all-powerful over those around them are as if non-existent.

Could more of us disregard these obstacles there might be many such heroes, for many people wish to live for similar ideals, and only lack the fury needed to sweep aside their inhibition. The higher excitabilities give courage, and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes for a different person, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people courage innately runs so high that the mere hint of danger sparks it to life, though danger is for most people the great inhibitor of action.

The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure driving the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently acquired. In the words of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, an artist who chose to put his faith in science rather than religion: ‘This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’[97]

Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, or enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality, our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun. This auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling emotion is religious.

We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of the religious state that form the special subject of our lecture. People living in their religious center of personal energy, and actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differ from their previous selves in definite ways. The new ardor in their hearts makes inaudible the lower naysaying voices that used to beset them, and keeps these individuals immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of their nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside has fallen, the hardness of heart has melted. The rest of us can imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary melting moods into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we weep, for our tears break through an inner dam and let all ancient sins and moral failings drain away, leaving us washed and soft of heart, open to every nobler leading.

With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted sway. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted emotions. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis, but in either case it may have come to stay.

At the end of the last lecture we saw how the higher insight won in a moment of grace can become permanent, even though the convert might backslide when fevered emotions cool and meaner motives temporarily prevail. We know that lower temptations may remain completely powerless, apart from transient emotion. The person’s habitual nature seems to have changed, as shown by documentary evidence in certain cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the twice-born character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed alcoholics and drug addicts.

In the liner notes to his 1965 masterpiece album, A Love Supreme, jazz composer John Coltrane recounted how Grace saved him from the hell of heroin addiction and infused him with gratitude:

During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. As time and events moved on, a period of irresolution did prevail. I entered into a phase which was contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path; but thankfully, now and again through the unerring and merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been duly re-informed of His OMNIPOTENCE, and of our need for, and dependence on Him. At this time I would like to tell you that NO MATTER WHAT ... IT IS WITH GOD. HE IS GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL. HIS WAY IS IN LOVE, THROUGH WHICH WE ALL ARE. IT IS TRULY – A LOVE SUPREME.[98]

You recollect the case of Hadley in the last lecture, and the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances. You also remember the graduate of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite. The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Spears the colonel said: ‘I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a suckling child; nor did the temptation return to this day.’ Webster's words on the same subject are these: ‘One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any other.’[99]

Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and habits reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism. For example, here is a case from Starbuck in which a sensory automatism brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been unable to effect. The woman subject writes:

When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said, Louisa, lay down smoking. At once I replied, Will you take the desire away? But it only kept saying: Louisa, lay down smoking. Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again.[100]

Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of relatively quick cure of bad habits with which the patient had struggled in vain. Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door. But just how anything operates in this region is still unexplained. We shall now leave the process of transformation altogether, leaving it a psychological or theological mystery, and turn our attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter in how they may have been produced. The radical destruction of old influences may occur physiologically in the cerebral organ, but on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement. This spiritual fever at last becomes so high and strong as to be sovereign, and we do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not in another. We can only give our imagination help by mechanical analogies.

If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up by a lever from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, will tumble back or relapse under the continued pull of gravity. But if it rotates far enough to shift its center of gravity, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and rest there permanently. The pull of gravity towards A has vanished, and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from that direction. In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it produces are unstable, and the person relapses into the original attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point is passed, and there follows an irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new nature.

The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is saintliness. I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of sanctimoniousness that sometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exact combination of affections which I go on to describe. The saintly character is the character for whom spiritual emotions are the habitual center of personal energy. In his lectures on Christian mysticism, Anglican priest and author William Ralph Inge said that people of preeminent saintliness:

tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.[101]

There is a certain composite snapshot of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced. They are these:

1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but sensible, of the existence of an ideal power. In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God, but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, as I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.

2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing surrender to its control.

3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down.

4. A shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections, towards yes, yes and away from no, where the claims of the non-ego are concerned.

These fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical consequences, namely, asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity:

a. Asceticism—The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn into self-immolation. It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh that some saints find pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing their degree of loyalty to the higher power.

b. Strength of Soul—The sense of enlargement of life may be so uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes their place.

c. Purity—The shifting of the emotional center first brings increase of purity. The person becomes more sensitive to spiritual discords, and feels impelled to wash away the brutal and sensual elements of life. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless severity.

d. Charity—The shifting of the emotional center secondly increases charity, and tenderness for fellow creatures. The ordinary motives to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among human beings, are inhibited. The saints love their enemies, and treat loathsome beggars as brothers.

I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the spiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so abundant. Since the sense of presence of a higher and friendly power seems to be the fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that. Our narratives of conversion showed how the world might look shining and transfigured to the convert. Apart from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like a dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the world's security.

In Walden, for example, Henry David Thoreau writes: ‘I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.’[102]

In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness becomes most personal and definite, banishing fear and granting the subject a great sense of peace and security. I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Charles Voysey:

It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God's unfailing presence with them in their going out and in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a love which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally ready to be safe or to meet with injury.[103]

More excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious literature, and the annals of Catholic saintship abound in records of ecstatic revelation or deliverance. I could easily weary you with their monotony.

Let me pass next to the charity and brotherly love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological virtues. Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood and sisterhood as people being an immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all. Christ utters the precepts: ‘Love your enemies, bless them who curse you, do good to them who hate you, and pray for those who despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ He gives for a reason: ‘That you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.’ The humility as to one's self and the charity towards others that characterizes spiritual excitement are results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief.

But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they harmonize with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coordinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, and cosmic emotion are all unifying states of mind in which the sand and grit of the ego incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule.

The world’s history of men, women and letters holds many examples of self-effacing service, and one that serves well here is that of Abraham Lincoln, as he effectively disappeared from his major speeches in the course of his presidency. We may ascribe his transformation to the pressures of leading the Union through four years of civil war. Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered just one month prior to his assassination, neither boasted of triumph nor hinted of blame. The process of his change into more prophet than president can be tracked over time, as noted by historian and biographer Ronald C. White: ‘In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln says nothing of himself. At a first hearing or reading, we are aware of what is being said and not of who is saying it. Yet at a second or third hearing or reading, Lincoln’s character, the ethos or credibility, which is the first principle of Aristotle’s rhetoric, is everywhere present.’[104]

The best thing is to describe faith as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim, but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly one from another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure. We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin.

In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie, Georges Dumas compares the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins, ‘sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period utter any but charitable opinions.’ And later, Dumas says of all such joyous conditions that ‘unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are the only affective states to be found in them. The subject's mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy.’[105]

Here we see an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life is no surprise. Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in narratives of conversion. Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human barriers, and the barrier between us and animals also. We read of André Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that ‘one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied:

This dog, whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow-feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings. Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him, but to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought both to lighten the condition of animals, whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ has made possible.[106]

Here, for instance, is an example of Christian non-resistance from Richard Weaver's autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist in his younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after drinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his flesh most perversely inclined. After his first conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man who had insulted a girl. Feeling that, having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a Christian man;—I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of heart is implied in his later conduct, wherein he literally turned the other cheek and let a fellow hit him in the face several times, meanwhile asking God’s forgiveness for the other man.[107]

Love your enemies! Mind you, not simply those who happen not to be your friends, but your enemies, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Eastern hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between individual and individual, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused? If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their lives would be morally discrete from the lives of other people. There are a few examples in our scriptures, the Buddhistic examples are legendary, and such love conceivably might transform the world. One example is where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar—having previously shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him.

Psychologically and in principle, the precept ‘Love your enemies’ is not self-contradictory. It is the extreme limit of a generosity of spirit that we know already, for example in the pitying tolerance of our oppressors. Yet if radically followed, the precept would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the present world's arrangements, that a tipping point would be passed, and we should be born into another realm of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach.

Love to enemies and anyone who is personally loathsome proves the inhibition of instinctive repugnance. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part, and along with charity we find humility, or the desire to forego distinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases.

Religious people seem strongly drawn to nursing the sick, even apart from church traditions being set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded, extravagances due only to the frenzy of self-immolation simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers, and many saints are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcers of their patients with their tongues, while the lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to think of, but which makes us admire and shudder at the same time.

So much for the human love aroused by the faith-state. Let me next speak of the calmness, acceptance, strength and patience that faith brings. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result, and it is easy to understand this, even without being religious one's self. In treating of the sense of God's presence, I spoke of the feeling of safety which one may then have. How could such a deep sense of divine safekeeping possibly fail to steady the nerves, cool the fever, and ease the worry, no matter what one's difficulties for the moment may appear to be? In deeply religious people the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only says, but feels, ‘God's will be done,’ is armored against every weakness. The whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious reformers proves the tranquil-mindedness that follows self-surrender, even under the most distressing circumstances.

The temper of the calm-minded individual differs according as the person is constitutionally somber or a cheerful. In the somber it partakes more of resignation and submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the solemn temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Jules Lagneau, a venerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at Paris:

My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole strength and my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, even in these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes will have been accomplished.[108]

There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Blaise Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament. He expresses still more amply the temper of self-surrendering submissiveness:

Deliver me, Lord, from the sadness at my proper suffering which self-love might give, but put into me a sadness like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make them an occasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one. You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.[109]

When we reach more optimistic temperaments the resignation grows less passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy, she said:

Some of my friends wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing which God does.... We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger. It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than this—that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father's choice.[110]

The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming autobiography, With Christ at Sea, by Frank Bullen. A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account:

It was blowing stiffly, and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship's bows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair's breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail I don't know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters.[111]

The annals of martyrdom tell of many triumphs of religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, Blanche Gamond, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV:

They shut all the doors, and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, Undress yourself, which I did. He said, You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off. They had so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, Does it hurt you? and then they discharged their fury upon me... But at this moment I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations.[112]

The transition from anxious responsibility and worry to calm, openness and peace is the most wonderful of all those shifts of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often. The chief wonder is that it so often comes about not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of responsibility for the self, this total surrender, seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious practice as distinguished from moral practice.

Personal surrender predates theologies, and exists independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, and ordinary neurological hygiene all insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of agreeing with every speculative creed. Christians who surrender strongly live in focused self-control, and are neither anxious for the future, nor worried about today. Saint Catharine of Genoa took notice of things only as they came into her field of consciousness in succession, moment by moment. Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.

American spiritual leader and guru Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now, explained it this way:

I was always time binding – when I was here with you, I was anticipating the fact that Saturday I’ll be at the temple, Sunday I’ll be flying to California... What’s changed now is that much more of the time... when I am ‘here,’ this is it, I am here, and when I’m not here, I’m not here. It’s interesting how when you give another human being, your family, or your business, the fullness of your being at any moment, a little is enough; while when you give them half of it, because you’re time binding with your mind, there’s never enough. You begin to hear the secret, that being fully in the present moment is the greatest gift you can give to each situation.[113]

The next religious symptom to note is what I call purity of life. The saintly person becomes very sensitive to inner inconsistency, and cannot tolerate mixed motives and questionable ethics. All the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Anything unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there also rises a passion for sacrifice of everything unworthy. Sometimes the spiritual ardor rules so strongly that purity is achieved at a stroke—we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest.

The ascetic forms of truth and purity of life are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, fought hard against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them most injuries was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social truth and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. George Fox perceived that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them in order to better align their actions with the spirit.

In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker who at one time worked as secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox's canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a short passage characteristic of spiritual sensibility:

By this divine light, then, I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils, and as such condemned in me.[114]

These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency between word and deed jarred some of them to protest. John Woolman wrote in his diary of having realized that the dyeing of cloth and fur hats was partly to please the eye and partly to hide dirt, and how this idea of masking uncleanliness came to be a spiritual burden to him. Though he was afraid of offending his friends and becoming estranged from them by behaving different from the crowd, he felt impelled to obey his heart, which told him to abandon the ‘customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom.’[115]

When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the one art in literature. And a slack life full of disorder and vague uselessness can no more have what we call character than literature can have it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as of actions, the holy-minded persons find that inner smoothness and cleanness, an order that they find torturous to see violated at every turn in secular life.

The pursuit of purity may be carried to extremes, and in this regard it resembles Asceticism. We apply the adjective ‘ascetic’ to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.

1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood by a person disgusted with too much ease.

2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and non-pampering of the body generally may be fruits of the love of purity. The subject may feel shocked by anything sensual.

3. These fruits of love may appeal to the subject as sacrifices they are happy to make for the Deity whom they acknowledge.

4. Ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs concerning atonement. The devotees may feel that they are buying freedom, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now.

5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on irrationally, by an obsession or fixed idea that comes as a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus do the subjects get their interior consciousness feeling right again.

6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures.

I will try to give an instance under each of these type headings in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of them alike. A strange moral transformation has swept over our Western world within the past century. We no longer think that we are called upon to face physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically.

The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world's order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of their day's work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into desuetude, if not discredit. Believers who flagellate or macerate their bodies today arouse more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly, even adding that perhaps it is as well not to waste time regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance.

Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive. Any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful for their own sakes might strike one as abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox. The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance.

Apart from the immediate pleasure that any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women can live on smiles and the word ‘yes’ forever. But for most people this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger and effort must be mixed in to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous, but whatever the mixture may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion for them. This, they feel, is my proper vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship that energizes my soul.

Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage, an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls. Some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest.

Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural selves; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.

When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures told us that Thomas Carlyle climbed into his bathtub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul's health to start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic: ‘Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.’

Such cases as these belong simply to our first type. In the next case we probably have a mixture of types 2 and 3, in which the asceticism becomes far more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck's manuscript collection: ‘I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any covering.’ The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and given it a market-value in the shape of ‘merit.’ But we see the cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneous need of character.

In another case we have a strongly pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. Methodism's first lay preacher, John Cennick, in 1735 became convicted of sin while walking in Cheapside, and immediately left off singing songs, playing cards and attending the theatre. Tyerman reported that Cennick sometimes:  

wished to go to a popish monastery, to spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day.... Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way rejoicing.[116]

In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and he makes sacrifices to purge sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural person generally has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self-mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of fear often having been used to encourage change, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to atone for wrongdoing and do penance is far too immediate and spontaneous an expression of self-despair and anxiety to be liable to any such reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of highly optimistic religious feeling.

Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, the parish priest of Ars, was a French country priest whose holiness was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need of sacrifice: ‘There is but one way in which to give one's self to God, that is to give one's self entirely and to keep nothing for one's self. The little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one suffer.’ Accordingly he determined never to smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling. The priest of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion. ‘This year, through all the cold, my feet have always been warm.’[117]

In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it under our type 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual and his maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather grotesque pedant, yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of what happened when his wife came to die? Mather said:

When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the Lord, I resolved with his help therein to glorify him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord, and in token of my real Resignation, I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She ... told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And though before that she called for me continually, she after this never asked for me anymore.[118]

Father Vianney's asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that anyone wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals.[119] The dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the love of worldly excitement and possession. All these sources of sin must be resisted, and discipline and austerity are the best ways of meeting them. Such spiritual guidebooks always have chapters on self-mortification. But whenever a procedure is codified, its more delicate spirit evaporates, and if we wish the undiluted ascetic spirit — the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its adoration — we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents.

Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished—or rather who existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him—in the sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose:

The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural passions: joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void... Let your soul therefore turn always not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest; not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful; not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts; not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation rather; not to rest, but to labor; not to desire the more, but the less; not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what is lowest and most contemptible; not to will anything, but to will nothing; not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world. Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.[120]

And now, as a more concrete example of types 4 and 5, in fact of all our types together, and of the irrational extremes to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso was one of the fourteenth century German mystics, and his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document:

He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to his navel. In this he used to sleep at night.... he devised something farther—two leathern loops into which he put his hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been on fire about him, he could not have helped himself.... If ever he sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore himself again and made fresh wounds. He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God required this of him no longer.[121]

Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. Suso next tells of his penitence by means of striking this cross and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his self-scourging—a dreadful story—and of many more years of self-mortification to extremes of bodily deprivation and harm. I spare you the recital of poor Suso's self-inflicted tortures from thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off.

His case is distinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation, which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable of actually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that:

Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. ‘Nothing but pain,’ she continually said in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable.[122]

So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain persons give rise.

In the ecclesiastically consecrated character, three minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and poverty which the monk vows to observe, and upon the heads of obedience and poverty I will make a few remarks.

First, of obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best-rooted Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand it.

On the lowest possible plane, the usefulness of obedience in an ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in everyone's life when one can be better counseled by others than by one's self. Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly often see them more wisely than we do. It is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But we also find good reasons for idealizing obedience on the higher plane of spiritual excitements.

Obedience may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and surrender to higher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they become ideally consecrated, and in obeying an individual whose fallibility we see through thoroughly, we nevertheless may feel much as we do when we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of any prudent benefit.

Catholic writers primarily conceive obedience as a sacrifice and mode of mortification, a sacrificial offering to God, of which we are both the priest and the victim. By poverty we immolate our exterior possessions; by chastity we immolate our body; by obedience we complete the sacrifice and give to God all that we yet hold as our own, our two most precious goods, our intellect and our will. The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God. Accordingly, in Catholic discipline we obey our superior not as mere human, but as the representative of Christ. Obeying God in that person by our intention, obedience is easy. But when the textbook theologians marshal collectively all their reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds rather odd to our ears.

Jesuit authority Alfonso Rodriguez, for example, said that:

One of the great consolations of the monastic life is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit no fault.... Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there were not something better that might have been done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior.... Saint John Climacus is of the same sentiment when he calls obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I was so ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse.[123]

Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience as the backbone of his order, and his letters provide insight into the full spirit of the Jesuit order. They are too long to quote, but he so vividly expresses his belief in a couple of sayings reported by companions that, though they have been often cited, I will ask your permission to recite them once more. An early biographer reports him as saying:

I ought on entering religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference between one Superior and another... but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like.... So must I be under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful. I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never opposes resistance.[124]

Our next topic shall be poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature, this is one more example of the ascetic paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the moment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold greed in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of obedience, I will also read you a page from his chapter on poverty. You must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of his own order, and bases them all on the text, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Rodriguez said:

If any one of you will know whether or not he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.

The Jesuit theologian then goes on to describe the practice of poverty in more detail, observing that Ignatius Loyola:

...wished the superiors to test their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a chance to make ever farther progress in perfection.... Among the various good reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a better opinion of our scholarship.[125]

Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it is worthwhile to examine the spiritual grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those being closest to common human nature. The opposition between the people who have and the people who are is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. The gentleman thanked God he was forever inaccessible to small and small-minded dealings, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation.

Knight-errantry embodied this ideal of the well-born man without possessions; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and entanglements. The claims which things make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards the empyrean ideal.

The Rev. George Whitefield said, “Everything I meet with seems to carry this voice with it,—‘Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes back, ‘Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of nestling,—in pity—in tender pity,—put a thorn in my nest to prevent me from it.”[126] 

The loathing of ‘capital’ with which our laboring classes today are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes: ‘Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have, Shall you become beautiful; You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones; Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy, but rather by discarding them... For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind; Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use and handle is an impediment.’[127]

In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based on doing or on being, and in responding to spiritual excitement some people throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or possession we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying it would be great to own a psalter, Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on the field of battle. And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis refused. From then on he denied all such requests, saying: ‘A man possesses of learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is known by its fruits.’[128]

But beyond this athletic attitude involved in doing and being, in the desire for not having there is something profounder still related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as we retain any secular safeguard, so long as we cling to any safe guarantee, so long is our surrender incomplete. The vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine rules us. We hold by two anchors, looking to God after a fashion, but also trusting in our usual plots and devices.

In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. Drunkards, or morphine or cocaine maniacs, offer themselves to be cured. They appeal to the doctor to wean them from the enemy, but they dare not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: they hide supplies of it among their clothing, and arrange secretly to have it smuggled in in case of need. Even so, incompletely regenerate persons still trust in their own expedients. Their money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patients keep beside the bed; they throw themselves on God, but if they should need the other help, there it will be also.

Everyone knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform, such as drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be unwilling to contemplate never being drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively, for good and all and forever, signifies one of those radical changes of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner person rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives in a new center of energy from this time on, and the turning-point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of nakedness and destitution.

Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life we hear this ever-recurring plea to fling yourself upon God's providence without any reservation whatever. Take no thought for the morrow, sell all you have and give it to the poor. Only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman much persecuted in her day by both Protestants and Catholics because she would not take her religion at second hand. As a young girl she begged the Lord to tell her what to do, and heard a voice, ‘Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself’:

She asked leave of her father to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave.... yet she went to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: That cannot be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money; you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here. This astonished her greatly.... and on Easter evening, having cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the going out, Where is thy faith? in a penny? she threw it away, begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone. Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burden of the cares and good things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God, with this only fear, lest she should be discovered and be obliged to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the world.’[129]

The penny may have been a small financial safeguard, but nonetheless posed a significant spiritual obstacle. Not till she threw it away could her character settle completely into the new equilibrium.

Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, the cult of poverty holds other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity: Naked came I into the world, etc.,—whoever first said that, possessed this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle; shams cannot save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his creatures. This sentiment, which seems in general to have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands, tends to nullify man's usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring to grovel on the common level before the face of God.

It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in practice. It is humanity, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ's saying, ‘Sell all thou hast and follow me,’ proceeds as follows:

Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you.... Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others.’[130]

But in all these matters of sentiment one must have been there one's self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple as these are mysteries that one must receive as gifts of birth, how much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have been considering? One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw.

Piety and charity exist on a different plane from worldly lusts and fears, and form another center of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation, as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain, so a supreme trust may render common safeguards odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one's hold of personal possessions.

The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe. This I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.

Varieties Reborn – Lectures XIV – XV –– The Value of Saintliness

We have now reviewed the more important of the phenomena regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of people who are devout. Today we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life. To parody Kant, I should say that our theme should be a ‘Critique of pure Saintliness’.

If we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man's perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it. Our perfection would be the fulfillment of our purpose; and our purpose would be union with our Maker. We could pursue that union along three paths: active, cathartic, (or cleansing), and contemplative, respectively; and progress along any path would be simple to measure by applying a number of theological and moral ideas and definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious experience would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands.

If convenience was everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you recall from our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. We cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part. We cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide that on the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned. ‘On the whole’ — I fear we shall never escape from that qualification, so dear to the practical person, so repugnant to the systematizing one!

I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot. You may think that skepticism or perverse choice can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. Allow me to persuade you from holding that opinion, and farther explain my empiricist principles.

Considered abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion's fruits in merely human terms of value. How can we measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If God really exists, then all a person’s conduct to meet the divine desires must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of their religion. The conduct would be unreasonable only in case God did not exist. If we were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of our subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, we would be making a theoretical mistake by assuming that the deity must be non-existent. In this case we would be setting up a theology of our own as much as if we were a scholastic philosopher in the Middle Ages trying to reconcile early Church Trinitarian dogma with the deductive logic of Aristotle.

To the extent of disbelieving absolutely in certain types of deity, I confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent. But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the product of experience gained over time. As people deepen their insight into nature, and progressively develop their social lives, nothing is more striking than the gradual change seen in their moral and religious tone. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory; the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in.

Today a god who should require actual sacrifices to appease him would be too bloody to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in its favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, the cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended such a god to our imaginations in eras when we respected coarse signs of power and could understand no others. We worshipped such deities because we relished such fruits.

Historic accidents doubtless always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological. When prophets, seers, and devotees founded a particular cult they bore witness to a deity worth something to them personally. They could use the god to guide their imagination, justify their hopes, and control their will, or even to safeguard against the demon and curb other people's crimes. In any case, they chose a deity for the value of the perceived fruits.

So soon as the fruits began to seem worthless, so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was soon neglected and forgotten. In this way educated pagans stopped believing in the Greek and Roman gods; thus we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic theologies. Protestants have dealt with the Catholic notions of deity in similar fashion, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions. This is how the Chinese judge of us, and how all of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.

Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their god seems to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty retributive justice, and a God without it would have struck them as not sovereign enough. But today we abhor the very idea of eternal suffering, and arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation to select individuals, which appears to us irrational and mean. Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods in earlier centuries also strikes people of later centuries with surprise.

We shall see examples from the annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his glory incomprehensibly enhanced thereby. On the other hand, the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.

Although we are compelled to employ a standard of theological probability in order to estimate the value of other people’s religion, this very standard has been born from the drift of common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of any disbeliefs inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.

If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us reinforce our demands on ourselves and on one another. I propose to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working principles. It is only the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs.

If we look at history candidly, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted. The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity is after all a reproach to the entire life of people in dealing with these matters. No religion has ever enjoyed certainty beyond dispute. In a later lecture I will ask whether theological reasoning can add objective certainty to a religion that already empirically prevails.

One word, also, about the reproach that in following this empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism. Since it is impossible to deny gradual changes in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to claim that one's own era cannot be corrected by the next. Skepticism cannot be ruled out as a possibility against which our conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability. But to admit one's liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. We are not willfully inviting skepticism. We who acknowledge the limits of our instrument, and make allowance for them in discussing our observations, are in a much better position to gain truth than if we claimed our instrument to be infallible.

Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted for claiming, as it does, to be undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, it only claimed reasonable probability for its conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as people who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had if unconscious of our liability to err. Nevertheless, dogmatism will likely continue to condemn us for this confession. The outward form of eternal certainty is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question. They will claim it even where the facts prove its folly.

The safe thing is to recognize that all our insights must be provisional. The wisest of critics is one who adapts to the better insight of the morrow, and claims to be right for the moment. When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to them, unfettered by our previous pretensions. Diverse judgments about religious phenomena are therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible.

Now a more fundamental question awaits us, whether we ought to expect people’s opinions to be absolutely uniform in this field. Should all people have the same religion? Should they approve the same benefits and follow the same leads? Are their inner needs so alike that they require exactly the same religious incentives? Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of people, so that some may benefit more from a religion of consolation and reassurance, while others get more good from one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judges or critics help being biased in favor of the religion by which their own needs are best met? They aspire to impartiality, but are too close to the struggle not to be to some degree participants, and they are sure to approve most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing to them.

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But please reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortals can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. We can gain more and more of truth by moving always in the right direction, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the end of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess.

In judging the value of religious phenomena it is very important to distinguish between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word religion, as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to organize themselves they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule then enter and contaminate the originally innocent thing, so that the word religion nowadays makes us think of some church or other. To some persons the word church suggests so much hypocrisy, tyranny, meanness and superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are ‘down’ on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.

But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. We are studying religious experience that lives within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked and lonely it comes into the world, and it has always driven those who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation in his Journal, referring to the time in his youth when religion began to ferment within him:

I fasted much, walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me. During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth.... For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, to rely on the Lord alone.[131]

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to others, it becomes a definite heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can from now forth can be counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubbling of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its supply of inspiration. Such an organization may adopt new movements of the spirit and use them for its selfish corporate designs. Of protective action of this politic sort, the dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples enough for our instruction.

People’s minds are built in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably have a firm footing. The baseness so commonly charged to religion's account is in almost all cases not at all due to religion proper, but rather to its wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And we can attribute most of the bigotries to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit is the sum of these two spirits of dominion, so please never confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life that are the exclusive object of our study. Baiting Jews, hunting heretics, stoning Quakers and ducking Methodists, murdering Mormons and massacring Armenians –– such violence is born of fear primeval. We all share the vestiges of this fear of the new, and all our defensive lashing out expresses our tribal hatred of the stranger, the eccentric, and the nonconformist much more than it proves any purported piety.

Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. The German emperor in 1900 sent his troops to China and told them to take no prisoners, and you believe as little as I do that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance. Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction. When the passions cool, piety may spur repentance in which the irreligious person would not take part.

For many of the historic aberrations charged to it, religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over-zealousness or fanaticism is one of its liabilities we cannot wholly acquit religion, so I will next remark upon that point. But I will make a preliminary comment that connects itself with much that follows.

Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has surely given you an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their aims by being blind for the time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We indulge a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michelangelo. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we also are glad for other ways of seeing life. So of many of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.

The fruits of religion, like all human products, are liable to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not blame the votaries; but it may be able to praise them only conditionally, as people who act faithfully according to their lights. They show us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked.

Every saintly virtue exemplifies error by excess, which in human faculties means usually one-sidedness or want of balance. It is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only other faculties equally strong be there to cooperate with it in action. Strong affections need a strong will, strong active powers need a strong intellect, and strong intellect needs strong sympathies to keep life steady. If the balance exists, no one faculty can possibly be too strong—we only get the stronger all-round character. In the lives of saints, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow. We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn—devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over these virtues in succession.

First of all let us take devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called fanaticism, which is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition). When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself.

In some cases, the one great merit of the worshiper is to adequately realize the merits of the idol.

The sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity.

Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted professional specialty within the tribe. Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Moslems venerate Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, instead of Abu-Bakr, his brother-in-law. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name and Ali's.

The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha and Mohammed and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes meant to be honorific, but which are simply outrageous and silly, and form a touching expression of our misguided propensity to praise.

An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity's honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity's enemies must be put to shame. In narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing preoccupation, and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel.

Between his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks. Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death, and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for execution. Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when freethinkers tell us that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.

Fanaticism must then be entered on the bad side of religion's account, so long as the religious person's intellect is of the type satisfied by the despotic kind of God. But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger. Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive. In gentle characters of intense devoutness and feeble intellect we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests –– though innocent enough, this is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a theopathic condition.

The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque serves as an example, as described by her biographer: To be loved here upon the earth, to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, with devotion,—what enchantment! But to be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction!—Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their reception.’[132]

Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary's life? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ's love so took over her life. Poor dear sister, indeed. Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.

A lower example still of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose ‘Revelations,’ a well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality for her undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.[133] In reading such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies.

What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being with whom our ancestors were so contented, particularly one interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors. Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.

Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women in history. She had a powerful intellect of the practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary style. She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals. Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment.

In spite of her sufferings there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploit them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her faults and imperfections in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with confusion at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of her temperament. She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them. But in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the devotee and the deity. Apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.

We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who cares to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and at the same time can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from childishness. So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual ideas that might guide it to bear useful human fruit.

The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers and friends are felt as interfering distractions, for when sensitiveness and narrowness occur together they require a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas aggressive pietists reach unity objectively, by forcibly stamping out disorder and divergence, retiring ones reach it subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which they eliminate discord altogether.

Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugitive, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuing the same object—to unify the life, and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. On this subject I refer to the work of Ernest Murisier, professor at the Academy of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But all strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find Murisier's book highly instructive.[134]

A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional society, then business, then family duties. Seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that bearable in the end. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone. For example, consider again the case of Henry Suso: ‘At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.’[135]

If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Ensconced in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The detailed uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a person of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest.

We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. His biographer reports him at the age of ten as follows:

‘The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God his own virginity—that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. ... In the use of schemes of defense, in flight from the most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril, just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of God's grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind.’[136]

He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue, and his greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought after false accusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of humility. Such was his obedience that, when a roommate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.

I can find no other fruits than these of his saintship. Aloysius Gonzaga died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as the patron of all young people. Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid little heed to social righteousness, and accounted it no discreditable scheme to leave the world to the devil while saving one's own soul. Today we deem helpfulness in general human affairs an essential element of worth in character, and reckon it a species of divine service to be of public or private use. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, had objective minds, and fought in their way for the world's welfare, so their lives today inspire us.

But when the intellect, as in this Aloysius, is originally no larger than a pin's head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. We see that purity is not the one thing needful, and it is better that a life should contract many a stain, rather than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. Resist not evil, Love your enemies, these are saintly maxims of which worldly people find it hard to speak without impatience. Are they right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth? No simple answer is possible. Here one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysterious way in which facts and ideals are interwoven.

Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actors, the objects for which they act, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if it either work by false means or addresses itself to the wrong recipient. No critics or judges of the value of conduct can confine themselves to the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.

Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect person’s conduct will appear perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. In other words, saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. In the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is punched, of hitting back and not turning the other cheek also. You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoy, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wrongdoer's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations. With their extravagances of human tenderness, the saints may be prophetic. Indeed, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transforming them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.

The human charity we find in all saints, and the great excess of it we find in some saints, is a genuinely creative social force. Charity tends to make real a degree of virtue that it alone sees as possible. The saints are authors and increasers of goodness. The potential in one human soul is unfathomable. Many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, and regenerated in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators. We never can be sure that anyone’s salvation through love is hopeless. The potential for development in any human soul can be likened to the potential of any particle to become supercharged. The Telescope Array in Utah, USA in 2021 recorded one of the most energetic particles ever known to strike the Earth. But where did it come from?, asked scientists associated with the National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA):

Dubbed Amaterasu after the Shinto sun goddess, this particle, as do all cosmic rays that strike the Earth's atmosphere, caused an air shower of electrons, protons, and other elementary particles to spray down onto the Earth below. ... Cosmic ray air showers are common enough that you likely have been in a particle spray yourself, although you likely wouldn't have noticed. The origin of this energetic particle, likely the nucleus of an atom, remains a mystery in two ways. First, it is not known how any single particle or atomic nucleus can practically acquire so much energy, and second, attempts to trace the particle back to where it originated did not indicate any likely potential source.[137]

We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the smoldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself today in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torchbearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they impregnate the world, vivify and animate potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another, and without their too-trusting belief in human worth the rest of us would stagnate in spirit.

Saint may waste their tenderness and be the dupes and victims of their charitable fever, but the charity itself plays a vital and essential role in social evolution. If we are ever to move upward, someone must be ready to take the first step and assume the risk. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly caution. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly methods are creative energies. Faith endows saints with an authority and impressiveness that makes them irresistible in situations where ordinary people cannot cope without the use of worldly caution.

This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saints’ magic gift to mankind. Not only does the vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but even when ill adapted, saints make some converts, and the environment gets better for their ministry. They are an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order. In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in a kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.

The next topic in order is Asceticism, a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The church has changed its attitude towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara today appear more like tragic frauds than sane people worthy of our respect. This change of attitude stems from the optimism and refinement of the modern imagination. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment? People who are emancipated from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike irrelevant and indifferent. They can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying: If you only love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. One of Ramakrishna's maxims is, ‘He needs no devotional practices whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of Hari.’[138]

And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called the ‘middle way’ to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure. The perfect life, he said, ‘is removed from both these extremes and has discovered the way which lies between them, the middle way which enlightens the eyes, enlightens the mind, which leads to rest, to knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nirvâna.[139] We find accordingly that as ascetic saints grow older, and directors of conscience become more experienced, they usually lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in God's service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestant circles today makes mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and we abhor the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor.

In consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some special benefit can be shown in some individual's discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological. Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of its particular acts, ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem.

The spiritual meaning of asceticism is the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes the belief in an element of real wrongness in this world, neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which we must squarely meet and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralize and cleanse away by suffering. In contrast, the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by ignoring it. Let people who escape suffering any great amount of evil also close their eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside their private experience, and they will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt is. Moreover it is but for the individuals one by one; and leaves the evil outside, unredeemed and unprovided for in their philosophy.

No such attempt can be a general solution of the problem; and to somber minds, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. For them optimism accepts a lucky personal accident in lieu of a real deliverance, a side-door escape. It leaves the general world unaided and still in the clutch of Satan. The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal application. We must meet and overcome pain, wrong and death, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If people have ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world's history fairly into mind—freezing, drowning, being buried alive, wild beasts, and hideous diseases—they find it hard to continue their own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that they may not be really inside the game, that they may lack the great initiation.

Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks, and it voluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something we must mourn, hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking person as a serious solution. Neat and cozy phrases of comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle.

In these remarks I am leaning only upon our common instinct for reality, which has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism. Heroism, we feel, hides life's supreme mystery within it. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for heroism. On the other hand, no matter what a people’s frailties otherwise may be, if they are willing to risk death, and still more if to suffer it heroically, the fact consecrates them forever.

Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life, and they are able to fling it away like a flower as caring nothing for it, we account them in the deepest way our born superiors. Each of us in our own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would make up for all our shortcomings. The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that they who feed on death possess life supereminently and excellently, and meet best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning.

Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander, asceticism must be part of the profounder way of handling the gift of life. Naturalistic optimism is mere whipped cream and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practical course of action for us, as religious people, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us today turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful.

The older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or terminated in the mere egotism of the individuals, increasing their own perfection. ‘The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away,’ said Ramakrishna.[140] But can we discard most of these older forms of mortification, and still find saner channels for the heroism that inspired them? Does not the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the spirit of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up today—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fiber? Are there not some points of application here for a renewed and revised ascetic discipline?

Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, just as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them. I read in an American religious paper that ‘when a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun, you may be sure that it is running away from Christ.’ Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight of many of our churches.

War and adventure keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible effort, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to deter us at all. Death becomes a commonplace affair, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. Nulling these customary inhibitions sets free ranges of new energy, and casts life upon a higher plane of power.

The beauty of war in this respect is that it so fits with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors. So the most insignificant individuals, when thrown into an army in the field, forget about their person being too precious to lose, and may turn into monsters of insensibility. Compare military self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, and we see a total difference in all their spiritual concomitants. Live and let live is no device for an army, writes a clear-headed Austrian officer. ‘War demands contempt for one's comrades, for the enemy troops, and above all for one's own person. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which his training must seek immediately to rid him. For the soldier victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for war's purposes they are incommensurably good.’[141]

These words are literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too insensitive to all our usual sympathies and respects that keep society functioning. Yet war is a school of strenuous life and heroism, and being of primal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against softness, delicacy and weakness, we reject the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion.

One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the boastful display of knowledge that infested it, there might be something like the moral equivalent of war that we are seeking. Could voluntary poverty be the strenuous life, without the need of crushing weaker peoples?

Poverty indeed is the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage, and the spiritual reform that our time stands most in need of.

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If people do not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem them spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the more Stoic indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared of material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and being doomed to manual labor, it is time to protest against so lame and irreligious a state of opinion.

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it breed cowardice and corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound individual must be a slave, while a person for whom poverty has no terrors becomes free. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces, yet while we lived we would bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions. Our question, you will remember, is whether religion stands approved by its fruits as exhibited in the saintly type of character. Non-religious individuals may be born with one or two characteristics of saintliness, but the whole group of attributes forms a religious combination; the sense of the divine is its psychological center.

Whoever strongly possesses this sense comes to believe that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields the believers a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social relations their serviceability is exemplary; they abound in impulses to help. The help flows inward as well as outward, for their sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common folk place it, in comfort, they place it in a higher level of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So they scorn no duty, however thankless; and when we need assistance, we can count upon the saints with more certainty than we can count on any other people. Finally, their humble-mindedness and ascetic tendencies save them from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and their purity makes them clean companions. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity — splendid traits.

But all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses. By the very intensity of their fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire them, saints can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal person would be in the same situation. We must judge them not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing them in their environment, and estimating their total function.

Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice to the individual, for in religious and theological matters people probably absorb narrowness from their generation. Moreover, we must not confound the essentials of saintliness with its accidents, which are the special determinations of holy passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the Middle Ages as bearing a hand in the world's work is to-day. Saint Francis or Saint Bernard, were they living to-day, would undoubtedly be leading consecrated lives of some sort, but likely not in seclusion. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead us to dismiss saintly impulses in their essential nature.

The most unfriendly critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche. He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in the predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of the latter. Your born saints, it must be confessed, have something about them which often makes the gorge of a carnal person rise, so it will be worthwhile to consider the contrast in question more fully.

Dislike of saintly behavior seems to be a negative reaction of the instinct to follow the leader, and to glorify the chief of the tribe. The chief or chieftess is the potential, if not the actual tyrant, the masterful, overpowering person of action. We confess our inferiority and grovel before them. We quail under their glance, and are at the same time proud of owning so dangerous a leader. Such instinctive and submissive hero-worship must have been biologically useful in primeval tribal life. In the endless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe's survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can have left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much struck with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances.

Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barnyard poultry. There are saints whose beard you may pull with impunity. Such persons excite no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; their consciences are full of scruples and returns; they stun us neither by their inward freedom nor their outward power; and unless they found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass them by with contempt.

As a matter of fact, such meek saints do appeal to a different faculty. Reenacted in human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler, wherein the blustery wind made the traveler wrap his cloak more tightly around his body, while the calm and quiet rays of the sun made the traveler remove the cloak. The sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping.

The saintly and the worldly ideals pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life, and occasionally real life turns up a blend of lamb and lion, such as when world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, (a.k.a. Cassius Clay), in 1967 refused induction into the United States military to fight in Vietnam, citing his beliefs as shaped by his membership in the Nation of Islam:

My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them, the little poor  black people, poor little babies and children and women. Just take me to jail...[142] But I would like to say there is another alternative. And that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my Constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.[143]

An all-white grand jury in Houston, Texas in May 1967 convicted Ali for failing to submit for induction, and the federal judge sentenced Ali with the maximum penalty: Five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Historian Dave Zirin said, ‘Anti-war sentiment was growing and it was thought that a stern rebuke of Ali would help put out the fire. In fact, the opposite took place.’[144] Protests in support of Ali happened all over the world, and by the time the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 overturned his conviction the war had become deeply unpopular in the United States.

The saints represent little but skulking subservience for Nietzsche. They are the sophisticated invalids, the degenerate, the people of insufficient vitality who go through life with eyes downcast. Their prevalence would endanger the human species. He says,

The sick are the great danger of man, not the evil, not the beasts of prey. They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instill the most dangerous venom and skepticism into our trust in life, and in ourselves. Where shall we escape from it, from that covert look (from which we carry away a deep sadness), from that averted look of him who is misborn from the beginning, that look which betrays what such a man says to himself––that looks which is a groan? ‘Would that I were something else,’ so groans this look, ‘but there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get away from myself? And verily––I am sick of myself!’ On such a soil of self-contempt, a veritable swamp-soil, grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and all so tiny, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the worms of revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things secret and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of the most malignant conspiracy––the conspiracy of the sufferers against the sound and the victorious; here is the sight of the victorious hated. And what lying so as not to acknowledge this hate as hate![145]

Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The meat-eating hunter, the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but moldiness and death in the saints’ attitude of being gentle with others and harsh to themselves. He regards them with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance? The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of. In the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful.

It is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type the more ideal? Most people suppose that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character. A certain kind of person must be the best absolutely and apart from the utility of function, apart from economic considerations. The saint's type, and the knight's or gentleman's type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute ideality; and the military religious orders blended both types of ideal. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a definition of the ideal horse, so long as dragging loads, running races, and bearing offspring all remain as differentiations of equine function. You may take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but it will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of human. We must test it by its economic relations.

Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness. Any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized with no expense of friction.

To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be work with his companions, and there would be no one to take advantage of his non-resistance. Saints are therefore abstractly a higher type of person than the aggressive ones, because they are adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. The pushy types would immediately tend by their presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to people as they now are.

But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we find that individual saints may be well or ill adapted, according to particular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this world goes, people who make saints of themselves do so at their peril. If they are not a large enough person, they may appear more insignificant and contemptible, for all their saintship, than if they had remained worldly types. Accordingly, religion has seldom been so radically taken in our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly temper. It has always found good people who could follow most of its impulses, but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ himself was fierce upon occasion. Leaders like Cromwell, Stonewall Jackson, and General Gordon show that Christians can be strong also.

How can we measure success absolutely when there are so many environments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? We cannot measure it absolutely, for the verdict will vary according to the point of view adopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment of history; and so far as any saint's example is a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes whom everyone acknowledges, are successes from the outset. They show themselves, and there is no question; every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things, their passion, their goodness, radiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background; and, placed alongside of them, the strong types of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of cement.

Our abandonment of theological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common sense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering place in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world's welfare. The great saints are immediate successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our Father's house are many mansions, and we all must discover for ourselves the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what we believe to be our powers and feel to be our truest mission and vocation. There are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy.

This is my conclusion so far. Some of you wonder that we should have applied such a method to our subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII. How can a religion that believes in two worlds and an invisible order be evaluated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world's order alone? Its truth, not its utility, you insist, must determine our verdict. If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. The search goes back to the question of the truth of theology. The plot thickens, and we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I propose that we face the responsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as mysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length of mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider religious philosophy.

Lectures XVI and XVII –– Mysticism

Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you may have smiled at my reiterated postponements. But now we must face mysticism in earnest, and pull those broken threads together. Personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness, so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Though forced to look upon the subject from outside, I will be as objective and receptive as I can, and may at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their function.

First of all, then, What does the expression mystical states of consciousness mean? How do we tell mystical states from other states? The words mysticism and mystical are often used as terms of mere reproach, to throw at any opinion that we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a mystic is any person who believes in thought-transference, or spirit-return. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too many less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of the word religion, and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way we shall avoid disputation, and the recriminations that generally go with it.

1. Indescribability—The subject of a mystical state of mind immediately says that it defies expression, that words fail to give an adequate report of its contents. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this way mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider them weak-minded or absurd. Mystics find most of us equally incompetent in understanding their experiences.

2. Mindful quality—Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the rational intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious and lasting sense of authority.-

These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:—

3. Transiency—Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour or so seems to be the limit, beyond which they fade into the light of day. When faded, their quality often can only imperfectly be remembered; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another the quality is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.

4. Passivity—The oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways. Yet when the characteristic mystical consciousness once has set in, the mystics feel as if their own will were on hold, and indeed sometimes as if they were grasped and worked on by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject's usual inner life, to which it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.

These four characteristics are sufficient to define a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group.

Our next step should be to look at some typical examples. Professional mystics at the height of their development often have elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. Remember what I said in my first lecture: phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with exaggerated and degenerated examples. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to cover now. Yet the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme.

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience is the deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula that occasionally sweeps over one. ‘I've heard that said all my life,’ we exclaim, ‘but I never realized its full meaning until now.’ Martin Luther said that a chance remark from a fellow monk one day inspired him to see ‘the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open.’ This sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words or word-pairings, effects of light on land and sea, smells of apple pie or campfires, or the mere hint of a song, all can raise the mind to a higher level when our antennae are tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled us. The words have now perhaps become less magnetic, but their pull remains, and lyric poetry and music are alive only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.

We take a more pronounced step upward on the mystical ladder with an extremely frequent phenomenon, that of déja-vu, the sudden feeling of having been here before, as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we had already been saying just these things. ‘It’s déja vu all over again,’ said Yankees baseball pitcher Yogi Berra in 1961 after Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit back-to-back home runs.[146]

Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the name ‘dreamy states’ to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness.[147] They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception that seems imminent but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the context by which we set it off.

Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:

When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.... Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?[148]

John Addington Symonds describes a much more extreme state of mystical consciousness, and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their own experience:

Suddenly, at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anesthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself.... Which is the unreality?—the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality?[149]

A recital like this certainly suggests pathology. Crichton-Browne says that Symonds's ‘highest nerve centers were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states which afflicted him so grievously.’ Symonds was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious people complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his life's mission.

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain of its meaning, they prove to be utter nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation. Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion forced upon my mind at that time has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they materialize in all their completeness, definite types of mentality that probably have their own field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final while disregarding these other forms of consciousness. How to regard them is the question––for they exist so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.

Mystical experiences may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and may open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict create all our troubles, melted into unity. Not only do the contrasted species belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying when expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Hegel places ultimate reality in ideas rather than in things, and uses investigation and discussion to comprehend the absolute ideas behind phenomena.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind. What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, which in most persons remain subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and mystical feeling surely inspired Hegel to make it articulate.

I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anesthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One. Mystic and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood made several attempts to sketch the anesthetic revelation in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, writing:

Into this pervading genius we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. The One remains, the many change and pass; and each and every one of us is the One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure as being—whence is all our care—so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above.[150]

Xenos Clark, a philosopher who died young at Amherst in the 1880s, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by Blood’s revelation, writing to me that:

The real secret would be the formula by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating? ... Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum.... You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them.... That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late—that's all.

Investigative-minded readers of this mish-mash of ideas will at least recognize the region of thought Clark writes about. In his latest pamphlet, ‘Tennyson's Trances and the Anesthetic Revelation,’ Blood describes the value of mystical experience for life as the initiation into the ‘immemorial mystery of the open secret of being, revealed as the inevitable vortex of continuity.’

This has the genuine religious mystic ring!

Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Switzerland first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1943, which began a new era of hallucinogenic research. Psychotherapists during the 1950s and early 1960s used LSD to treat alcoholism, address trauma, and to study schizophrenia. In1956 Dr. Sidney Cohen interviewed a research subject who volunteered to take the drug at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. Cohen tested the woman, the unidentified wife of a hospital employee, and determined that she was a psychologically and emotionally stable individual. He then administered LSD to her, and while she was under the influence of the drug three hours later, asked her about the experience.

The filmed session went as follows:

I just couldn’t, I couldn’t possibly tell you. It’s here. Can’t you feel it? This whole room, everything is in color, and I can feel the air, I can see it. I can see all the molecules. I’m part of it –– can’t you see it? [Cohen: I’m trying.] Oh, it’s just like you’re released, or you’re free, or [pause] I don’t know how I can tell you. [Cohen: How do you feel inside?] Inside? I don’t have any inside. [Cohen: Is it all one?] It would be all one if, if you weren’t here, and if, if nobody else –– yes, everything is one, you have nothing to do with it. I am one with what I am. I can see everything in color, everything –– you have to see the air, you can’t believe it. And the dimensions, and all the prisms and the rays, and everything coming down through you and moving. [Cohen: What does this all mean to you?] I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life. It’s like a curtain or a spiderweb or a –– can you see it? It’s right here in front of me, right now. Watch. No. Good heavens. You know it went through me? It passed right through me! [Cohen: Could you feel it?] I was, it was –– me? I wasn’t any me. [Cohen: Is all this pleasant or unpleasant? Or aren’t these the right words?] What seems pleasant or unpleasant? There isn’t anything pleasant or unpleasant. It’s too beautiful. How can you think in, I mean, can’t you feel it? Everything is so beautiful and lovely and alive. You shouldn’t say anything about anything not being –– this is reality, this is –– if you look right over there [pointing]. Can you see it? [Cohen: Yes, what should I see?] I wish I could talk in Technicolor. Or let you see, can you –– Did you say you can see it? [Cohen: No, I can’t quite see it. Tell me about it.] I can’t tell you about it. If you can’t see it then you’ll just never know. I feel sorry for you.

ABC News in 2011 reported journalist Don Lattin saying he discovered the video in the archives of philosopher Gerald Heard. The clip comes from a series of eight half-hour programs on station KNXT in Los Angeles called ‘Focus on Sanity.’ ‘Before the term psychedelic was coined, these were called psychotomimetic drugs because they mimic psychosis,’ Lattin said. ‘They were taking the research in a different direction. They wanted to understand how it works, how the mind works and the connection between the psychotic state and a spiritually enlightened state.’[151]

Symonds said that the question remains, ‘is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded [his dose of chloroform], when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the ... certainty of God?’[152]

With this we connect with religious mysticism pure and simple. Symonds's question takes us back to those examples in my lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton in 1958 had a mystical experience while shopping for his monastery in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, suddenly realizing his unity and love for all the so-called strangers around him. He later reflected more deeply on its meaning:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us in our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependents, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.[153]

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods. Most of the striking cases in my collection occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty. I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from my own experience in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State in July 1898, which I shared with Mrs. James in a letter the next day, which I quote:

My guide had to serve for the party, and quite unexpectedly to me the night turned out one of the most memorable of all my memorable experiences. I was in a wakeful mood before starting, having been awake since three, and I may have slept a little during this night; but I was not aware of sleeping at all. My companions, except Waldo Adler, were all motionless. The guide had got a magnificent provision of firewood, the sky swept itself clear of every trace of cloud or vapor, the wind entirely ceased, so that the fire-smoke rose straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people round me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children, dear Harry on the wave, the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal of it in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. The two kinds of Gods have nothing in common — the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch ahead.

The intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could only tell the significance; the intense inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intense appeal of it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you, and my relation to you part and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together; it was indeed worth coming for, and worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected. It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement. In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance, and don’t know what it was significant of, so there it remains, a mere boulder of impression. Doubtless in more ways than one, though, things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to it.[154]

Whitman expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception:

There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity... a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-center for the mind, mere optimism explains only the surface or fringe of it.[155]

Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, calls these distinctly characterized phenomena cosmic consciousness:

Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is not simply an expansion or extension of the self-conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as self-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence—would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.’[156]

We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life. Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin said, ‘This, then is the word that gives freedom: it is not enough for man to throw off his self-love and live as a social being. He needs to live with his whole heart, in union with the totality of the world that carries him along, cosmically.’[157]

Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically. In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different schools of yoga. The yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the hidden side of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samâdhi, and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know.

Swami Vivekananda teaches that one learns:

that the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes.... All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi.... Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves—for Samâdhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.[158]  

The followers of Vedanta Yoga say that one may stumble into super-consciousness sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure. Their test of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is empirical: its fruits must be good for life. When a person comes out of Samâdhi, they assure us that one remains enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, the whole character changed, the life changed, illumined. Buddhists use the word samâdhi as well as the Hindus; but ‘dhyâna’ is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the indifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what memory and self-consciousness mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.]

Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned—a region where there exists nothing, and where the meditator says: ‘There exists absolutely nothing,’ and stops. Then one reaches another region and says: ‘There are neither ideas nor absence of ideas,’ and stops again. Then another region where, ‘having reached the end of both idea and perception, one stops finally.’ This would seem to be, not yet Nirvâna, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.[159]

In the Moslem world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.

Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian who flourished in the eleventh century, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere—the absence of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other than the Christian. Auguste Schmölders has translated a part of Al-Ghazzali’s autobiography into French:

The Science of the Sufis aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul... I went to Syria, where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God... The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one's hand.[160]

This inability of people to impart their mystical experience is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else. In this it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that learned by conceptual thought. Philosophers have often compared remote and abstract thought unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be rational but must be intuitive, that it must be constructed more after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and judgment. But our immediate feelings have only the content supplied by the five senses; and mystics may deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their transports yield.

The Christian church has always had mystics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.[161] The basis of the system is prayer, or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. One may attain the higher levels of mystical experience through the practice of prayer and meditation. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life.

The first thing to aim for in meditation is to detach the mind from outer sensations, for these interfere with concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend the disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes.[162] The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi-hallucinatory vision on a single theme—an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism. But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition called the union of love, which he says is reached by ‘dark contemplation.’ In this the Deity pervades the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul:

finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances... This is the peculiarity of the divine language.... There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the wellsprings of the comprehension of love... and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to talk of divine things by their means.[163]

I cannot pretend to detail the various stages of the Christian mystical life. In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as levitation, stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of enlightenment whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of enlightenment is for us the essential mark of mystical states. Our time would not suffice to detail all the stages, and moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names in the Catholic books seem to represent nothing objectively distinct. So many persons, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.

We are directly concerned with their cognitive aspects, their value in the way of revelation, and it is easy to show how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such conditions, and says of one of the highest of them, the prayer of supplication for union, that it is not:

acquired by the intellect striving to think about God within itself, or by the imagination imagining Him within itself. Such efforts are good and an excellent kind of meditation because they are founded on a truth, which is that God is within us... But what I'm speaking of comes in a different way. Sometimes before one begins to think of God, these people are already inside the castle. I don't know in what way or how they heard their shepherd's whistle. It wasn't through the ears, because nothing is heard. But one noticeably senses a gentle drawing inward... I have heard it compared to a hedgehog curling up or a turtle drawing into its shell. (The one who wrote this example must have understood the experience well.) ... these words remain in the memory for a very long time, and some are never forgotten, as are those we listen to here on earth...[164]

Various kinds of truth, whether sensible or supersensible, are communicable in mystical ways. Some of them relate to this world, such as visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, or knowledge of distant events, for example, but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical:

Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed abundant tears.[165]

Some of these states seem delicious beyond anything in ordinary consciousness. The quality evidently involves organic sensibilities, for people speak of it as something too extreme to be borne, verging on bodily pain but too subtle and piercing a delight for ordinary words to communicate. The subjects of such experiences speak of God’s touch, of being intoxicated with divine love, and of marriage to God. Intellect and senses both swoon in these highest states of ecstasy. In the condition theologians call ravishment, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa's descriptions and the very exact distinctions which she makes, to believe that one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena that conform to definite psychological types.

To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life.

Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque. Many other people experiencing ecstasy would have perished but for the care taken of them by admiring followers.

The other-worldliness encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this willful withdrawal from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble, but in strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged.

Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and ‘touches’ by which God reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that:

They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life—even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment—that of not being allowed to suffer enough.[166]

Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture. There are many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more evidently veracious account of the formation of a new center of spiritual energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement? Mystical conditions may energize the soul along the lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states establish the truth of the theological passions in which the saintly life has its root?

In spite of the difficulty in articulating a good description of mystical states, they in general assert a fairly distinct theoretical drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism, and the other is non-dualism, or monism, a belief in the essential unity of all reality. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes function more than to the no function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth, though it seems on the surface to be a no function, is a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that it is this, seems implicitly to shut it off from being that—it is as if they lessened it. So we deny the this, negating the negation which it seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude by which we are possessed.

The fountainhead of Christian mysticism is Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively:

Mystic theology is like that ladder set up on the earth whose top reached to Heaven on which the angels of God were ascending and descending, and above which stood Almighty God. The Angel ascending is the Negative, which distinguishes Almighty God from all created things. God is not matter—soul, mind, spirit, any being, nor even being itself, but above and beyond all these. The Angel descending is the Affirmative. God is good, wise, powerful, the Being, until we come to Symbolic Theology, which denotes Him under material forms and conditions. Theology prefers the negative because Almighty God is more appropriately presented by distinction than by comparison.[167]

But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is super-lucent, super-splendent, super-essential, super-sublime, super everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the method of negation.

Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, ‘where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, there the spark of the soul is content in the light, and there is at peace more than in itself.’[168] Franciscan Father Richard Rohr also teaches the wisdom of paradox:

Because paradox undermines dual thinking at its root, the dualistic mind immediately attacks paradox as weak thinking or confusion, somehow separate from and inferior to hard logic. The modern phenomenon of fundamentalism displays an almost complete incapacity to deal with paradox, and shows how much we’ve regressed. Today the church is trying to catch up to what mystics have always known, and great scientists now teach as well. ... Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. At least we “worship” these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus. But this approach tends not to give people the underlying principle that Jesus, the Christ, has come to teach us about life and about ourselves. Jesus, as the icon of Christ consciousness (1 Corinthians 2:16), is the very template of total paradox: human yet divine, physical yet spiritual, killed yet alive, powerless yet powerful.[169]

Negation as a pathway towards a higher level of affirmation links us to the subtlest of moral counterparts in the personal will. Since religious experience deems denial of the finite self and its wants to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all mystical writings. In Paul's language, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. Only when we become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life and ours remain.

Overcoming all the barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, we find the same recurring note, so all mystical utterances share an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think. The mystical classics have neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.

That art Thou! say the Upanishads, and the Vedanta add: Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the World. The Sufi Gulshan-Râz says that every person ‘whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the me, the we, the thou, are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: I am God: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to death.’ Writes Suso, ‘Here the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead ... and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple unity. It is in this modeless where that the highest bliss is to be found.’[170]

In mystical literature we continually meet self-contradictory phrases such as dazzling obscurity, whispering silence, and teeming desert. They prove that mystical truth best speaks to us through music rather than ideas. In fact, many mystical scriptures are little more than musical compositions. These mystical thoughts stir chords within us which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages that non-musical critics are unable to contradict, though they may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt, and whispers from that region mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waves of the infinite ocean break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. The doctrine that eternity is timeless, that our immortality is not future but here and now, seems true to us in the mysteriously deeper level of our being. We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them ourselves; it alone protects ‘the password primeval.’

I have now sketched the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with the twice-born quality and so-called other-worldly states of mind. My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice-born quality and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can.

My answer is divided into three parts:—

(1) Mystical states usually are absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or reasoning consciousness based upon understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open up the possibility of other orders of truth, in which we may freely continue to have faith.

I will take up these points one by one.

1.

As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. (I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director, but usually not the subject, remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon.) They have been ‘there,’ and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to people proves to be a force that they can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order them to live in another way? We can throw them into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change their mind—we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs, as in Martin Luther King’s plea for civil rights and justice in his 1963 letter from the Birmingham, Alabama jail:

In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern,’ and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular. I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother.[171]

Mystical truth mocks our utmost efforts to suppress or sidestep it, absolutely escaping our jurisdiction. We base our own more rational beliefs on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be suspended, mystical states are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, bringing their subjects face to face with what seems immediately to exist.

The mystics are invulnerable, and must be left in undisturbed enjoyment of their creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.

2.

But I now add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ask of us is to admit that they establish a presumption.

They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for “suggestive,” not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to do so suits our life.

But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a “privileged case.” It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in “schools.” It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic within the Christian church, and antinomian, indulging in the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law. It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom the category of personality is absolute. The union of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity. How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort.[172]

The mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of partnering with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all these things—it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie.

So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the textbooks on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which mystical ideas are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, or paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life.

It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or trans-marginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: seraph and snake abide there side by side. To come from there is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves. Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.

In his work, Degeneration, Max Nordau seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to those who have the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in their thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists have explained paranoiac conditions by a laming of the association function. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.[173]

Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately apprehended. They sometimes add subjective heard and seen observations to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as beyond this world, they oblige no change in the facts of sense.

It is the rationalist critics rather who play the part of deniers in the controversy, and their denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, with tempting and saving moments, with valid experiences and counterfeit ones just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same.

We should have to select and subordinate and substitute its experiences just as we do in this ordinary naturalistic world. We should be liable to error just as we are now. Yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it might be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.

In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical people incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of life.

It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by coercive argument, and the construction of philosophies of this kind has always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this term in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it which my limits will allow.

Varieties Reborn – Lecture XVIII –– Philosophy

The subject of Saintliness left us asking whether the sense of divine presence is a sense of anything objectively true. We turned first to mysticism for an answer. Although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, we found it too private and varied in its messages to be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of truth upon the religious person’s sense of the divine?

Many of you probably wonder where I plan to go with this line of inquiry. I have undermined the authority of mysticism, you say, and next I shall probably seek to discredit that of philosophy. You expect to hear me conclude that religion is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on a vivid sense of the reality of things unseen. It is essentially private and individualistic. Religion always exceeds our powers of formulation, and people will forever try to pour its contents into a philosophic mold. Yet these attempts are always secondary processes that in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own power and conviction. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name.

To a certain extent I have to admit that you are right. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean. When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, it’s unlikely that any philosophic theology could ever have been framed.

I doubt if calm intellectual contemplation of the universe would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. People would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticized these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science they would have left a certain amount of psychical research, even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But they would have had no motive to venture on high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, feeling no need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must be classed as over-beliefs, intellectual structures built into directions originally hinted at by feelings.

But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, it still might have dealt in a superior way with the matter suggested. Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Philosophy aims to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory it touches. The intellect's most cherished ideal has always been to find an escape from obscure personal persuasion to truth that is objectively valid for all thinking persons. Reason’s task has been to redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances.

I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task. We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. We must interpret our personal ideals, as well as our religious and mystical experiences, as they fit comfortably in the intellectual living room that our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak using general and abstract verbal formulas. Ideas and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one person’s constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now on) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts that we can define in formulas agreeable to everyone.

Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, which in turn spur criticism of one set of these by the adherents of another. Impartial classifications and comparisons recently have become possible, alongside the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce among creeds used to be carried on exclusively. We have the beginnings of a ‘Science of Religions,’ so-called, and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I should be made very happy.

But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive, or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.

The intellectualism in religion that I wish to discredit pretends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to build religious things with logical reason alone, or with logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches conclusions by way of theoretical knowledge, and guarantees their truth. Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true. What more ideal refuge could there be? Such a system offers a safe intellectual home to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things. Accordingly, we find embedded in the theological schools of today a disdain for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain.

Scottish theologian John Caird, for example, who headed the University of Glasgow for fifteen years, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion:—

Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be true. It must be seen as having in its own nature a right to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feeling must be judged. In estimating the religious character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but what they think and believe—not whether their religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the conceptions of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the content or intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its character and worth are to be determined.[174]

Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, well expresses this disdain for sentiment. Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not—not physical evidences for God, not natural religion, for these are but vague subjective interpretations:

If the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful, just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs, if his essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, just as we talk of the philosophy or the romance of history, or the poetry of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain about Him.... I simply mean the Science of God, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology. [175]

Both these extracts set the issue clearly before us: Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it does not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only forms sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its program of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure today. I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be objectively convincing.

In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe that our logical reason operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which passions or mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. Our reasoning mind finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructs, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of Harold Fielding in The Hearts of Men, which came into my hands after my text was written. Fielding says, ‘Creeds are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow.’[176] The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.

Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable textbooks published since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence, and after that at those by which it establishes his nature.

The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years. Waves of unbelieving criticism break against these arguments, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to convert you. The proofs are varied. The cosmological argument reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause that must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The argument from design reasons, from Nature's laws being mathematical, and her parts being adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The moral argument is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The argument of universal agreement is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of humans, and should therefore carry authority.

I will not discuss these arguments technically. All idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them, which shows that the arguments are not solid enough to uphold religion. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as lucky escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument. These arguments only follow the combined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only corroborate our pre-existing partialities.

Any form of disorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. Any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us is disorderly can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.

When one views the world with no theological bias, one sees that order and disorder are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material.

Our dealings with Nature are just like this. Nature is a vast array of matter in which our attention draws random lines in many directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, while the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things not adapted to each other in this world than there are things adapted, infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations among them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds until the collection fills an encyclopedia. Yet all the while among and around them lies an infinite chaos of objects that no one ever thought of grouping together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.

The facts of order from which the physical-theological argument starts can easily be interpreted as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, the argument for him will fail to constitute a knock-down proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already. If philosophy can do so little to establish God's existence, how goes its efforts to define his attributes? It is worthwhile to look at the attempts of systematic theology in this direction.

Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence from Himself. From this self-generating on God's part, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both necessary and absolute, cannot not be, and cannot in any way be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is One, and Only, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is Spiritual, for if He were composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine them into the total, which would contradict his unique self-sourcing of his own being. He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature. He is simple metaphysically also, that is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect.

Since God is one and only, his essence and his being must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only virtual, and made from the human point of view. In God all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.

This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be immutable. He is actuality, through and through. Were there anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is immense, boundless; for if He could be outlined in space, He would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore omnipresent, indivisibly there, at every point of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of time,—in other words eternal. For if He began in time, He would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his own creation of himself. If He ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability.

He has intelligence and will and every other creature perfection, for we have them, and the effect cannot overcome the cause. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in action, and their object, since God can be bounded by naught that is external, can primarily be nothing other than God himself. He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite self-pleasure. (For the scholastics the ability to desire embraces feeling, desire, and will.) Since He must of logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called free to enter, with the freedom of contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures. To leave, however, or with respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot need to create, being perfect in being and in happiness already. He wills to create, then, by an absolute freedom.

Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a person; and a living person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely self-sufficient: his self-knowledge and self-love are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them.

He is omniscient, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is prophetic, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his immutability. He is omnipotent for everything that does not involve logical contradiction. He can make being—in other words his power includes creation. If what He creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non-divine in substance. If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God's definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something caused already.

The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, and gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute them to Him only in a terminative sense, as differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.

God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is positive being's fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good, for the good of the whole takes precedence over good of the part. Moral evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He permits it only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.

As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that God's secondary purpose in creating is love.

I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther, into the mysteries of God's Trinity, for example. What I have given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants. John Henry Cardinal Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time.[177] He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us scholastic philosophy touched with emotion, and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of Newman's type. It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point I make a short digression.

What God has joined together, let no one break apart. The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must make a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash value in terms of particular experience?

This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or multiplicity of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning, and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his ‘matter.’ The cash value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the whole meaning of the term matter—any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words.

Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. It was English and Scotch writers, not Kant, who introduced the critical method into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious people. For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or which false?

An American philosopher of eminent originality, Charles Sanders Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of pragmatism, and defends it somewhat as follows:[178]

Thought in movement can only be trying to attain belief, a state in which the mind can rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action. The whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If any part of a thought made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. That conduct is for us its sole significance, and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our idea of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our thinking on the object, so far as that idea has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections, whether some are far less significant than others.

If we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes as distinguished from his moral attributes, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. Take God's self-sourcing, for example; or the necessity of his existence; his immateriality; his simplicity or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession that we find in finite beings. Take his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his personality, apart from the moral qualities which it may support; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself. Candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a person’s religion whether they be true or false?

For my own part, although I dislike to say anything that may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true. Please, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the 1800s, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the closet naturalists, as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins.

As a boy I used to think that a closet naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by an adding machine as well as by a person of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms. Mere words have stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent.

If such a gaggle of abstract terms really gave the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might continue to flourish, but vital religion would have flown from this world. What keeps religion going is something other than abstract definitions and systems of linked adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves for all ages in the lives of humble private individuals.

So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster that they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.

What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance. God's holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute with definite relations to our practical life. Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists, it may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment.

But truly, how stands it with dogmatic arguments? It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists reject them, but they never have converted anyone who has found in the moral complexion of the world reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God's goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound silly to such a witness.

No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. The process of precise thinking is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity: ‘I will lay my hand upon my mouth; I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You.’ An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet with a trustful sense of presence—such is the situation of persons who are sincere with themselves and with the facts, but who remain religious still.

Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hellfire or its equivalent is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology has largely based this doctrine upon revelation, and, in discussing it has tended to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.

We must therefore bid definitive farewell to dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that guarantee. Modern idealism has said goodbye to this theology forever. Can modern idealism give faith a better stamp of truth, or must it still rely on its poor self for witness?

The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness ‘I think them’ must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the ‘I’ in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.

It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of abstract consciousness into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian school, which today so deeply influences both British and American thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation. The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of severed limbs, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.

The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the potential infinite.

Applying these principles, we seem to add a force to our logic beyond the power of a bare, stark self-identity in each thing. The objects of our thought now act within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them; and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it in developing its fullness of meaning. The program is excellent. The universe is a place where things are followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them. A logic that gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far better than the traditional school logic, which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and subsuming categorizations, or static resemblances and differences. As Thomas Merton shared from his experience:

I read a depressingly inane magazine article by a Logical Positivist––someone wanted my comment on it. What can I say? The burden of his teaching seems to be this: ‘Since we cannot really say anything about anything, let us be content to talk about the way in which we say nothing.’ That is an excellent way to organize futility.[179]

Nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic. Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have already named, John Caird, who says that the reality in which all intelligence rests is an absolute spirit, and that it is only in communion with this absolute spirit or creative intelligence that the individual’s spirit can realize itself:

When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self-consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness.

Here Caird makes the transition that Kant did not make. He converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a condition of ‘truth’ being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge our limits is in essence to be beyond them, and makes the transition to the religious experience of individuals in the following words:

But it is the prerogative of man's spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own.... As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that is universal—in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.

Nevertheless, Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete. Whatever we may be potentially, the very best of us in actuality fall very short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self-sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Our ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable. Caird continues:

Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life—call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will—there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress towards, but within the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly.... It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realization of the life of God.[180]

You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing. They utter what the mystics felt but were unable to communicate; and in hearing them, the saints recognize their own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously. But has Caird—and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking—transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery?

I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser's[181] and Professor Pringle-Pattison's[182] memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar. 298 Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?

What religion reports it always claims to be a fact of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they need. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them, but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to guarantee faith's truth, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.

It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what it can do for religion. If it will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform itself from theology into science of religions, it can become enormously useful. Our spontaneous mind always defines the divine in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship it can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.

Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, philosophy can leave a residuum of ideas that at least are possible. It can deal with these as hypotheses, testing them in all the ways, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. It can reduce their number, as some are found more open to objection. Philosophy can perhaps become the champion of one it picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. It can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be taken literally. As a result, philosophy can offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about consensus of opinion. It can mediate more successfully depending on how well it discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which it compares.

I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a hold on public opinion as that commanded by physical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics—it might appear as foolish to refuse them. As the science of optics has to continually verified by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical rebuilds. The science of religions could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosophers. Their formulas are like stereoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.

In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it bears witness.

Varieties Reborn – Lecture XIX – Other Characteristics

After our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, we have wound our way back to where we were before. We say that the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification ‘on the whole’ may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness with a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions.

First, the aesthetic life plays a part in determining our choice of a religion. People involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. We need formulas, just as we need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them puts us on the track of it.[183] Intoning the divine attributes as he would for a cathedral service, Newman shows their high aesthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal flourishes, just as it enriches a church to have an organ, marbles, frescoes and stained windows. Descriptive phrases lend atmosphere to our worship. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible.

Minds like Newman's grow uneasily protective of their belief in the same way that heathen priests become anxiously concerned about the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols. Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: 'From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.' And again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: 'I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of God.'[184]

Among the elaborate constructs of religion that the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplicity, others desire richness as their supreme imaginative requirement; picture a Quaker meeting house next to a Baroque church. The intellectual difference is on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, and simplicity.

Others need superabundance, high pressure, stimulation, and lots of superficial relations. There are persons who would faint if you should pay all their debts, arrange that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to a single one set on a clean table with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so bare would appall them. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of these things that to others would appear a mass of lies and trickery.

When one's mind is strongly of this needy busybody type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in the presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the appeal of public prayer to a crowded cathedral; one gets the vibration of honor and respect coming from every quarter. Consider such a noble complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place.

In comparison, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives like Emerson, who boasted in his poem ‘Good-Bye’:

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,

I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;

And when I am stretched beneath the pines,

Where the evening star so holy shines,

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,

At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;

For what are they all, in their high conceit,

When man in the bush with God may meet?[185]

What a leveling of a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer a poorhouse for a palace. It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and perhaps comes from a home on the prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its center table. It makes a pauper of the monarchical imagination!

The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it impossible that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at present succeed in converting many believers from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer field to the imagination, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always look like the poorhouse in Catholic eyes. The Catholic mind cannot comprehend its bitter negativity.

To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices approved by the Church are as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of childlike—innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestants, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. They must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at the literalness. Protestants appear to Catholics as morose as if they were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptiles. The two will never understand each other—their centers of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies always need a mutual interpreter.

Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the meek lover of the good, alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate ‘business’ that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely vain principles, with her confessor and director, her merit storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional devotee, her definite exercises, and her definitely recognized social pose in the organization. So much for the aesthetic diversities in the religious consciousness.

Most books on religion represent three things as its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must say a brief word on each of these elements in turn. First of Sacrifice.

Sacrifices to gods are present everywhere in primeval worship. As cults have grown refined,  however, more spiritual sacrifices have superseded burnt offerings and the blood of goats. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ's atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain presentations to God. The ascetic practices that Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage show how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices that life calls for, whenever it is taken strenuously. As these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions of origin, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession.

I will also be most brief with Confession, speaking about it psychologically rather than historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of cleansing and freeing of guilt that one senses a need for in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For those who confess, shams are over and realities have begun; they have put their rottenness outside of themselves. If they have not actually got rid of it, they at least no longer smear it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—they live at least upon a basis of truth. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is hard to account for. Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinners themselves it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more people the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ears that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone into our confidence. A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by Frank Granger, The Soul of a Christian.[186]

Now I must comment on Prayer, but this time less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that prayer may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal factor of moral health, its omission would be harmful. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief, everyone now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. For example, the minister of Sudbury heard a Boston clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, ‘You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.’[187]

But a prayer of petition is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. A liberal French theologian says:

religion is a conscious and voluntary relation entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate depends. This communication with God is realized by prayer, which is religion in act. Prayer is real religion. Prayer distinguishes the religious phenomenon from similar phenomena such as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life.... Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why so-called natural religion is not properly a religion. It cuts people off from prayer. It leaves them and God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in the person, no return of the person to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion.[188]

It seems that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of Sabatier's contention. We see the religious phenomenon, studied as inner fact and ignoring ecclesiastical or theological complications, present at every incidence and stage in human consciousness of an intercourse with higher powers. People at the time understand this communication as being both active and mutual. If it is not effective, if the friendship is not a give and take relation, if nothing is really transacted while it lasts, if the world is not one whit different for its having taken place, then prayer is a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would be to devout people, would leave us but spectators of a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life we seem to be actors, and not in a play, but in a serious reality.

The genuineness of religion is thus bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness is or is not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened person can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur.

Religion insists that prayer brings things that cannot be realized in any other manner.  Prayer alone sets personal energy free to operate in some part of the world of facts, whether objective or subjective. Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached.

Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Müller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Müller's prayers were the crassest petitions. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight, but by the Lord's hand. He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more than 111 million scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Müller received and administered nearly a million and a half pounds sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.[189]

During the sixty-eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds. His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough. George Müller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. Müller was absolutely unphilosophical. There is an immense literature relating to answers to prayers of petition. The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are devoted to the subject,[190] but for us Müller's case will suffice.

Innumerable other believers follow a prayerful life without so much begging and pleading. Such persons say that persistence in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active influence. The following description of a ‘led’ life by Swiss lay theologian Carl Hilty, whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience.

In the guided life, says Hilty:

books and words (and sometimes people) come to one just at the very moment in which one needs them; that one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until the peril is past... When the time is right, one suddenly receives a courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, and even bits of knowledge and insight, of which it is impossible to say their source. Finally, persons help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest service and furtherance... There is no doubt that now one walks continually through open doors and on the easiest roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to imagine.... All these are things that every human being knows, who has had experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord.[191]

Other believe not so much that a superintending providence tilts particular events toward us as a reward for our reliance, but that our spiritual practice prepares us to receive and take advantage of events and opportunities in our lives. The outward face of nature, once dead to us, returns to life. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter case our relation springs into new vitality. So when one's affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world's authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other, a series of purely benign chances. It is as if all doors open onto freshly smoothed paths. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit infused by this kind of prayer.

Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274) ended his classic text 'The Soul’s Journey into God' with the following: ‘If you wish to know how these things come about, ask [for] grace, not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God.’[192]

Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus embody the grateful spirit, aware of blessings and also informed by experience. They share the perspective of the mind-curers, transcendentalists, and so-called liberal Christians. Says Epictetus:

Good Heaven! any one thing in creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or plow or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion; who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be someone to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song.[193]

The Rev. James Martineau expressed this attitude also in one of his sermons:

We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach.... It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of ‘the Living God.’[194]

Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine origin, instead of being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period:

One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault-finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied.[195]

We heard in previous lectures of how beautiful the face of the world may appear to converts after their awakening. As a rule, religious persons assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny signify divine purposes. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if it be trial, strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at all stages of the prayerful life we find people who believe that the process of communion with a higher power allows energy from on high to flow in to meet demand, energy which then becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this operative way is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is really effected.

So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture. The last aspect of the religious life that remains for me to touch upon is that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence.

You may remember what I said in my opening lecture about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration. I also speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian saints and sinners, including the greatest, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and openings. They experienced these things because they had exalted sensibility. In such susceptibility there lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them.

Incursions from beyond the subliminal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body.

A first-rate psychologist who is a subject of graphic automatism tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor-centers. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the sense of an absence would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. A statements such as Antonia Bourignon's, that ‘I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine,’ in context indicates inspiration rather than direct automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called, 'Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Ambassadors,' written and illustrated automatically in 1881 by John Ballou Newbrough of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the head of the reincarnation-believing spiritualist community of Sholam in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power is of course inspiration. It is easy to discriminate between the religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece.

As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a careful study of them, to see:

how, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own intuition. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain.... It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions that speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own.[196]

Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria describes his inspiration, as quoted by the English priest, Augustus Clissold, who was also a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg's case is of course the worthy one of auditory and visual hallucinations serving as a basis of religious revelation:

Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes.[197]

If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed's revelations all came from the subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them,—

Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and when the angel went away, he had received the revelation. Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however, ... distinguish still other kinds,’ including direct revelation from God in person, though veiled, and in dreams[198]

In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the revealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by the aid of the ‘peep-stones’ which he found, or thought or said that he found, with the gold plates—apparently a case of crystal-gazing. For some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but seems generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction. The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the president of the Church and its Apostles.

Other revelations described as openings—Fox's, for example, were evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of today as impressions. As all effective initiators of change must needs live to some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.

When in addition to these phenomena of inspiration we take religious mysticism into account, we conclude that religion is a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region. Recall, too, the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self we saw in conversion, and how we reviewed the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self-severity met with in saintliness. If the word subliminal is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latter the A-region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the B-region. The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it houses everything that is latent, and is the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved.

Our subconscious contains, for example, such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motivated passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations, come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it.

In this subliminal region arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, as well as our automatisms, sensory or motor, our life in hypnotic and hypnoid conditions, our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if any; our supra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountainhead of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen—and this is my conclusion—the door into this region seems unusually wide open. At any rate, experiences entering through that door have distinctly shaped religious history.

With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle opened in my first lecture, terminating thus the review of inner religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is in itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions that so much material may suggest.

Varieties Reborn – Lecture XX – Conclusions

The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our theoretical and practical conclusions. Defending the empirical method in my first lecture, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the significance for life of religion, taken on the whole. Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but when the time comes I will formulate them as sharply as I can.

The broad characteristics of the religious life as we have found them include the following beliefs:

1. The visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance;

2. Union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

3. Prayer or inner communion with that spirit—whether God or law—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.

Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:—

4. A new zest for life, the gift of lyrical enchantment, and appeal to earnestness and heroism.

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.

Our illustrative case documents have literally bathed us in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality in it. After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies before us.

The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of my having sought them among the extravagant cases of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these more extreme examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion.

We who have pursued such radical expressions of religion may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as anyone can know them who learns them from another. We have next to answer the practical question: what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?

But this question suggests another one, which I will answer immediately to get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us. Ought we assume that in all people the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical? Should we assume that the lives of all people show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable?

To these questions I answer No emphatically. I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Individuals from their peculiar angles of observation take in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which they separately must deal with in unique manners. Some must soften themselves where others must harden; some must yield while others must stand firm. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.

The divine can mean no single quality, but rather a group of qualities, and different persons may find worthy missions in life by championing them to various degrees. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So a god of battles must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We should recognize that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our religion; what need of such self-denial if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance; but why think much of deliverance if we are healthy-minded?

From this point of view the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid minds, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down upon the rigid, straitlaced consciousness of life of the once-born as being mere morality, and not properly religion. As it is said, Jesus loves a sinner. An orthodox minister is reported to have said that another minister was ‘excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character.’ One may hear a backhanded reference to this phenomenon in the lyrics of a 1978 Rolling Stones song, Far Away Eyes:

I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield

Listening to gospel music on the colored radio station

And the preacher said, you know you always have the Lord by your side

And I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran

Twenty red lights in his honor

Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord[199]

It is true that the outlook upon life of the born again—holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution—is the wider and completer. The heroic or solemn way in which life comes to them is a higher synthesis into which healthy-mindedness and morbid thinking both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded so much as carried away in the higher religious cheer of these persons.

But the final consciousness of union with the divine that each type reaches has the same practical significance for the individual. Persons may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases quoted in Lecture IV of the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject.

Unquestionably, some people have the more complete experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for individual persons to stay in their own experience, whatever it be, and for others to tolerate them there, is surely best. You may now ask whether this one-sidedness would be cured if we all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to the active life.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism, that to understand the causes of drunkenness is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true, and yet the best person at this science might be the one who found it hardest to be devout. As the anonymous 14^th century English mystic said in The Cloud of Unknowing

Only see, all creatures able to reason, angel and human, each has a main ability, the power to know, and the power to love. To the first capacity, the power to know, God their creator is evermore incomprehensible. And to the second principal capacity, the power to love, in each one diversely He is all comprehensible at the full, in so much that a loving soul only in itself, by virtue of love, should comprehend in it Him that is sufficient at the full––and much more, without comparison––to fill all the souls and angels that ever may be. And this is the endless marvelous miracle of love, that which shall never take end; forever shall he do it, and never shall he cease to do it. See, those who bt grace may see, for the feeling of this is endless bliss, and the contrary is endless pain.[200]

The name of Ernest Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith. Renan became embroiled in a double scandal when teaching the first course on the history of religions at the College de France in 1862, and then allegedly hiding the scientific intent of his book upon publication in 1863.[201] If religion is a function by which either God's cause or our cause is to be advanced, then the one who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than one who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

For this reason the science of religions cannot be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when it must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let its knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that this branch of knowledge has assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that this science agrees that active religion involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that our prayerful communion with them gets work done, and makes something real come to pass. This science now has to exert critical activity, and decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered true.

To decide this dogmatically is an impossible task. Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, they are also full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy inclines. The scientist tends to be so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be recognized at all.

And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivators of this science become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in their minds that any religious belief is probably false. In the ‘prayerful communion’ of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work—even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations—can possibly be done.

The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of survival, an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought that humanity in its more enlightened examples has outgrown; and our religious anthropologists do little to counteract this notion. This view is so widespread at present that we must consider it before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the survival theory, for brevity's sake.

The religious life revolves round the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in by people—whether crude savages or disciplined intellectuals—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. We think religious thought in terms of personality, which is the one fundamental fact in the world of religion. Today, as much as at any previous age, religious individuals tell you that the divine meets them on the basis of their personal concerns.

Science, on the other hand, utterly repudiates the personal point of view. Science catalogues its elements and records its laws indifferent to their purpose, and constructs its theories with no concern for their bearing on human affairs. Though some scientists may nourish a religion, and be theists in their irresponsible hours, the days are over when one could say that for Science itself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time, which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts.

The scientific imagination nowadays finds it impossible to discover in the study of space and time, whether on the universal or on the molecular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result.

Nature has no one ultimate tendency with which to pull on our heartstrings and create a bond of sympathy. In the vast rhythm of its processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, nature appears to cancel itself. The books of natural theology that satisfied the intellects of our grandparents seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to our pettiest private desires. Consider, for example, the childish account of God's beneficence in the institution of ‘the great variety throughout the world of men's faces, voices, and handwriting,’ given by William Derham,  the rector of Upminster, and author of a book on physical theology that enjoyed much vogue in the eighteenth century. Derham speculated on a physiologically homogenous human world:

And in this case, what confusion, what disturbance, what mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under! No security could have been to our persons; no certainty, no enjoyment of our possessions; no justice between man and man; no distinction between good and bad, between friends and foes, between father and child, husband and wife, male or female; but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed to the malice of the envious and ill-natured, to the fraud and violence of knaves and robbers, to the forgeries of the crafty cheat, to the lusts of the effeminate and debauched, and what not! Our courts of justice can abundantly testify the dire effects of mistaking men's faces, of counterfeiting their hands, and forging writings.[202]

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam of a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena. Their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's flow of events. You see from this point of view how natural it is to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought.

For eons our one great object in dealings with the natural world has been to befriend the spiritual powers and get them on our side. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and tall tales were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to comparatively recent times we could hardly conceive such distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence. Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Mythology reflects the subordination of historical accuracy to narrative power. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted.

Early medical books invoke sympathetic magic on every page. Take, for example, the famous healing ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of recipes, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms; the usnia, or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal; and other materials equally unpleasant—the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn, according to Jean Baptiste van Helmont:

Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well, for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german, the blood in the patient's body.... The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of revenge about him than any other animal. And thus the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the posthumous character of revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the unguent.[203]

We thought about most things from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and confined our attention to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events. How could it be otherwise? Nobody could have foreseen the extraordinary value of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception used by science. Weight, motion, velocity, direction, position–– what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities that make phenomena striking, fail to get singled out first and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of natural life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights. It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the promise of the dawn and of the rainbow, the voice of the thunder, the gentleness of the summer rain, the sublimity of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed. And just as of old, devout persons tell you that in the solitude of their rooms or elsewhere they still feel the divine presence, that in-flowing of help come in reply to their prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill them with security and peace.

Pure anachronism, says the survival-theory. The way to bring our imaginations into the modern era is to stop attributing human characteristics to natural processes on earth and in heaven. The less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of science we become.

In spite of the appeal that this detached scientific attitude makes to people of generous temperaments, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason. So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.

The world of our experience always consists of two parts, an objective and a subjective part. The impersonal, objective part may be incalculably more extensive than the personal, subjective part, but we can never omit or suppress the latter. The objective part is the sum total of whatever we may be thinking of at any given time, while the subjective part is the inner state in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous— cosmic time and space, for example—whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and meaningless activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects are only ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess, but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.

A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of, plus an attitude towards the object, plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is solid as long as it lasts, not a mere abstract element of experience such as the object is when taken all alone. It is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities must belong; the motor currents of the world run through it. This fact is on the line connecting real events with real events.

We cannot share the feeling that all of us have of our individual destiny rolling out on fortune's wheel. This sense of our unique circumstances may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up. As the saying goes: I’m not much, but I’m all I think about. Compare Hermann Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is in itself is by conceiving it as it is for itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of inner activity of some sort going with it.[204]

If this is true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places—they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description—they being as describable as anything else—would be something like offering a printed menu as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities that it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.

A menu with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg,’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. Therefore, however we may answer particular questions connected with our individual destinies, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival-theory of religion as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.

Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers 'verified' from day to day by their experience of fact. ‘Experience of fact’ is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist, methodically declining to recognize such ‘facts’ as mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as nonsense, claptrap, and folly, certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as well.

Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed by scientists as figments of the imagination. But the scientists’ tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given them a way to understand phenomena of this order, and they consequently now allow that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of suggestion. Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientists as a fact, now that they have the name of hystero-demonopathy by which to comprehend it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occult, magic, or alchemical phenomena under newly found scientific titles may proceed—even prophecy and levitation might creep into the pale.

Thus the divorce between scientific facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems. And the personal, subjective and romantic interpretations of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, may not be so irrevocably outgrown by humanity on the whole. The final human opinion may, in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position so confidently assumed by sectarian scientists today.

By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded in feeling. The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Hume's criticism has banished causation from the world of physical objects, and science is satisfied to define cause in terms of concomitant change. The notion of causation originates in our inner personal experience, and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and described.

Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects that the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?

When I read in a religious paper words like these: ‘Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is the Inevitable Inference,’ I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious persons like Saint Francis, Luther, and Behmen have usually been enemies of the intellect's pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which everyone should read) of a philosopher like Borden Parker Bowne.[205]

See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy as pronounced by French philosophical writer Étienne Vacherot: ‘Religion answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy.’[206]

In a still more radical vein, Professor Théodule-Armand Ribot describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula—the ever-growing predominance of the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments:

Of religious sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable x which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this more simply, religion tends to turn into religious philosophy. These are psychologically entirely different things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man.[207]

I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of Princeton philosopher and psychologist James Mark Baldwin,[208] and architect psychologist Henry Rutgers Marshall[209] to make it a purely ‘conservative social force.’

Let us agree, then, that religion, occupying itself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. The next thing to decide is what religion reveals about those destinies, or whether indeed it reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general message to mankind. We have done with our preliminaries, and our final summing up can now begin.

After all the heart-throbbing documents that I have quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution and belief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I now advance may appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a tapering-off of the subject instead of a crescendo of interest and result. I said a while ago that the religious attitude of Protestants appears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-stricken may my final summing up of the subject appear at first to some of you. Please bear in mind that I am now trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic and morbid outgrowths, the bare essence which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on which all religious persons may agree.

That established, we should have a result which might be small, but would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a critical philosopher), and I hope you will also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be in the varied world of solid religious constructs once more. For the moment, let me pursue the analytic part of the task.

Both thought and feeling determine conduct, and the same conduct may be determined by either one. We find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed in the field of religion, but the feelings and the conduct are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. Religion generates theories both variable and secondary, so if you wish to grasp its essence you must look to the feelings and conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which religion carries on its principal business. The ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines that may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function for religious life to go on.

This is the first conclusion that we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have reviewed. The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order do they belong?

The feelings result in what Kant calls a ‘sthenic’ affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order that freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life. The name of ‘faith-state’ by which Professor Leuba designates it is a good one. It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces by which men live. The total absence of it, anhedonia, means collapse.

The faith-state may hold a minimum of intellectual content. We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke described. It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air. For example, Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: ‘I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me; I want to do something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing.... I would fain do great things.’ Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes: ‘I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back—I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.’[210]

This primacy in the faith-state of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines from Leaves of Grass:

O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do....

Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,

Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and defeated.

This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the possible exceeding the real.

When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief, and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the smallest details of their widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming religions, and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their truth, we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anesthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,[211] goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all. Leuba says:

The truth of the matter can be put in this way: God is not known, He is not understood; He is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If He proves himself useful, His right to remain in the service of man is thereby vindicated. The religious consciousness asks for no more than that, it does not embarrass itself with further questions: Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is He? etc. are so many irrelevant questions.... Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is in the last analysis the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development... is the religious impulse.[212]

Leuba makes extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what Wilhelm Bender says in his Essence of Religion:

Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric....  ‘Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards the world's ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached.[213]

The whole book is little more than a development of these words.

At this purely subjective assessment, therefore, we must consider religion vindicated from the attacks of its critics. Religion cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether it is with or without intellectual content, and whether, if it has any, it be true or false.

We must next move beyond subjective utility to inquire into the intellectual content itself. Under all the discrepancies of the creeds, is there a common nucleus to which they testify unanimously? And second, should we consider the testimony true? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:

1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like the following:

The individuals, so far as they suffer from their wrongness and criticize it, are to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of them, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part they should identify their real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the persons identify their real being with the germinal higher part of themselves; and do so in the following way. They become conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of them, and which they can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save themselves when all their lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

Remember that for some people stage 2 arrives suddenly, for others gradually, while others practically enjoy it all their life.

All the phenomena are accurately describable in these very simple general terms. The practical difficulties are: one, to realize the reality of one's higher part; two, to identify oneself with it exclusively; and three, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.

These terms allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal center and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. French author Edouard Récéjac says, ‘When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me. The objectivity of it ought in that case to be called excessiveness, rather, or an exceeding quality.’[214]

There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms. So far as this analysis goes, however, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subjects when they have them, a new life opens for them, and the experiences seem to them a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but their subjective way of feeling things, a mood of their own fancy, in spite of the effects produced.

I now turn to my second question: What is the objective “truth” of their content? We take the word ‘truth’ here to mean something additional to bare value for life, although our natural propensity is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true. The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most pertinently arises is that ‘more’ of the same quality with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a ‘more’ merely our own notion, or does it really exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of that union with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced?

It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They all agree that the ‘more’ really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of union with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes.

At the end of my lecture on Philosophy I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which it might also formulate in terms to which physical science need not object. This it might adopt as its own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis.

The time has now come for this attempt. Who says ‘hypothesis’ renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true.

The more, as we called it, and the meaning of our union with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the ‘more’ as Jehovah, and the union as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief.

We must begin by using less specific terms. Since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first a way of describing the ‘more,’ which psychologists may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity, and exactly the mediating term we need. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of the trans-marginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness is as true as when it was first written:

Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.[215]

For a full statement of Myers's views, I may refer to his posthumous work, ‘Human Personality and Its Survival Of Bodily Death,’ which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural series a mass of subliminal facts up to now considered only as curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show.[216]  

Much of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive timidities, ‘dissolutive’ phenomena of various sorts, as Myers calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.

Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its near side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with science that the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian's contention that the religious person is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher,’ but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.

This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our subliminal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin. Here mysticism and the conversion rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world.³⁵⁵ Here the prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith.

One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader's familiarity with the notion of it, comes from Swami Vivekananda:

If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you come in and begin to weep and wail, Oh, the darkness, will the darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives, Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God within, and instead of condemning, say, Rise, thou effulgent One, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest your nature. ... This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering our nature.[217]

Those of us not personally favored with such specific revelations must decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way best fitting the pitch of our emotions.

Intellectual attitudes play a decisive part among these capacities for emotional excitement. Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union that opens to us as a gift, the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in individuals until their favorite intellectual beliefs or ideas are touched. 

These ideas will thus be essential to those individuals’ religion. Over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about people are usually their over-beliefs, i.e., ones for which the evidence is lacking, but which the persons believe in nonetheless.

Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes. If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief—though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you—for which I can only beg the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new people, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly in the preceding lectures. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.

God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. Transcendentalists are fond of the term ‘over-soul,’ but as a rule they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion. ‘God’ is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion, and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize. We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God's demands. As far as this goes I probably have you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.

The real effects in question are exerted on the personal centers of energy of the various subjects, but most of the subjects spontaneously believe that the effects embrace a wider sphere than the merely personal. Most religious people believe (or ‘know,’ if they are mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are all saved, in spite of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God's existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved.

This world may indeed someday burn up or freeze, as science assures us, but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience, and bring a real hypothesis into play. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious individual’s experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject's absolute confidence and peace.

Say our relations with God range over the whole gamut of consciousness, from the near side of our extra-marginal self to the remotest regions of our subliminal mind. Believing that God to be the absolute world ruler is a considerable over-belief. Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that religion, in its fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light.

It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But religion is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression. Our new world must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.

This thoroughly ‘pragmatic’ view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common people. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands.

I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes religion claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one of many worlds of consciousness that exist. Those other worlds must contain experiences that carry meaning for our life also. Although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford once wrote,[218] whispering the word ‘bosh! Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow scientific bounds.

Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

Varieties Reborn – Postscript

In aiming so much at simplification in my concluding lecture, I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position more amply and consequently more clearly.

Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalist supernaturalism; for the crasser variety ‘piecemeal’ supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which today is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to have displaced. Piecemeal supernaturalism admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by slipping influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It pertains to a different ‘-ology,’ and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and wedge itself between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.

Forget for the moment my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism. I believe that communion with the Ideal lets new force come into the world, and new departures to be made here below. This belief likely subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type.

Universalist supernaturalism surrenders too easily to naturalism, it seems to me. It takes the facts of physical science at their face value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments that may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalist way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that principles can exist that make no difference in facts.

Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. ‘A world’ of fact—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better should be done within this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us, so that all the interests that our poor souls embrace raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David's psalms!

But all facts are particular facts. Asking about God's existence has consequences for specific facts that the divine existence may be expected to fix or settle on us. That no concrete element of experience should change in consequence of a God being there seems to be an incredible proposition, yet this is the thesis to which refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It says that the Absolute maintains relations only with experience all together. It condescends to no transactions of detail.

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order to describe my general point of view better, but as I understand the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law. But for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalist metaphysics, the word ‘judgment’ here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems. It carries, on the contrary, execution with it, is in things as well as following things, and operates ‘causally’ as partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a Gnosticism[219] pure and simple on any other terms. But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the whole be classed among the expressions of that creed.

I state the matter thus bluntly because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where I belong.

If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of ‘prayerful communion,’ especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. It appears that in this phenomenon something ideal, in one sense part of ourselves and in another sense not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our center of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways.

If there then is a wider world of being than that of our everyday consciousness, if in it there are forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects is the openness of the subliminal door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.

The difference in natural fact that most of us would assign as the first difference arising from the existence of a God would be personal immortality. For the great majority of our own race religion means immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in eternity, I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to be eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove spirit-return, though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book.

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the God of ordinary persons, is by both ordinary people and by philosophers endowed with certain metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be one and only and to be infinite; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly anyone thinks it worthwhile to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness I feel bound to say that religious experience cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinite deity belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its obsession for a single idea, both pass to the limit and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to be sufficiently met by the belief that beyond individuals and in a fashion continuous with them there exists a larger power which is friendly to them and to their ideals. The facts only require that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds.

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and still is today) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, all is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was said about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details. Some people are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail—all of us are willing, whenever our activity-excitement rises sufficiently high. A final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has so far been willing to do. For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.[220] But all these statements are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book.

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[31] Francis W. Newman, The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, London, J. Chapman, 1849, pp. 96, 97.

[32] Pharrell Williams, “Happy,” iTunes audio, 3:52, 2014, https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/happy-from-despicable-me-2/id823593445?i=823593456.

[33] Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness; A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1901), 182-186.

[34] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself, Brooklyn, New York, self-published, 1855, p. 32.

[35] Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Roger Penrose - Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Consciousness?, Closer To Truth, directed by Peter Getzels, August 2019,

.

[36] Henry H. Goddard, "The Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures,” American Journal of Psychology vol. x, 1899, https://dn790003.ca.archive.org/0/items/jstor-1412143/1412143.pdf.

[37] Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Novato, Calif., New World Library and Namaste Publishing, 1997, 2004, p 44.

[38] Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite; or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty, (London, George Bell and Sons, 1899), 7, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23559.

[39] Paul Lejeune, Introduction à la Vie Mystique, (Paris: Lethielleux, 1899), 218.

[40] Friedrich Zuendel, Johann Christoph Blumhardt: A Biography, (Zürich: S. Höhr, 1883).

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid, pp 214, 117.

[43] Henry Wood, Ideal suggestion through mental photography; a restorative system for home and private use, preceded by a study of the laws of mental healing,  Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1893.

[44] Oprah Winfrey, interview, "The American Academy of Achievement," Video interview, 1991, accessed January 17, 2024, https://achievement.org/achiever/oprah-winfrey/#interview.

[45] Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man & his Wellbeing, 1910, Translated and edited by A. Wolf. Internet Archive, https://ia800300.us.archive.org/13/items/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft.pdf.

[46] Martin Luther, A commentary on Saint Paul's epistle to the Galatians, Philadelphia: J. Highlands, 1891, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/cu31924029294141.

[47] Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History, (New York: Scribner, 1949,) 121.

[48] John Muir, Journeys in the Wilderness, a John Muir Reader, edited by Graham White, (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2009), 327.

[49] Eccles. 1:1-13.

[50] Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Book XVII, lines 447-448.

[51] Theognis of Megara, Elegy and Iambus, Volume I, edited by J. M. Edmonds, The Elegiac Poems of Theognis, Perseus Digital Library, lines 425-428.

[52] Sophocles, Oedipus in Colonus, edited by Richard Jebb, translated by Francis Storr, Perseus Digital Library, lines 1225-1228.

[53] Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884), 142-143.

[54] Théodule-Armand Ribot, La Psychologie des Sentiments, edited by Félix Alcan, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière, 1896), 54, https://ia600907.us.archive.org/27/items/lapsychologiede00ribo/lapsychologiede00ribo_bw.pdf.

[55] Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry, Souvenirs de Ma Jeunesse, (Paris: Charles Douniol and Company, 1876), 119–121.

[56] S. A. K. (Samuel Alexander Kenny) Strahan, Suicide and Insanity, a Physiological and Sociological Study, (London: S. Sonnenschein and Co., 1894), Second Edition, 131.

[57] Jacques Roubinovitch, Edouard Toulouse, La Melancolie, (Paris, Masson, 1897), 170-171.

[58] George Dumas: La Tristesse et la Joie, edited by Félix Alcan, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière, 1900).

[59] Leo Tolstoy, Ma Confession, translated by Zoria, (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Parisienne, 1887).

[60] John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, (London: George Larkin, 1666).

[61] Henry Alline, The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, (Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1806), 25-26.

[62] For a similar account, see my father, Henry James, Society, the redeemed form of man, and the earnest of God's omnipotence in human nature: affirmed in letters to a friend, (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 43-52.

[63] Lutfullah, Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan gentleman, edited by Edward B. Eastwick, (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), 134-135.

[64] Alphonse Daudet, Notes sur la Vie, edited by Eugene Fasquelle, (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1899), 1-2, https://archive.org/details/notessurlavie00daudgoog/mode/2up.

[65] Annie Besant, Annie Besant: an Autobiography, (London: The Theosophical Society, 1885), 41.

[66] Smith Baker, Heterogeneous Personality (Etiological Significance of), (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893), 664.

[67] Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958; Taylor and Francis eLibrary, 2005), 59-60, https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/jung-the-undiscovered-self-1957.pdf.

[68] Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged, https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Nouveaux Mélanges Philosophiques, (Paris: Joubert, 1842), 114-115, https://archive.org/details/nouveauxmlange00jouf.

[71] John Foster, Decision of Character and Other Essays, (London:  Ward Lock, 1806), 71-72, https://archive.org/details/decisionofcharac014696mbp.

[72] Horace Fletcher, Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1895), 25-27, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45040.

[73] Edwin Diller Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1899, 3rd edition, 1911), 224, 262.

[74] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, (Philadelphia: James Crissy, 1821), 90.

[75] James H. Leuba, Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal of Psychology, vii. 309 (1896).

[76] J. Wilbur Chapman, S.H. Hadley of Water Street, a Miracle of Grace, (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1906), https://archive.org/details/shhadleyofwaters00chapuoft/page/n5/mode/2up.

[77] Ibid, 117.

[78] Ibid, 385.

[79] Ibid, 99, 100.

[80] Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1957), 30th edition, 63-64.

[81] Ibid, 113, 160.

[82] Jonathan Edwards, The Life of Rev. David Brainerd, Chiefly Extracted from His Diary, (New York: American Tract Society, 1833), 25-26.

[83] Ibid, 374-375.

[84] Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1872), 463.

[85] Bill J. Leonard, Dull Habit or Acute Fever? William James and the Protestant Conversion Crisis, 2015 William James Lecture, Video, 1:33:02, 2015, Harvard Divinity School,

.

[86] Alfred Binet, Alterations of Personality, (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1896).

[87] George A. Coe, The Spiritual Life, (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1900).

[88] Adolphe Monod, Souvenirs de sa Vie, Vol. I, (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1885), 433, https://archive.org/details/adolphmonod01mono.

[89] Martin Luther, A Commentary on the Galatians, 1796, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-commentary-on-the-gala_luther-martin_1796.

[90] Ibid, 345-347, abridged.

[91] Ibid, 61, abridged.

[92] W. F. Bourne, The King's Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, (London, Bible Christian Book-Room, 1874), 9.

[93] William B. Sprague, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, (New York: D. Appleton, 1833).

[94] Charles G. Finney, Memoirs Written by Himself, (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1876,) 34, https://archive.org/details/memoirsofrevchar00finnuoft.

[95] Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, (Paris: Hachette, 1878), 95, 106, abridged, https://archive.org/details/portroyal00sain.

[96] Heinrich Heine, The Two Grenadiers, translated by Richard Stokes, https://oxfordsong.org/song/die-beiden-grenadiere.

[97] George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley, 1903.

[98] John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, Recorded December 1964, Impulse! Records, 1965, Vinyl album, http://albumlinernotes.com/A_Love_Supreme.html.

[99] Philip Doddridge, The Life of Col. James Gardiner, Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1745), 23, 32, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11253.

[100] Ibid, 142.

[101] William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism; Considered in eight lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1899), 326.

[102] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (Boston: 1854), 122-123, Project Gutenberg e-book, https://ia802302.us.archive.org/22/items/henry-david-thoreau_walden/henry-david-thoreau_walden.pdf.

[103] Charles Voysey, The Mystery of Pain, Death and Sin, and Discourses in Refutation of Atheism, (Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1878), https://archive.org/details/mysterypaindeat00voysgoog.

[104] Ronald C. White, The Eloquent President; A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words, (New York, NY: Random House, 2011), 255.

[105] Georges Dumas, Tristesse et la Joie, edited by Félix Alcan, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière, 1900), 130, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k77202b/f8.item.

[106] André Towianski, Translated from Italian by Wm. James, (Turin, private printing by Vincent Bona, 1897), Chapter X, http://www.biblisem.net/etudes/canotowi.htm.

[107] R.C. Morgan, Life of Richard Weaver, (London: Morgan and Chase, 1827), https://archive.org/details/richardwea00morg.

[108] Bulletin, l'Union pour l'Action Morale, September, 1894, https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34532066t.

[109] Blaise Pascal, Prieres pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies, (Cologne: Baltazar d'Egmondt, 1666).

[110] Thomas C. Upham, Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, (New York: Harper Brothers, 1849), 48, 141.

[111] Frank Bullen, With Christ at Sea, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1900), 129-130.

[112] Thomas Claparède, Edouard Goty, Deux Héroines de la Foi, (Paris: Librairie Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1880), 121-122.

[113] Ram Dass, Be Here Now, (San Cristobal, New Mexico: Lama Foundation, 1971), https://www.ramdass.org/the-practice-of-be-here-now-each-moment/.  

[114] Thomas Ellwood, The History of Thomas Ellwood, (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1885), 33.

[115] John Woolman, A Journal of the Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of that Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman, (Philadelphia: Society of Friends, 1876).

[116] Ibid, 274.

[117] Alfred Monnin, Le Curé d'Ars, Vie de Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, (Paris: Charles Douniol, 1864), 545.

[118] Barrett Wendell: Cotton Mather, the Puritan Priest, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1891), 198.

[119] For example: Jérôme Ribet, L'Ascétique Chrétienne, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Poussielgue, 1898.

[120] Carmelites de Paris, Saint Jean de la Croix, Vie et Oeuvres, (Paris: Librairie Religieuse H. Oudin, 1893), 223-224.

[121] The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, translated by Thomas Francis Knox, (London: Burns, Lambert, and Oates, 1865), 57-60.

[122] Emile Bougaud, Histoire de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Poussielgue, 1882), 265, 171.

[123] Alfonso Rodriguez, S.J., Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, (Lille: L. Lefort, 1833), Part iii., Treatise v., ch. x.

[124] Daniel Bartoli, S.J., History of the Life and Institute of St. Ignatius de Loyola, Founder of the Society of Jesus, (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1855), vol ii, 92-94.

[125] Ibid, Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.

[126] Robert Philip, The Life and Times of the Reverend George Whitefield, (London: George Virtue, 1842), Fourth edition, 366.

[127] Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), Third edition, enlarged, 358, 361.

[128] Speculum Perfectionis, edited by Paul Sabatier, (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1898), 10, 13.

[129] Antonia Bourignon, An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, (London: Printed for D. Brown, S. Manship, R. Parker, and H. Newman, 1699), 269-270.

[130] John Jay Chapman, "Unknown Title," The Political Nursery vol. iv., 4, (1900).

[131] George Fox, A Journal, (Philadelphia: Friends' Book Store, 1800), 59-61.

[132] Emile Bougaud, Histoire de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Poussielgue, 1882), 145.

[133] Révélations de Sainte Gertrude vol. i, (Paris: Oudin, 1898), 44, 186.

[134] Ernest Murisier, Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, ed. Felix Alcan, (Paris: Ancienne Libraire Germer Baillière, 1901).

[135] Ibid, 168.

[136] Maurice Meschler, S.J., The Life of Saint Aloysius of Gonzaga, (St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder, 1891).

[137] Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, “Energetic Particle Strikes the Earth,” Astronomy Picture of the Day, Dec. 5, 2023, https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231205.html.

[138] F. Max Müller, Ramakrishna, His Life and Sayings, (New York: Scribner's, 1899), 180.

[139] Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha; His Life, His Doctrine, His Order, trans. William Hoey, (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882), 127.

[140] Ibid, 172.

[141] Augustin Frédéric Hamon, Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, ed. Charles Rozez, (Paris: A.L. Charles, 1895).

[142] Muhammad Ali, “Remember When: Muhammad Ali Protested Against the Vietnam War,” NowThis News, August 26, 2018,

.

[143] Muhammad Ali, "Muhammad Ali: the world’s ‘greatest’ conscientious objector," Amnesty International, June 14, 2016, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/06/muhammad-ali-the-worlds-greatest-conscientious-objector/.

[144] Dave Zirin, "June 20, 1967: Muhammad Ali Convicted for Refusing the Vietnam Draft," Zinn Education Project, This Day in History, January 14, 2024, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/-muhammad-ali-convicted-refusing-vietnam-draft.

[145] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1887), 128.

[146] Yogi Berra, “Yogi-isms,” Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, 2024, https://yogiberramuseum.org/about-yogi/yogisms/.

[147] James Crichton-Browne, The Cavendish Lecture On Dreamy Mental States, (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1895).

[148] William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism; Considered in eight lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1899), 341.

[149] Horatio F. Brown, John Addington Symonds, a Biography, (London, John C. Nimmo, 1895), 29-31.

[150] Benjamin Paul Blood, The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, (Amsterdam, N.Y.: Self-published, 1874), 35, 36.

[151] Sidney Cohen, M.D., Learning from a '50s Housewife on Acid, Film, ABC News, January 18, 2011, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1950s-housewife-acid/story?id=12640926.

[152] Ibid, 78.

[153] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (New York: Image Books/Doubleday Religion, 1966), 154.

[154] William James, "To Mrs. James," The Letters of William James vol. 2, ed. Henry James, (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), 76-77.

[155] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect, (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh, 1882), 174.

[156] Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness; A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1901), 182-186.

[157] Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, Trans. René Hague, (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 27, 33.

[158] Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, or Conquering the Internal Nature, (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897).

[159] Carl Friedrich Koeppen, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung, (Berlin: Friedrich Schneider, 1857), 585.

[160] Auguste Schmölders: Essai sur les Écoles Philosophiques Chez les Arabes, (Paris: L'Institute Français, 1842), 54-68.

[161] Tomás de Vallgornera, Mystica Theologia, (Turin: Augusta Taurinorum, 1911).

[162] Edouard Récéjac, Essai sur les Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique, (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1897), 66.

[163] Saint John of the Cross, Vie et Œuvres, 3me édition, (Paris: H. Oudin, 1891), 429-432.

[164] Saint Teresa of Avila, The Complete Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1987), 955, 1002.

[165] Daniel Bartoli, S.J., History of the Life and Institute of St. Ignatius de Loyola, Founder of the Society of Jesus, (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1855), vol i, 34-35.

[166] Ibid, 320.

[167] Dionysius the Areopagite, The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, trans. John Parker, (London: James Parker, 1897), 129.

[168] Josiah Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, (New York: D. Appleton, 1898), 282.

[169] Richard Rohr, "The Wisdom of Paradox," Daily Meditation, January 17, 2024, The Center for Action and Contemplation, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-wisdom-of-paradox/.

[170] Ibid, 309-310.

[171] Martin Luther King, Jr, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, 1963, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/letter-birmingham-jail.

[172] See Carpenter's Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and Jefferies's wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.

[173] Max Nordau, Degeneration, (New York: D. Appleton, 1895).

[174] John Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, (New York: Macmillan, 1880), 174-175.

[175] John Henry Cardinal Newman, Idea of a University, (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), Discourse II. § 7.

[176] Harold Fielding, The Hearts of Men, (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1902), 313.

[177] John Henry Cardinal Newman, Idea of a University, (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), Discourse II. § 7.

[178] Charles Sanders Peirce, "How to make our Ideas Clear," Popular Science Monthly 12, no. 7, January 1878, https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf.

[179] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (New York: Image Books/Doubleday Religion, 1966), 9.

[180] Ibid, 243-250, 291-299.

[181] Alexander Campbell Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, second edition, (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899), part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.

[182] A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1893), passim.

[183] Ibid, Discourse III. § 7.

[184] John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia, (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 49, 50.

[185] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Good-Bye,” Poetry Foundation, 12/24/2023, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45876/good-bye.

[186] Frank Granger, The Soul of a Christian, (London: Methuen & Co., 1900), Ch. xii.

[187] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1883),  363.

[188] Auguste Sabatier, Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me éd.,(Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1897), 24-26.

[189] Frederic G. Warne, The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, (New York: Crowell, 1898), 228, 194, 219.

[190] For instance: Bishop of Ripon, et. al., In Answer to Prayer, (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898).; 

S.B. Shaw, Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, (Lansing, Mich., Self-published, 1898).; and Horace Lorenzo Hastings, The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, (Boston: H.L. Hastings, 1893).

[191] Ibid, 92.

[192] Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 115.

[193] The Works of Epictetus,  trans. Elizabeth Carter, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1866), Book i. Ch. xvi.

[194] James Martineau, Endeavours after a Christian Life, (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 352-353.

[195] Ibid, 121-122.

[196] William Sanday, The Oracles of God, (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 52-54.

[197] Augustus Clissold, The Prophetic Spirit in its Relation to Wisdom and Madness, (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 66-67.

[198] Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorâns, (Göttingen: Verlag der Dieterichschen Buebhandlung, 1860), 16.

[199] Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Far Away Eyes, recorded 10 October – 21 December 1977, track 6 on Some Girls, Rolling Stones Records, 1978, vinyl album.

[200] The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher, (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), Chapter 4, lines 324-335, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/gallacher-cloud-of-unknowing.

[201] Perrine Simon-Nahum, "The Scandal Surrounding the Vie de Jésus by Ernest Renan; Literary Success, Scientific Failure," Mil neuf cent. Revue d'histoire intellectuelle Volume 25, Issue 1, 2007, pages 61-74.

[202] William Derham, Physico-Theology: or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation, (London: W. Innys, 1713), 347-349.

[203] Jean Baptiste van Helmont, A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton, (London: Flesher, Lee, 1650), 105-106.

[204] Hermann Lotze, Logic, in three books: of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, ed. and trans. B. Bosanquet, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 500.

[205] Borden Parker Bowne, The Christian Revelation, (Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, 1898).; Borden Parker Bowne, The Christian Life, (Cincinnati: Curtis & Jennings, 1899).; and Borden Parker Bowne, The Atonement, (Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, 1900).

[206] Étienne Vacherot, La Religion, (Paris: Librairie Chamerot et Lauwereyns, 1869), 313, 436, et passim.

[207] Ibid, 310.

[208] James Mark Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, (New York: MacMillan, 1897), Ch. 10.

[209] Henry Rutgers Marshall, Instinct and Reason, (New York: MacMillan, 1898), Ch. 7-12.

[210] Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry, Henri Perreyve, (London: Rivington's, 1872), 92, 89.

[211] James H. Leuba, "The Contents of Religious Consciousness," The Monist 11, (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1901), 536.

[212] Op. cit., 571-572.

[213] Wilhelm Bender, Wesen der Religion, (Bonn: Verlag von Mar Cohen & Sohn, 1886), 85, 38.

[214] Edouard Récéjac, Essai sur les Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique, (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1897), 46.

[215] Frederic W.H. Myers, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research vol. vii., 305 (1892).

[216] Frederic W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, (London: Longmans, Green, 1903).

[217] Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Practical Vedanta IV, (Kolkata, India: Advaita Ashram, 2023), 160.

[218] William Kingdon Clifford, The Scientific Basis of Morals, and Other Essays, (New York: Humboldt, 1884).

[219] William James, Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897), 165.

[220] Edmund Gurney, Tertium quid: chapters on various disputed questions, (London: K. Paul Trench, 1887), 99, 148, 149.

---

[1] C. G. Jung, Letters, Vol. I. 1906–1950, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 530-532.

[2] Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, or Conquering the Internal Nature, (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), frontispiece.

[3] "To Henry W. Rankin," The Letters of William James vol. 2, ed. Henry James, (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), 149, 150.