 contents and preface to the varieties of religious experience. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature by William James. To EPG, Enthilial Gratitude and Love. Contents. Lecture 1, Religion and Neurology. Introduction. The course is not anthropological, but deals with personal documents, questions of fact and questions of value. In point of fact, the religious are often neurotic. Criticism of medical materialism which condemns religion on that account. Theory that religion has a sexual origin refuted. All states of mind are neuraly conditioned. Their significance must be tested not by their origin, but by the value of their fruits. Three criteria of value. Origin useless as a criterion. Advantages of the psychopathic temperament when a superior intellect goes with it, especially for the religious life. Lecture 2, Circumcription of the Topic. Futility of simple definitions of religion. No one specific religious sentiment. Institutional and personal religion. We can find ourselves to the personal branch. Definition of religion for the purpose of these lectures. Meaning of the term divine. The divine is what prompts solemn reactions. Impossible to make our definitions sharp. We must study the more extreme cases. Two ways of accepting the universe. Religion is more enthusiastic than philosophy. Its characteristic is enthusiasm in solemn emotion. Its ability to overcome unhappiness. Need of such a faculty from the biological point of view. Lecture 3, The Reality of the Unseen. Percepts versus abstract concepts. Influence of the latter on belief. Cons, theological ideas. We have a sense of reality other than that given by the special senses. Examples of sense of presence. The feeling of unreality. Sense of a divine presence. Examples. Mystical experiences. Examples. Other cases of sense of God's presence. Convincingness of unreasoned experience. Inferiority of rationalism in establishing belief. Either enthusiasm or solemnity may preponderate in the religious attitude of individuals. Lectures 4 and 5. The Religion of Healthy Mindedness. Happiness is man's chief concern. Once-born and twice-born characters. Walt Whitman. Mixed nature of Greek feeling. Systematic healthy-mindedness. Its reasonableness. Liberal Christianity shows it. Optimism as encouraged by popular science. The mind cure movement. Its creed. Cases. Its doctrine of evil. Its analogy to Lutheran theology. Salvation by relaxation. Its methods. Suggestion. Meditation. Recollection. Verification. Diversity of possible schemes of adaptation to the universe. Appendix. Two mind cure cases. Lectures 6 and 7. The Sick Soul. Healthy-mindedness and repentance. Essential pluralism of the healthy-minded philosophy. Morbid-mindedness. Its two degrees. The pain threshold varies in individuals. Insecurity of natural goods. Failure or vain success of every life. Pessimism of all pure naturalism. Hopelessness of Greek and Roman view. Pathological unhappiness. Anhedonia. Query-less melancholy. Vital zest is a pure gift. Loss of it makes physical world look different. Tolstoy. Bunyan. Aline. Morbid fear. Such cases need a supernatural religion for relief. Antagonism of healthy-mindedness and morbidness. The problem of evil cannot be escaped. Lecture 8. The divided self and the process of its unification. Heterogeneous personality. Character gradually attains unity. Examples of divided self. The unity attained need not be religious. Counter-conversion cases. Other cases. Gradual and sudden unification. Tolstoy's recovery. Bunyans. Lecture 9. Conversion. Case of Stephen Bradley. The psychology of character changes. Emotional excitements make new centers of personal energy. Schematic ways of representing this. Starbuck likens conversion to normal moral ripening. Luba's ideas. Seemingly unconvertible persons. Two types of conversion. Subconscious incubation of motives. Self-surrender. Its importance in religious history. Cases. Lecture 10. Conversion concluded. Cases of sudden conversion. Is suddenness essential? No. It depends on psychological idiosyncrasy. Proved existence of trans-marginal or subliminal consciousness. Automatisms. Instantaneous conversions seem due to the possession of an active subconscious self by the subject. The value of conversion depends not on the process, but on the fruits. These are not superior in sudden conversion. Professor Coe's views. Sanctification as a result. Our psychological account does not exclude direct presence of the deity. Sense of higher control. Relations of the emotional faith state to intellectual beliefs. Luba quoted. Characteristics of the faith state. Sense of truth. The world appears new. Sensory in motor automatisms. Permanency of conversions. Lectures 11, 12, and 13. St. Linus. Sambur on a state of grace. Types of character as due to the balance of impulses and inhibitions. Sovereign excitements. Erasability. Effects of higher excitement in general. The saintly life is ruled by spiritual excitement. This may annul sensual impulses permanently. Probable subconscious influences involved. Mechanical scheme for representing permanent alteration and character. Characteristics of St. Linus. Sense of reality of a higher power. Peace of mind. Charity. Equanimity, fortitude, etc. Connection of this with relaxation. Purity of life. Asceticism. Obedience. Poverty. The sentiments of democracy and of humanity. General effects of higher excitements. Lectures 14 and 15. The value of St. Linus. It must be tested by the human value of its fruits. The reality of the God must, however, also be judged. Unfit religions get eliminated by experience. Empiricism is not skepticism. Individual and tribal religion. Loneliness of religious originators. Corruption follows success. Extravagances. Excessive devoutness as fanaticism. As theopathic absorption. Excessive purity. Excessive charity. The perfect man is adapted only to the perfect environment. Saints are lemons. Excesses of asceticism. Asceticism symbolically stands for the heroic life. Militarism and voluntary poverty as possible equivalents. Pros and cons of the saintly character. Saint versus strong men. Their social function must be considered. Abstractly, the saint is the highest type, but in the present environment it may fail, so we make ourselves saints at our peril. The question of theological truth. Lectures 16 and 17. Mysticism. Mysticism defined four marks of mystic states. They form a distinct region of consciousness. Examples of their lower grades. Mysticism and alcohol. The anesthetic revelation. Religious mysticism. Aspects of nature. Consciousness of God. Cosmic consciousness. Yoga. Buddhistic mysticism. Sufism. Christian mystics. Their sense of revelation. Tonic effects of mystic states. They describe by negatives. Sense of union with the absolute. Mysticism and music. Three conclusions. One, mystical states carry authority for him who has them. Two, but for no one else. Three, nevertheless they break down the exclusive authority of rationalistic states. They strengthen monistic and optimistic hypotheses. Lecture 18. Philosophy. Primacy of feeling in religion. Philosophy being a secondary function. Intellectualism professes to escape objective standards in her theological constructions. Dogmatic theology. Criticism of its account of God's attributes. Pragmatism as a test of the value of conceptions. God's metaphysical attributes have no practical significance. His moral attributes are proved by bad arguments. Collapse of systematic theology. Does transcendental idealism fair better? Its principles. Quotations from John cared. They are good as restatements of religious experience but uncoercive as reason proof. What philosophy can do for religion by transforming herself into science of religions. Lecture 19. Other characteristics. Aesthetic elements in religion. Contrast of Catholicism and Protestantism. Sacrifice and confession. Prayer. Religion holds that spiritual work is really effective in prayer. Three degrees of opinion as to what is affected. First degree, second degree, third degree. Automatisms. Their frequency among religious leaders. Jewish cases. Muhammad. Joseph Smith. Religion and the subconscious region in general. Lecture 20. Conclusions. Summary of religious characteristics. Men's religions need not be identical. The science of religions can only suggest not proclaim a religious creed. Is religion a survival of primitive thought? Modern science rules out the concept of personality. Anthropomorphism and belief in the personal characterize pre-scientific thought. Personal forces are real in spite of this. Scientific objects are abstractions. Only individualized experiences are concrete. Religion holds by the concrete. Primarily religion is a biological reaction. Its simplest terms are an uneasiness and a deliverance. Description of the deliverance. Question of the reality of the higher power. The author's hypotheses. One, the subconscious self as intermediating between nature and the higher region. Two, the higher region or God. Three, he produces real effects in nature. Post script. Philosophic position of the present book defined as piecemeal supernaturalism. Criticism of universalistic supernaturalism. Different principles must occasion differences in fact. What differences in fact can God's existence occasion? The question of immortality. Question of God's uniqueness and infinity. Religious experience does not settle this question in the affirmative. The pluralistic hypothesis is more conformed to common sense. 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 me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each, for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on man's religious appetites and the second a 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 20 lectures. In lecture 20 I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions and the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to the post script 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 me on the middle of the book to offer a caricature of this 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. My thanks for helping writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck of Stanford University who made over to me his large collection of manuscript material, to Henry W. Rankin of East Northfield, a friend unseen but proved to whom I owe precious information, to Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, to Canning Schiller of Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand for documents, to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller and to my friends Thomas Renn Ward of New York and Vincente Lutislavski, late of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books at Glenmore above Keen Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express. Harvard University, March 192. End of contents and preface. Lecture one. Religion and neurology. It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from a living voice as well as from the books of European scholars is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, naughty winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries, whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired. And in him who first makes the adventure, it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this University were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Frazier's essay in philosophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's classroom therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown, and I confess that to find my humble self-promoted from my native wilderness to be actually, for the first time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names carries with it a sense of dreamland, quite as much as of reality. But since I have received the honor of this appointment, I have felt that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that now that the current here and at Aberdeen has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States. I hope that our people may become in all these higher matters, even as one people, and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament that goes with our English speech, may more and more pervade and influence the world. As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I am neither a theologian nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist, the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities. If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet, when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life, and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The documents humans, which we shall find most instructive, need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition. They lie along the beaten highway, and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession from books that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand. The question, what are the religious propensities? And the question, what is their philosophic significance? Are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view? And as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have referred. In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? How did it come about? What is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, what is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a vertutile, or what we may, if we like, dominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately and then adding them together. In the matter of religions, it is particularly easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds when they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still further question. Of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this question, we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation, and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus, if our theory of revelation value were to affirm that any book to possess it must have been composed automatically, or knocked by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great sold persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value, and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view and some another of the Bible's value as a revelation according to their spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs. I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because there are many religious persons, some of you now present possibly are among them, who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential point of view from which in the following lectures, the phenomena of religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically and psychologically, as if they were mere curious facts of individual history, some of you may think at a degradation of so sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life. Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention, and since such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point. There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact, a religious life exclusively pursued does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian or a Muhammadan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are geniuses in the religious line, and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often showed symptoms of nervous instability, even more perhaps than other kinds of genius. Religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably, they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas, and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects today are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to County Magistrates and Jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet, from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detracke of the deepest die. His journal abounds in entries of this sort. Quote, As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw three steeple house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was. They said Litchfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whether I was to go. As soon as they were gone, I stepped away and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Litchfield, where in a great field shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then I was commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still for it was winter, but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes and left them with the shepherds, and the poor shepherds trembled and were astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying, cry, woe to the bloody city of Litchfield. So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, woe to the bloody city of Litchfield. It being market day, I went into the marketplace, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, woe to the bloody city of Litchfield. And no one laid hands on me. As I went, thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the marketplace appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace, and returning to the shepherds gave them some money and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do. Then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this, a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it the bloody city. For though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet there was no more than had to be fallen many other places. But afterwards, I came to understand that in the 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 marketplace, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs which had been shed above a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets. In the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord. Close quote. Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed, handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us, and awakens our devotion, feels to us also as if it must be sweet, generous, and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without a do or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. I am no such thing, it would say. I am myself, myself alone. The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says, quote, I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. Close quote. And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly, M. Tyne, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written, quote, whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar. Close quote. When we read of proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel, quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform, menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance and make them appear of no more preciousness either than the useful groceries of which M. Tyne speaks. Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-insticated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion, probably his liver is torpid. Elyse's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticizing the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints and the devotion of missionaries are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection and the like. Footnote As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this reinterpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one so crudely is it often employed, of the famous catholic taunt that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its phones at origo was Luther's wish to marry a nun. The effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena some are undisguisedly amatory. Example, sex deities and obscene rights in polytheism and ecstatic feelings of union with the Savior and a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist. Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as his language drawn from the sexual life. We hunger and thirst after righteousness, we find the Lord a sweet saver, we taste and see that he is good. Spiritual milk for American babes drawn from the breasts of both testaments is a subtitle of the once famous New England primer and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk thought of from the point of view not of the mother but of the greedy babe. Saint Francois des Alves for instance thus describes the orison of quietude quote in this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast whose mother to caress him whilst he is still in her arms makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips so it is here our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which his majesty pours into our mouth and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord close quote and again quote consider the little infants united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers and you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them even so during this orison the heart united to its god often time makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness close quote in fact one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function the bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression quote hide not thine ear at my breathing my groaning is not hid from me my heart panteth my strength faileth me my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long as the heart panteth after the waterbrooks so my soul panteth after thee oh my god close quote god's breath in man is the title of the chief work of our best known american mystic thomas lake harris and in certain non-christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration these arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory but the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analog elsewhere the two main phenomena of religion namely melancholy and conversion they will say are essentially phenomena of adolescence and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life to which the retort again is easy even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact which it is not it is not only the sexual life but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence one might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics physics chemistry logic philosophy and sociology which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion is also a perversion of the sexual instinct but that would be too absurd moreover if the argument from synchrony is to decide what is to be done with the fact that the religious age par excellence would seem to be old age when the uproar of the sexual life is passed the plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness the moment one does this one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness everything about the two things differs moods objects faculties concerned and acts impelled to any general assimilation is simply impossible what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast if now the defenders of the sex theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis that without the chemical contributions which the sex organs make to the blood the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities this final proposition may be true or not true but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religions meaning or value in this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the pancreas and the kidneys as on sexual apparatus and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence somehow of the mind upon the body end footnote we are surely all familiar in the general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy we all use it to some degree in criticizing persons who states of mind we regard as overstrained but when other people criticize our own more exalted soul flights by calling them nothing but expressions of our organic disposition we feel outraged and hurt for we know that whatever be our organisms peculiarities our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the two simple-minded system of thought which we are considering medical materialism finishes up st paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex he being an epileptic it snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric st Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate george fox's discontent with the shams of his age and his pining for spiritual veracity it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon carlyle's organ tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro due dental Qatar all such mental over tensions it says are when you come to the bottom of the matter are mere affairs of diathesis or auto intoxications most probably due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover and medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way modern psychology finding definite psychophysical connections to hold good assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete if we adopt the assumption then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way if not in every detail st paul certainly had once an epileptoid if not an epileptic seizure george fox was an hereditary degenerate carlyle was undoubtedly auto intoxicated by some organ or other no matter which and the rest but now i ask you how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance according to the general postulate of psychology just referred to there is not a single one of our states of mind high or low healthy or morbid that has not some organic process as its condition scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are and if we only knew the facts intimately enough we should doubtless see the liver determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the methodist under conviction anxious about his soul when it alters in one way the blood that percolates it we get the methodist when in another way we get the atheist form of mind so of all our raptures and our drynesses our longings and pantings our questions and beliefs they are equally organically founded be they of religious or of non-religious content to plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind then in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value is quite illogical and arbitrary unless one have already worked out in advance some psychophysical theory concerning spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings not even our scientific doctrines not even our disbeliefs could retain any value as revelations of the truth for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessors body at the time it is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no sweeping skeptical conclusion it is sure just as every simple man is sure that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others and reveal to us more truth and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment it has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states by which it may accredit them and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction is altogether illogical and inconsistent let us play fair in this whole matter and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts when we think certain states of mind superior to others is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents no it is always for two entirely different reasons it is either because we take an immediate delight in them or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life when we speak disparagingly of feverish fancies surely the fever process as such is not the ground of our disesteem for ought we know to the contrary 103 or 104 degrees fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in than the more ordinary blood heat of 97 or 98 degrees it is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies or their inability to bear the criticism of the convalescent hour when we praise the thoughts which health brings health's peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment we know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms it is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good or else their consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs which makes them pass for true in our esteem now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree what immediately feels most good is not always most true when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience the difference between philip drunk and philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration if merely feeling good could decide drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience but its revelations however acutely satisfying at the moment are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time the consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience we shall hear after hear much of them that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come but they seldom come and they do not come to everyone and the rest of life makes either no connection with them or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases some prefer to be guided by the average results hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end it is however a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test a good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors genius says dr. morrow quote is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree genius says dr. lombroso quote is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety and is allied to moral insanity whenever a man's life writes mr. nezbet quote is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study he inevitably falls into the morbid category and it is worthy of remark that as a rule the greater the genius the greater the unsoundness now do these authors after having succeeded in establishing to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease consistently preceded thereupon to impugn the value of the fruits do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now onwards and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth no their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here and hold their own against inferences which in mere love of logical consistency medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw one disciple of the school indeed has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesome way such works of contemporary art namely as he himself is unable to enjoy and they are many by using medical arguments but for the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged and the medical line of attack either confines itself to such secular productions as everyone admits to be intrinsically eccentric or else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations and then it is because the religious manifestations have been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds in the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment no matter what may be their author's neurological type it should be no otherwise with religious opinions their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily and secondly on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true immediate luminescence in short philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of a placidist cow and it would not now save her theology if the trial of her theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible and conversely if her theology can stand these other tests it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below you see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future some direct mark by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely now and forever against all mistake such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists it is clear that the origin of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort if only the various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test origin in immediate intuition origin in pontifical authority origin in supernatural revelation has by vision hearing or unaccountable impression origin in direct possession by a higher spirit expressing itself in prophecy and warning origin in automatic utterance generally these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history the medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way they are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion but the argument from origin has seldom been used alone for it is too obviously insufficient dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebuttors of supernatural religion on grounds of origin yet he finds himself forced to write quote what right have we to believe nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only she may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose it is the work that is done and the quality in the worker by which it was done that is alone of moment and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective if indeed he were hypocrite adulterer eccentric or lunatic home we come again then to the old and last resort of certitude namely the common assent of mankind or of the competent by instruction and training among mankind close quote in other words not its origin but the way in which it works on the whole is dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief this is our own empiricist criterion and this criterion the stoutest in sisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character to pass themselves off as significant still less as divine in the history of christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit thus making the religious person too full more the child of hell he was before has always been a difficult one to solve needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience in the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion by their fruits ye shall know them not by their roots jonathan edwards treaties on religious affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis the roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us no appearances whatever our infallible proofs of grace our practice is the only sure evidence even to ourselves that we are genuinely christians quote informing a judgment of ourselves now edwards writes we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day there is not one grace of the spirit of god of the existence of which in any professor of religion christian practice is not the most decisive evidence the degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine close quote catholic writers are equally emphatic the good dispositions which a vision or voice or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter saint Teresa says quote like imperfect sleep which instead of giving more strength to the head doth but leave it the more exhausted the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches and an admirable renewal of bodily strength i alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination i showed them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me they were my actual dispositions all those who knew me saw that i was changed my confessor bore witness to the fact this improvement palpable in all respects far from being hidden was brilliantly evident to all men as for myself it was impossible to believe that if the demon were its author he could have used in order to lose me and lead me to hell an expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead for i saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all that wealth close quote i fear i have made a longer excursus than was necessary and that fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen among some of you as i announced my pathological program at any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results exclusively and i shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize your piety no more still you may ask me if its results are to be the ground of our final spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon why threaten us at all with so much existential study of its conditions why not simply leave pathological questions out to this i reply in two ways first i say irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on and i say secondly that it always leads to a better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed in sane conditions have this advantage that they isolate special factors of the mental life and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings they play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body to understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations the study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their comprehension of normal sensation that of illusions has been the key to the right comprehension of perception morbid impulses and imperative conceptions fixed ideas so-called have thrown a flood of light on the psychology of the normal will and obsessions and delusions have performed the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief similarly the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts of which I already made mention to class it with psychopathical phenomena borderland insanity crankiness insane temperament loss of mental balance psychopathic degeneration to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called has certain peculiarities and liabilities which when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age than if his temperament were less neurotic there is of course no special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect for most psychopaths have feeble intellects and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems but the psychopathic temperament whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired often brings with it ardor and excitability of character the cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility he is liable to fix ideas and obsessions his conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action and when he gets a new idea he has no rest till he proclaims it or in some way works it off what shall I think of it a common person says to himself about a vexed question but in a cranky mind what must I do about it is the form the question tends to take in the autobiography of that high sold woman mrs. Annie peasant I read the following passage quote 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 re echoed phrase of weak need amiability someone ought to do it so why not I is the cry of some earnest servant of man eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution close quote true enough and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man thus when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty they are bound to coalesce often enough in the same individual we have the best possible condition of the kind of defective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with mere 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 mrs lombroso nisbet and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox to pass now to religious phenomena take the melancholy which as we shall see constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers take the trance like states of insight into truth which all religious mystics report these are each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope religious melancholy whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious is at any rate melancholy religious happiness is happiness religious trance is trance and the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others or its origin is shown the moment we agree to stand by experimental results and inequality in judging of values who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness or of religious trances far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy happiness and trance then by refusing to consider their place in any more general series and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order all together I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this supposition as regards to the psychopathic origin of so many religious phenomena that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of human experiences no one organism can possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth few of us are not in some way infirm or even diseased and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly in the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception we have the intensity and tendency to emphasize which are the essence of practical moral vigor and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world what then is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth to corners of the universe which your robust philistine type of nervous system forever offering its biceps to be felt thumping at 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 were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity and having said thus much I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop the mass of collateral phenomena morbid or healthy with which the various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them better forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed the a perceiving 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 a perceiving mass I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context than has been usual in university courses end of lecture one