 The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Lecture 4. The Religion of Healthy Mindedness. If we were to ask the question, what is human life's chief concern? One of the answers we should receive would be, it is happiness. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which different kinds of conduct bring. And even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles around which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say, with the author whom I lately quoted, that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise. But we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may produce the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy in existence. And we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be. With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true, therefore it is true. Such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the immediate inferences of the religious logic used by ordinary men. The near presence of God's spirit, says a German writer, quote, may be experienced in its reality, indeed only experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable feeling of happiness, which is connected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start. Close quote. In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day. In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. Cosmic emotion inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are amably happy, I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset, their religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the Reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not 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, dili gay et quod vis fac, if you love but God, you may do as you incline, is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters, they have been refined or gross, but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the steam of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are, of course, infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, Bide Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the 18th century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that nature, if you will, only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good. It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky, blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds, and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden. God has two families of children on this earth, says Francis W. Newman, the once-born and the twice-born, and the once-born he describes as follows. Quote, they see God not as a strict judge, not as a glorious potentate, but as the animating spirit of a beautiful, harmonious world, beneficent and kind, merciful as well as pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies. They do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections. Yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous, for they hardly think of themselves at all. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them, for they no more shrink from God than a child from an emperor before whom the parent trembles. In fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severe majesty of God consists. Footnote, I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she could always cuddle up to God. And footnote, he is to them the impersonation of kindness and beauty. They read his character not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts, and not very much in the world, and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues, and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency, and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship. Close quote. In the Romish church, such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough, and in its recent liberal developments of Unitarianism and Latitudinarianism, generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another. Here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence. Quote. Orthodox scholars say, in the heathen classics you find no consciousness of the sin. It is very true God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities. But they were not conscious of enmity against God, and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now. I miss the mark, draw a bow, and try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much health in me, and in anybody, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and St. Paul. Close quote. In another letter Parker writes, quote, I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days, and if sometimes they were a little cold and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years, I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the religious. Close quote. 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 answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbucks circulars. I quote a part of it. Quote, I observe with profound regret the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational, who is trained in the theory of such a religion so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the problems of life. I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy. To learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course. To lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural. If one did this, why he enjoyed life, because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has therefore infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily and probably will make more of it than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good. Close quote. One can but recognize in such writers as these, the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer, and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals, optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them, as by a kind of congenital anesthesia. Footnote. I know not to what physical laws philosophers will someday refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations, writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on nature to the placer de la rune, placer de la tumbo, rune de la la cure, placer de la solitude, each of them more optimistic than the last. End footnote. This finding of luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtsev expresses it well. Quote, In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping. I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased. No, not exactly that. I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this. My body weeps and cries, but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all. Close quote. End footnote. The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. His favorite occupation writes his disciple, Dr. Buck, quote, seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave to him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man, it had not occurred to me that anyone could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated, liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps indeed no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like, and I believe he did like, all the men, women, and children he saw, though I never knew him to say that he liked anyone. But each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew him, I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these 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 deprecantingly 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. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger, and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it. Close quote. Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order, and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things, are divinely good. Thus it has come about that many persons today regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult. A periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heteroxy are already beginning to be drawn. Humans are written by others in his peculiar prosody, and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter. Whitman is often spoken of as a pagan. The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin. Sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is a wearing up of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it. A conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show. Quote, 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. Close quote. No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand, Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say, Ah, friend, thou too must die, why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who is better far than thou. Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh mourn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite or arrow from the string. Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the skamander and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reconcile, 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 ingenuous. Good was good, and bad just bad for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature, Walt Whitman's verse, what is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect. What have been mere silliness to them, nor did they in order to escape from those ills invent another and a better world of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent good of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant. His gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist. And this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets. Footnote, God is afraid of me, remarked such a titanic, optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still wrangled in his breast. And footnote, if then we give the name of healthy mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematic variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision. And although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism. In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its incentive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it, and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up. But more than this, the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or party-priest. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight. It's sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully that a man is simply bound in honor with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace to adopt this way of escape. Things to admit their badness, despise their power, ignore their presence, turn your attention the other way, and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern. The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy, and once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, pulling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood, we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs. In all this, I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary, non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthousiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot. The usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause. Death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I 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 do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should inconsistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can, and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end, on which our life is founded, are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is. Footnote quote, as I go on in this life day by day, I become more of a bewildered child. I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing. The commonest things are a burden. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad body and orgiastic or minatic foundations form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. Close quote, Robert Louis Stevenson. End footnote. The advance of liberalism, so-called in Christianity during the past 50 years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over a morbidness with which the old hellfire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations, whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore or even deny eternal punishment and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable, and a sanguine and muscular attitude, which to our forefathers would have seen purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right. I am only pointing out the change. The persons to whom I refer have still retained, for the most part, their nominal connection with Christianity in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that theory of evolution, which gathering momentum for a century has within the past 25 years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. But accordingly, we find evolutionism interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in by a multitude of our contemporaries who had either been trained scientifically or been fond of reading popular science and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbucks' circular of questions. The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him course-meeted and incapable of wounded spirit as he is a sufficiently familiar contemporary type. Question, what does religion mean to you? Answer, it means nothing, and it seems so far as I can observe useless to others. I am 67 years of age and have resided in X50 years and have been in business 45. Consequently, I have some little experience of life and men and some women too. And I find that the most religious and pious people are, as a rule, those most lacking in uprightness and 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, T, 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 just as leaf, yes, rather die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die. There being no immortality in either case. Question, what comes before your mind corresponding to the words of God, heaven, angels, et cetera? Answer, nothing whatever. I am a man without religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh. Question, have you had any experiences which appeared providential? Answer, none whatsoever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince anyone of this fact. Question, what things work most strongly on your emotions? Answer, lively songs and music. Pinafore instead of an oratio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, et cetera, et cetera. Of songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, America, Marseilles, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the country, 12 miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle 40 or 50. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind. For instead of doubts and fears, I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence. Question, what is your notion of sin? Answer, it seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development, not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of years hence, equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin. Question, what is your temperament? Answer, nervous, active, wide awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that nature compels us to sleep at all. If we are in search of a broken and contrite heart, clearly we need not look at this brother. His contentment with the finite encases him like a lobster shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science. To my mind, a current far more important and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day. I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the Mind Cure Movement. There are various sets of this new thought to use another of the names by which it calls itself, but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose and I will treat the movement without apology as if it were a simple thing. It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff mechanically produced for the market to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers. A phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings. One of the doctrinal sources of Mind Cure is the four Gospels. Another is Emersonianism or New England Transcendentalism. Another is Berkeleyan Idealism. Another is Spiritism with its messages of law and progress and development. Another, the optimistic popular science Evolutionism of which I have recently spoken and 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 precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples and this experience forms today a mass imposing in a mount. Footnote, cautionary versus for children. This title of a much used work published early in the 19th century shows how far the muse of evangelical Protestantism in England with her mind fixed on the idea of danger had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind Cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America. End footnote, the blind have been made to see the halt to walk. Lifelong invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them. Regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second hand. One hears of the gospel of relaxation, of the don't worry movement, of people who repeat to themselves, youth, health, vigor, when dressing in the morning as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the later abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them. For in everything human, failure is a matter of course. And we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind cure literature, some of which is so moon-struck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read at all. The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind cure, the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting to open their eyes, it is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group. It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind cure's ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who can be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect. Footnote, lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, H. H. Goddard of Clark University, whose thesis on the effects of mind on body as evidenced by faith cures is published in the American Journal of Psychology. This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind cure exist but are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion. And the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work. As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes, quote, in spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. 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 cure disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics, divine healing and Christian science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as mental scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day. It is not confined to a few. It is not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures. Otherwise, the failures would have ended the delusion. Christian science, divine healing or mental science, do not and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases. Nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease. We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform and mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch, would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable. Close quote, end footnote. To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than a general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts and desires of egotism, doubt and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered forwardness to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind curers say that the mark of the beast in it is fear, and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion. To quote a writer of the school quote, fear has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and it seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals, but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent and should be entirely removed as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word fear thought to stand for the unprofitable element of forethought and have defined the word worry as fear thought in contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined fear thought as the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestion of inferiority in order to place it where it really belongs in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectful things. Close quote. The misery habit, the martyr habit engendered by the prevalent fear thought get pungent criticism from the mind cure writers. Quote. Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged requirements. There is a theological bias, a general view of the world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely that we shall suffer certain children's diseases, diseases of middle age and of old age. The thought that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line of particular fears and trouble bearing expectations such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one sits in a drought, the coming of hay fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worry mints, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghastly train of fateful shapes which our fellow men and especially physicians are ready to help us conjure up an array worthy to rank with Bradley's unearthly ballet of bloodless categories. Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable volunteers from daily life, the fear of accident, the possibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war, and it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow, sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering. Close quote. To quote another writer, quote, man often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world. He is reared in fear. All his life is passed into bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification. Think of the millions of sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare. Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance and vitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity. Close quote. Although the disciples of the mind cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians. Footnote. Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion is for the exegetes to decide. According to Harnak, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind cures do. What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist? Asks Harnak and says it is this, quote, the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead rise up and the gospel is preached to the poor. That is the coming of the kingdom. Or rather in these saving works, the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, of these actual effects, John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work of redemption. But Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills. He never spends time in asking whether the sick one deserves to be cured. And it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness, sickness and health, health. All evil, all wretchedness is for him something dreadful. It is of the great kingdom of Satan, but he feels the power of the savior within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well. Close quote, end footnote. Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious. And through the subconscious part of it, we are already one with the divine without any miracle of grace or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of Vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view. Quote, 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. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it kindly light, providence, the over-soul, omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to that great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God, and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the infinite spirit, including us as well as all else beside, yet in essence, the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality, they differ in degree. The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious, vital realization of our oneness with this infinite life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the infinite life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the infinite life? Do we make ourselves channels through which the infinite intelligence and power can work? In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the infinite spirit, you will exchange disease for ease, in harmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity and our intimate relation to the universal is to attach the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to. We can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose, and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the universe combine to help us heavenward. Close quote, end of lecture four.