 Lecture 5 of the Varieties of Religious Experience. Let me now pass from these abstractor statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers from correspondence. The only difficulty is to choose. The first two, whom I shall quote, are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the infinite power by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. Quote, The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from that divine energy which we call God. The soul, which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene, I and my Father are one, has no further need of healer or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momentally, the influx of the deific breath. If one with omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness? How illness assail that indomitable spark? This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own case. For my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are today, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened. But since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of deity be sick? Since greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against us. Close quote. My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement. Quote, Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking down and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity, besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this new thought took possession of me. I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch. This word is to me very expressive, with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually, that is by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within just as we turn to the sun for warmth, light, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which haven't grossed you without. I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health as such because that comes of itself as an incidental result and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it. Beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the Spirit. This life is the real seeking of the divine kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts so that all else comes as that which shall be added unto you, as quite incidental and as a surprise to us perhaps, and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very center of our being. When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time and are pursued because many accept them. I mean conventionalities, social abilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal and even unhealthy superfluities. Close quote. Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment. They express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying. Quote, I had been an ill sufferer from my childhood till my 40th year. Details of ill health are given which I omit. I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air but steadily growing weaker when one day during the latter part of October while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words, you will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of. These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness which continued until Christmas when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer. This was January 7th, 1881. The healer said, There is nothing but mind. We are expressions of the one mind. Body is only a mortal belief. As a man thinketh, so is he. I could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was there for me in this way. There is nothing but God. I am created by him and am absolutely dependent upon him. Mind is given me to use, and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body, I shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience. That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself, the power that created the stomach must take care of what I have eaten. By holding these suggestions through the evening, I went to bed and fell asleep saying, I am soul, spirit, just one with God's thought for me, and slept all night without waking for the first time in several years. The distress turns had usually recurred about two o'clock in the night. I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental suggestions of truth, which were to me like stepping stones. I will note a few of them. They came about two weeks apart. First, I am soul, therefore it is well with me. Second, I am soul, therefore I am well. Third, a sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering with my own face begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed my attention on being well and refused to even look at my old self in this form. Fourth, again the vision of the beast far in the background with faint voice, again refusal to acknowledge. Fifth, once more the vision, but only of my eyes with a longing look and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been. For I was soul, an expression of God's perfect thought. That was to me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees, though it took me two years of hard work to get there, I expressed health continuously throughout my whole body. In my subsequent nineteen-year experience, I have never known this truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the simplicity and trustfulness of a little child. Close quote. But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already, by such records of experience, how impossible it is not to class mind cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrines of the oneness of our life with God's life is, in fact, quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's message, which, in these very gifford lectures, has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers. Footnote. The Cards, for example, in Edward Cards' Glasgow Lectures of 1890 through 1892, passages like this abound. Quote. The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of heaven is at hand, passes with scarce a break into the announcement that, the kingdom of God is among you. And the importance of this announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference in kind between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division and the least in the kingdom of heaven. The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach. They are called on to be perfect as their father in heaven is perfect. The sense of alienation and distance from God, which had grown upon the pious in Israel, must in proportion, as they had learned to look upon him as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moe is declared to be no longer in place. And the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between this world and the next, which thought all the history of the Jews had continually been growing wider. As in heaven, so on earth. The sense of the division of man from God as a finite being from the infinite, as weak and sinful from the omnipotent goodness is not indeed lost, but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms son and father at once state the opposition and markets limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity that can and must become a principle of reconciliation. End footnote. But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous, finite consciousness, the mind curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill-agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a mystery or problem, or in laying to heart the lesson of its experience after the manner of the evangelicals. Don't reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond. It is avidya, ignorance, something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian science, so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind cure in its dealings with evil. For it, evil is simply a lie, and anyone who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lecture will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind cureer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good? After all, it is the life that tells, and mind cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene, which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the dietetik der sil into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism. Quote, pessimism leads to weakness, optimism leads to power, thoughts are things. As one of the most vigorous mind cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages. And if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor and success, before you know it, these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought are inlets to destruction. Most mind curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are forces, and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one's desires. And the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one side by opening one's mind to their influx. On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, what shall I do to be saved? Luther and Wesley replied, you are saved now if you would but believe it. And the mind curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with them and what shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well, is the form of their question. And the answer is you are well, sound, and clear already if you did but know it. The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence, says one author whom I have already quoted, quote, God is well and so are you. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being, close quote. The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier Gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface and seeing its rapid growth in influence and its therapeutic triumphs. One is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day. Footnote. It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes more and more the form of mind cure experience and academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sex. End footnote. But I hear fear that I may begin to jar upon the nerves of some of the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries you may think should hardly take so large a place in these dignified, gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have types of religious experience and seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet. Our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic scientific type, the officially and conventionally correct type, the deadly receptacle type for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves. Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith of methodistic conversions and of what I call the mind cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom, at any rate at a certain stage in their development a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. Be vigilant day and night they adjurus quote hold your passive tendencies and check shrink from no effort keep your will like a bow always bent close quote but the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands and only makes them two fold more the children of hell they were before the tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight under these circumstances the way to success as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations is by an anti moralistic method by the surrender of which I spoke in my second lecture passivity not activity relaxation not intentness should be now the rule give up the feeling of responsibility let go your hold resign the care of your destiny to higher powers be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief but often also in addition the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing this is the salvation through self despair the dying to be truly born of Lutheran theology the passage into nothing of which Jacob Bayman writes to get to it a critical point must usually be passed a corner turned within one something must give way a native hardness must break down and liquify and this event as we shall abundantly see hereafter is frequently sudden and automatic and leaves on the subject an impression that he has been wrought upon by an external power whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character with those who undergo it in its fullness no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality they know for they have actually felt the higher powers in giving up the tension of personal will a story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice at last he caught a branch which stopped his fall and remained clinging to it in misery for hours but finally his fingers had to loose their hold and with a despairing farewell to life he let himself fall just six inches if he had given up the struggle earlier his agony would have been spared as the mother earth received him so the preachers tell us will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards ever save the mind curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience they have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxation by letting go psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology it is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest and finding that a greater self is there the results slow or sudden or great or small of the combined optimism and expectancy the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort remain firm facts of human nature no matter whether we adopt a theistic a pantheistic idealistic or a medical materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation footnote the theistic explanation is by divine grace which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up the pantheistic explanation which is that of most mind curers is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self the spirit of the universe which is your own subconscious self the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed the medical materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting out of psychologically though in this instance not spiritually higher ones which seeking to regulate only succeed in inhibiting results whether this third explanation might in a psychophysical account of the universe be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here and footnote when we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion we shall learn something more about all this meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind curers methods they are of course largely suggestive the suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education but the word suggestion having acquired official status is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases suggestion is only another name for the power of ideas so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct ideas efficacious over some people prove in efficacious over others ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere the ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction today whatever they may have been in earlier centuries but when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its saver here or gained it there the mere blank waving of the word suggestion as if it were a banner gives no light Dr. Goddard whose candid psychological essay on faith cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion concludes by saying that quote religion and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity has in it all there is in mental therapeutics and has it in its best form living up to our religious ideas will do anything for us that can be done close quote and this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely nothing or did nothing until mind cure came to the rescue footnote within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation something sent by God for our good either as chastisement as warning or as opportunity for exercising virtue and in the Catholic church of earning merit illness says a good Catholic writer quote is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications the mortification which one has not one self chosen which is imposed directly by God and is the direct expression of his will if other mortifications are of silver Monsignor Gay says this one is of gold since although it comes of ourselves coming as it does of original sin still on its greater side as coming like all that happens from the providence of God it is of divine manufacture and how just are its blows and how efficacious it is I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very masterpiece and consequently the triumph of mortified souls close quote according to this view disease should in any case be submissively accepted and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away of course there have been exceptions to this and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale almost all the great saints having more or less performed them it was one of the heresies of Edward Irving to maintain them still to be possible an extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part and prayer on the priests was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor Johann Christoph Blumhart in the early 40s nearly 30 years Blumhart's life of Zundl gives in chapters 9, 10, 11 and 17 a pretty full account of his healing activity which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition Blumhart was a singerly pure simple and non-fanatical character and in this part of his work followed no previous model in Chicago today we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dewey a Scottish Baptist preacher whose weekly leaves of healing were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume and who although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as diabolical counterfeits of his own exclusively divine healing must on the whole mind cure movement in mind cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted it is wholly of the pit God wants us to be absolutely healthy and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms and footnote an idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation the mind cure with its gospel of healthy mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened it has let loose their springs of higher life in what can the originality of any religious movement consist save in finding a channel until then sealed up through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings the force of personal faith enthusiasm and example and above all the force of novelty are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success if mind cure should ever become official, respectable and entrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost in its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert the church knows this well enough with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many indurated into the obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the spirit we may pray says Jonathan Edwards quote concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians that they may either be enlivened or taken away if that be true that is often said by some at this day that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men and lead more souls into hell and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead close quote footnote Edwards from whose book on the revival of New England I quote these words dissuades from such a use of prayer but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members and footnote the next condition of success is the apparent existence in large numbers of minds who unite healthy mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements however few of us here present may belong to such a type it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination well represented in the world finally mind cure has made what in our Protestant countries is an unprecedented great use of the subconscious life to their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation concentration and meditation and have even invoked something like practice I quote some passages at random quote the value the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the new thought most strongly insists the development namely from within outward from small to great consequently one's thought should be centered on the ideal outcome even though its trust be literally like a step in the dark to attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind the new thought advises the practice of concentration or in other words the attainment of self-control one is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal to this end one should set apart the times for silent meditation by oneself preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought in new thought terms this is called entering the silence quote the time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and everywhere the spirit of infinite love life, wisdom, peace, power and plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting leading you this is the spirit of continual prayer one of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly and often talking loudly entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him this self centered faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully enclosed in his own psychic aura and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions as though he were alone in some primeval would taking his difficulty with him to the mystic silence in the form of a direct question to which he expected a certain answer he would remain utterly passive until the reply came and never once through many years experience did he find himself disappointed or misled close quote wherein I should like to know does this intrinsically differ from the practice of recollection which plays so great a part in his discipline otherwise called the practice of the presence of God and so known among ourselves as for instance in Jeremy Taylor it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on contemplation quote it is the recollection of God the thought of God which in all places and circumstances makes us see him present lets us commune peacefully and lovingly with him and fills us with desire and affection for him would you escape from every ill never lose this recollection of God neither in prosperity nor in adversity nor on any occasion which so ever it be invoke not to excuse yourself from this duty either the difficulty or the importance of your business for you can always remember that God sees you that you are under his eye if a thousand times an hour you forget him reanimate a thousand times the recollection if you cannot practice this exercise continually at least make yourself as familiar with it as possible and like unto those who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your soul close quote all the external associations of the catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind cure thought but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions and in both communions those who urge it right with authority experienced in their own persons what whereof they tell compare again some mind cure utterances quote high healthful pure thinking can be encouraged promoted and strengthened its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel by means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony to inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult even almost mechanical but perseverance will at length render it easy then pleasant and finally delightful the soul's real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states and imaginations if we will can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and real and there gain a residence the assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum whenever the thought is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere there are quiet leisure moments by day and wakeful hours at night when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage if one who has never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought forces will for a single month earnestly pursue the course as suggested he will be surprised and delighted at the result and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless and superficial thinking at such favorable seasons the outside world with all its current of daily events is barred out and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire the spiritual healing that is infinitely sensitive so that the still, small voice is audible and tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed and there is a great calm the ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the divine presence that mighty, healing, loving fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves there is soul contact parent soul and an influx of life, love, virtue health and happiness from the inexhaustible fountain close quote when we reach the subject of mysticism you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over if I may so express myself and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away doubt, I mean as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric sit down you will then be convinced I trust that these states of consciousness of union form a perfectly definite class of experiences of which the soul may occasionally partake and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance this brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy mindedness and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out it concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy mindedness and mind cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life in a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly the relation of religion to science on the one hand and to primeval savage thought on the other there are plenty of persons today, scientists or positivists as they are fond of calling themselves who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival and atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and outgrown if you ask them to explain themselves more fully they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality the savage thinks that things operate by personal forces and for the sake of individual ends for him even external nature obeys individual needs and claims just as if these were so many elementary powers now science on the other hand these positivists say has proved that personality so far from being an elementary force in nature is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces physical, chemical, physiological and psychophysical which are all impersonal and general in character nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought and discredited its personal way of looking at things they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification follow out sciences conceptions practically they will say the conceptions that ignore personality all together and you will always be corroborated the world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long and only so long as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal but here we have mind cure and her diametrically opposite philosophy setting up an exactly identical claim live as if I were true, she says and every day will practically prove you right that the controlling energies of nature are personal that your own personal thoughts are forces that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify and that experience does largely verify these prime evil religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind cure movement spreads as it does not by proclamation and assertion simply but by palpable experiential results here in the very heyday of sciences authority it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy and succeeds by using sciences own peculiar methods and weapons believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it it finds the belief not only not impugned but corroborated by its observation how conversions are thus made and converts confirmed is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn here is one quote as soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion and felt it through all my being there is nothing but God all life comes from him perfectly I cannot be sprained or hurt I will let him take care of it well I never had a sensation in it and I walked two miles that day close quote the next case not only illustrates experiment and verification but also the element of passivity and surrender of which a while ago I made such account quote I went into town to do some shopping one morning and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill the ill feeling increased rapidly until I had pains and all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache all the symptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza I thought that I was going to have the grip epidemic then in Boston or something worse the mind cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter there upon came into my mind and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself on my way home I met a friend and I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt that was the first step gained I went to bed immediately and my husband wished to send for a doctor but I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how I felt then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me I gave up all fear of any impending disease I was perfectly willing and obedient there was no intellectual effort or train of thought my dominant idea was behold the hand made of the lord be it unto me even as thou wilt and a perfect confidence that all would be well that all was well the creative life was flowing into me every instant and I felt myself allied with the infinite in harmony and full of the peace that passeth understanding there was no place in my mind for a jarring body I had no consciousness of time or space or persons but only of love and happiness and faith I do not know how long this state lasted nor when I fell asleep when I woke up in the morning I was well close quote these are exceedingly trivial instances but in them if we have anything at all we have the method of experiment and verification footnote see appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends and footnote for the point I am driving at now whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not that they seemed to themselves to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system and although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mold to get such results for not everyone can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than anyone can be cured by the first regular practitioner who he calls in yet it would surely be pedantic and overscrupulous for those who can get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics what are we to think of all this has science made too wide a claim I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are to say the least premature the experiences which we have been studying during this hour and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them plainly show the universe to be a more many sided affair than any sect even the scientific sect allows for what in the end purifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas or conceptual systems that our minds have reigned but why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true the obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas and is so handled by different men and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit for which he cares to the handler while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed science gives to all of us telegraphy electric lighting and diagnosis and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease and religion in the shape of mind cure gives to some of us serenity moral poise and happiness and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does or even better in a certain class of persons evidently then the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure house to him who can use them practically just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use and why after all may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes just as mathematicians the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry by analytical geometry by algebra by the calculus or by quaternions and each time come out right in this view religion and science each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life would be co-eternal primitive thought with its belief in individualized personal forces seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field today numbers of educated people still find it in the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality footnote whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception as most philosophers assume that they must and how if so that conception may best be reached are questions that only the future can answer what is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception each corresponding to some part of the world's truth each verified in some degree each leaving out some part of real experience and footnote the case of mind cure lays so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention but I must content myself today with this very brief indication in a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention appendix to lectures four and five case one, quote my own experience is this I had long been ill and one of the first results of my illness a dozen years before had been a dyplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great exhaustion I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith with no or ill result then at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it I had no great hope of getting any good from it it was a chance I tried partly because my thought was interested in the new possibility it seemed to open partly because it was the only chance I then could see I went to X in Boston from whom some friends of mine had got or thought that they had got great help the treatment was a silent one little was said and that little carried no action to my mind whatever influence was exerted was that of another person's thought were feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind into my nervous system as it were as we sat still together I believed from the start in the possibility of such action for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering the body's nerve activities and I thought I had no empathy probable although unproved but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day at first with no result then, after ten days or so I became quite suddenly swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me a sense of power to pass beyond old halting places of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life too high to climb I began to read and walk as I had not done for years and the change was sudden and unmistakable this tide seemed to mount for some weeks three or four perhaps when, summer having come I came away taking the treatment up again a few months later the lift I got proved permanent and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself though, my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been the potent factor there I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first with little faith and doubtful expectation it is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter into words to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one's conclusions on but I have always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify to myself at least the conclusion that I came to then and since have held to that the physical change which came at that time was first the result of the change wrought within me by a change of mental state and secondly that that change of mental state was not saved in a very secondary way brought about through the influence of an excited imagination or a consciously received suggestion of a hypnotic sort lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my receiving telepathically and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness a healthier and more energetic attitude receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me in my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous not organic but from such opportunities as I have had of observing I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one the nerves controlling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout and I believe that the central nervous system by starting and inhibiting local centers can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind if it can be brought to bear in my judgment the question is simply how to bring it to bear and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective that these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure that the conscious mind the imagination enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true but in many others and sometimes very extraordinary ones it hardly seems to enter in at all on the whole I am inclined to think that as the healing action like the morbid one springs from the plane so the strongest and most effective impressions are those which it receives in some as yet unknown subtle way directly from a healthier mind who state through a hidden law of sympathy it reproduces close quote case 2 quote at the urgent request of friends and with no faith hardly any hope possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a Christian scientist our little daughter was placed under the care of a healer and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraged by his diagnosis this interested me and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing gradually an inner peace and tranquility came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly my children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it all feelings of irritability disappeared even the expression on my face changed noticeably I had been bigoted aggressive and intolerant in discussion both in public and private I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others I had been nervous and irritable coming home 2 or 3 times a week with a sick headache induced as I then supposed by dyspepsia and Qatar I grew serene and gentle and the physical troubles entirely disappeared I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread I now meet everyone with confidence and inner calm I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of selfishness I do not mean simply the grosser more sensual forms but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret envy, etc it has been in the direction of a practical working realization of the eminence of God and the divinity of man's true inner self close quote End of lecture 5