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