symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into
another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in
general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer
stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high
threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low
threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to
small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low
“difference‐threshold”—his mind easily steps over it into the
consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak
of a “pain‐threshold,” a “fear‐threshold,” a “misery‐threshold,” and find
it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying
too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The
sanguine and healthy‐minded live habitually on the sunny side of their
misery‐line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and
apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle
or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have
been born close to the pain‐threshold, which the slightest irritants
fatally send them over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the
pain‐threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who
habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of
different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally
at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But
before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the
unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in
contrast to the healthy‐minded, have to say of the secrets of their
prison‐house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then
resolutely turn our backs on the once‐born and their sky‐blue optimistic
gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, “Hurrah
for the Universe!—God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Let us
see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human
helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more
complicated key to the meaning of the situation.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
To begin with, how _can_ things so insecure as the successful experiences
of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its
weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most
prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are
always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of
pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of
nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that
sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming
from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz
of life ceases at their touch as a piano‐string stops sounding when the
damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again,—at intervals.
But with this the healthy‐minded consciousness is left with an
irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws
its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy‐mindedness as never to
have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still,
if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with
that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky
chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born
to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security!
What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is,
“Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!” Is not its blessedness a
fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike
the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success,
even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied
by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one
of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched
far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals
of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows
himself to be found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this
wise, how must it be with less successful men?
“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “against the course
of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and
burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I
have not had four weeks of genuine well‐being. It is but the
perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”
What single‐handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet
when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an
absolute failure.
“I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith
and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last
Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst
forth, and I shall be at rest.”—And having a necklace of white
agates in his hand at the time he added: “O God, grant that it may
come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to‐day,
for the Judgment to come to‐morrow.”—The Electress Dowager, one
day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: “Doctor, I wish
you may live forty years to come.” “Madam,” replied he, “rather
than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of
Paradise.”
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it
with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the
memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning
emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal
expiation, will satisfy the world’s demands, but every pound of flesh
exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to
these results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and
everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. “There is indeed one
element in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that not
blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we
are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”(71) And our
nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians
should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the
personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of
life’s significance is reached?(72)
But this is only the first stage of the world‐sickness. Make the human
being’s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over
the misery‐threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments
themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods
perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and
health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and
disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of
everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all‐encompassing
blackness:—
“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under
the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and
behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so
dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a
reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and
their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any
more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in
them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they
shall be many.”
In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But
if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are
equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems
infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the
joy‐destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief
that healthy‐mindedness can give is by saying: “Stuff and nonsense, get
out into the open air!” or “Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll be all right
erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!” But in all seriousness,
can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To
ascribe religious value to mere happy‐go‐lucky contentment with one’s
brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness
and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for _that_ cure. The
fact that we _can_ die, that we _can_ be ill at all, is what perplexes us;
the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that
perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable
to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies
beyond the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “The
trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and
goodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort,
“and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and
disconcerted at its being possible.” And so with most of us: a little
cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal
toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain‐threshold,
will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into
full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life
and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing
quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely
naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure
to end in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or
naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy‐mindedness do its
best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and
forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of,
and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the
individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact
depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its
significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be
known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy,
its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal
disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he
knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge
knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of
death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of
possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an
eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let
Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and
hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with
zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place
round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all
permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science
evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the
thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a
position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,
surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that
little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near
when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously
will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer
and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night,
the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of
the total situation.
The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models
of the healthy‐minded joyousness which the religion of nature may
engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks—Homer’s flow
of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even
in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,(73) and the moment the
Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became
unmitigated pessimists.(74) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that
follows too much happiness, the all‐encompassing death, fate’s dark
opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed
background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their
polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable
in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that
Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice‐born people whose
religion is non‐naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism
and renunciation.
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance
which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: “Seek not
to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always
linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the
deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming
low; and above all do not fret.” The Stoic said: “The only genuine good
that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all
other goods are lies.” Each of these philosophies is in its degree a
philosophy of despair in nature’s boons. Trustful self‐abandonment to the
joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and
Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust‐
and‐ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy
of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and
gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of
resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which
man’s primitive intoxication with sense‐happiness is sure to undergo. In
the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite
cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they
were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to
all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished
in the evolution of the world‐sick soul.(75) They mark the conclusion of
what we call the once‐born period, and represent the highest flights of
what twice‐born religion would call the purely natural man—Epicureanism,
which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his
refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world
in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity.
Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated
Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts
for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.
Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to _judge_
any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.
The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice‐
born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more
radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen
how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature.
But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may
be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from
the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something
more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The
individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological
melancholy. As the healthy‐minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’s
very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself
to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the
least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a
rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one
seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the
most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic
constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its
active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that
follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance
absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal
documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost
an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle
of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all
seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below
the smooth and lying official conversational surface.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is
mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack
of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name
_anhedonia_ to designate this condition.
“The state of _anhedonia_, if I may coin a new word to pair off
with _analgesia_,” he writes, “has been very little studied, but
it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for
some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any
affection for her father and mother. She would have played with
her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the
act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter
entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of
a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic
disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional
reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he
could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his
home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little,
he said, as a theorem of Euclid.”(76)
Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition
of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be
turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected
with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both
intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher,
Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of
mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young
Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus
describes:—
“I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school,
or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring
into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And
when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I
suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on
despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned!
I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had
never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that
direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in
that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I
suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of
heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of
anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It
was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows
less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in
inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love—all these
words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have
talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling
anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping
anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my
great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived
any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract
heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for
eternity.”(77)
So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A
much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical
neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of
various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing;
sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self‐mistrust
and self‐despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient
may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he
may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should
so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our
classifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively
small proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious
sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do
not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I
lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.
“I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep
since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by
bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by nightmares, dreadful
visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear,
presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where
is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess
of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I
not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie
awake all night, suffer without interruption—such is the fine
legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand
is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a
middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say
God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After
all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along,
thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor
means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily
prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent
enough—I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being
either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I
ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is
tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed
against him even if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would
but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all! But I
stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can
write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God!
what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless
between an evening and a morning; and how true and right I was
when in our philosophy‐year in college I chewed the cud of
bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in
life than gladness—it is one long agony until the grave. Think how
gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine,
coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred,
who knows how many more years!”(78)