about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really
insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a
worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe
coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror,
surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual
perception of evil, but the grisly blood‐freezing heart‐palsying sensation
of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live
for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual
refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a
need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem:
Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says
things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as
these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint,
if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser
religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and
supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some
constitutions need them too much.
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Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally
arise between the healthy‐minded way of viewing life and the way that
takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter
way, the morbid‐minded way, as we might call it, healthy‐mindedness pure
and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy‐minded way,
on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.
With their grubbing in rat‐holes instead of living in the light; with
their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind
of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath
and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and
burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt
that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy‐minded would at
present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are
we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that
morbid‐mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its
survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention
from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as
it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more
generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of
its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a
religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy
comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there
is no doubt that healthy‐mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical
doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account
for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best
key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to
the deepest levels of truth.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which
insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its
innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all
drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the
shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of
helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there
yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard
for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet
there is no tooth in any one of those museum‐skulls that did not daily
through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in
despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to
their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to‐
day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays
with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws.
Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life
as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every
day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts
clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac
feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.(85)
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute
totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to
higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so
extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect
of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical
resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But
provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil
facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic
presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that
systematic healthy‐mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow,
pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally
less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in
their scope.
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the
pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and
Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially
religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can
be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some
of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now
onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which
we have recently been dwelling on.
LECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION.
The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a
pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were
brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at
life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy‐
minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be
twice‐born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions
of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once‐born the
world is a sort of rectilinear or one‐storied affair, whose accounts are
kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally
they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and
minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist
in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice‐
born, on the other hand, the world is a double‐storied mystery. Peace
cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of
minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and
transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is
by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can
never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our
real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step
in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the
spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the
other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two
types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current
classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and
the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties
and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you
understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere
sky‐blue healthy‐minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion
of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the
Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the
inversion of natural appearances the essence of God’s truth.(86)
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The psychological basis of the twice‐born character seems to be a certain
discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an
incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first
time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my
brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is
dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self
thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at
the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.
Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on
foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me
that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or
put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”(87)
Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this
point.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is
harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are
consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the
guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their
lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;
and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result
in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the
consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent
kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s
autobiography.
“I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength,
and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to
suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe‐lace was untied would
feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string;
as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself
unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any
one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was
afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather
than bear the pain of reproving the ill‐doer; when I have been
lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I
have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather
than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the
platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from
quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in
private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed
unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault
with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and
how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty
platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass
for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to
make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on
the platform, opposition makes me speak my best.”(89)
This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a
stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject’s life.
There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags,
as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars
with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt
their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of
repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of
inheritance—the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic
ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This
explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs
corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be,
we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of
which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make
the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently,
indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to
a man at all. A “dégénéré supérieur” is simply a man of sensibility in
many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his
spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his
feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the
haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid
scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament
when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of
heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, “Sell
Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” which would run
through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath
with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” he impulsively said, “Let him go
if he will,” and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a
year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions,
ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects
itself with the life of the subconscious self, so‐called, of which we must
ere‐long speak more directly.
Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in
proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified
temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly
psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in
the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the
lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a
comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of
functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the
period of order‐making and struggle. If the individual be of tender
conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form
of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and
of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer
of one’s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and “conviction
of sin” that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant
Christianity. The man’s interior is a battle‐ground for what he feels to
be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo
makes his Mahomet say:—
“Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantôt l’homme d’en haut, et tantôt l’homme d’en bas;
Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne.”
Wrong living, impotent aspirations; “What I would, that do I not; but what
I hate, that do I,” as Saint Paul says; self‐loathing, self‐despair; an
unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the
heir.
Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with
melancholy in the form of self‐condemnation and sense of sin. Saint
Augustine’s case is a classic example. You all remember his half‐pagan,
half‐Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan,
his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless
search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the
struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own
weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown
off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and
the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, “_Sume, lege_” (take
and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, “not in
chambering and wantonness,” etc., which seemed directly sent to his
address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.(91) Augustine’s
psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a
divided self which has never been surpassed.
“The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to
overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So
these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other
spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I
understood by my own experience what I had read, ‘flesh lusteth
against spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ It was myself indeed in
both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself
than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was through
myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me,
because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to
earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to
be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled
by them.
“Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the
efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with
sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy
sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not
approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to
surrender to thy love than to yield to my own lusts, yet, though
the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me
bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, ‘Awake, thou
sleeper,’ but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘Presently; yes,
presently; wait a little while.’ But the ‘presently’ had no
‘present,’ and the ‘little while’ grew long.... For I was afraid
thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease
of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see
extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own
soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to
offer.... I said within myself: ‘Come, let it be done now,’ and as
I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it,
yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost
succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it,
hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to
which I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not
tried.”(92)
There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the
higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive
intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists),
that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously
into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we
shall have much to say about this higher excitability.
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I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography
of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a
brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth’s sins were, as you will
see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to
be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.
“I was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience.
I now began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of
my mind all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my
soul, for I soon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still
flattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse, nor
swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnal mirth, and I
thought God would indulge young people with some (what I called
simple or civil) recreation. I still kept a round of duties, and
would not suffer myself to run into any open vices, and so got
along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I was
distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms of
thunder, my religion would not do, and I found there was something
wanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to frolics,
but when the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart,
with the solicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young
company, were such strong allurements, I would again give way, and
thus I got to be very wild and rude, at the same time kept up my
rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God, not willing I should
destroy myself, still followed me with his calls, and moved with
such power upon my conscience, that I could not satisfy myself
with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimes would
have such a sense of my lost and undone condition, that I would
wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I went
home, would make many promises that I would attend no more on
these frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but
when I came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no
sooner would I hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I
would find my mind elevated and soon proceed to any sort of
merriment or diversion, that I thought was not debauched or openly
vicious; but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt as guilty
as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyes for some hours
after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most unhappy
creatures on earth.
“Sometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the
fiddler to cease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and
walk about crying and praying, as if my very heart would break,
and beseeching God that he would not cut me off, nor give me up to
hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hours and nights I thus wore
away! When I met sometimes with merry companions, and my heart was
ready to sink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenance
as possible, that they might not distrust anything, and sometimes
would begin some discourse with young men or young women on
purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of my soul
would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I would
then rather have been in a wilderness in exile, than with them or
any of their pleasures or enjoyments. Thus for many months when I
was in company, I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart,
but at the same time would endeavor as much as I could to shun
their company, oh wretched and unhappy mortal that I was!
Everything I did, and wherever I went, I was still in a storm, and
yet I continued to be the chief contriver and ringleader of the
frolics for many months after; though it was a toil and torment to
attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart drove me about
like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that, and bear
this and bear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep my
credit up, and retain the esteem of my associates: and all this
while I continued as strict as possible in my duties, and left no
stone unturned to pacify my conscience, watching even against my
thoughts, and praying continually wherever I went: for I did not
think there was any sin in my conduct, when I was among carnal
company, because I did not take any satisfaction there, but only
followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.
“But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar
night and day.”
Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of inner
unity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely some of
the peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may
come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through altered
feelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come through new
intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later have to
designate as “mystical.” However it come, it brings a characteristic sort
of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the
religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in
which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often
transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most
enduring happiness.
But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and
the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord
is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of
mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In
judging of the religious types of regeneration which we are about to
study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a
genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be
away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity
into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the
individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition,
cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have
precisely the same psychological form of event,—a firmness, stability, and
equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In
these non‐religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or
suddenly.