around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively
conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some
fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a
wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often
get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot
beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which
we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other
times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to
a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.
Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of
width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually
vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future
operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead
into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this
magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their
way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain
diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the
past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some
one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates is the
indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter
which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to
guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It
lies around us like a “magnetic field,” inside of which our centre of
energy turns like a compass‐needle, as the present phase of consciousness
alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond
this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual
powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self
stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines
between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our
conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements
whether we are conscious of them or not.
The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the
marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the
consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal,
inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field” of the moment, all dim
and impossible to assign as the latter’s outline may be; and, second, that
what is absolutely extra‐marginal is absolutely non‐existent, and cannot
be a fact of consciousness at all.
And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in
my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may recollect,
that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the
facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant
by such a statement.
I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred
in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the
discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there
is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre
and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories,
thoughts, and feelings which are extra‐marginal and outside of the primary
consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of
some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call
this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances
which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely
unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step
forward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this.
In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field,
or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of
religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it
is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of
the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You
will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet’s Alterations of
Personality(122) being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.
The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far
been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of
unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet the
elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is
shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in
some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high
degree.
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra‐
marginal life of this sort is that one’s ordinary fields of consciousness
are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the
source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable
impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of
hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of
automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself may
not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this phenomenon,
Mr. Myers has given the name of _automatism_, sensory or motor, emotional
or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects, due to “uprushes” into
the ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts
of the mind.
The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post‐hypnotic
suggestion, so‐called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately
susceptible, an order to perform some designated act—usual or eccentric,
it makes no difference—after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually,
when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him
that the act must ensue, he performs it;—but in so doing he has no
recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised
pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even
be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain
interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the
voice heard, with no inkling on the subject’s part of its source. In the
wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and
others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have
revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories
of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the
primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with
hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion,
and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of
mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the
patient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr.
Myers’s sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy‐tales
when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy;
and, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar
observations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new
light upon our natural constitution.
And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting
the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter,
wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or
obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination,
we are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosion,
into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of
those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore,
for its source in the Subject’s subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases,
we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly.
In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be
extracted from the patient’s Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods,
for an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological
cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the
source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal
regions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap.
There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed,—but the assumption
involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in
which the religious experiences of man must play their part.(123)
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And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous
conversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the
graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar
occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with
a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher
control. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value for
the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their
psychological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of
what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along
with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference
between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of
divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of
the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact,
namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one
of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental
work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly
upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.
I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and
recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very
first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that
the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment,
I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or
condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the
_fruits for life_ of the state of conversion are good, we ought to
idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology;
if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural
being may have infused it.
Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of preëminent
saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run
of “saints,” the shopkeeping church‐members and ordinary youthful or
middle‐aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or
in the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you will probably agree
that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from
them, or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that
favor. Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards
says,(124) of an entirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as
he does directly of Christ’s substance, there surely ought to be some
exquisite class‐mark, some distinctive radiance attaching even to the
lowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could remain
insensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent
than ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously
there is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable
from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their
fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere
every‐day inspection of the “accidents” of the two groups of persons
before him, that their substance differed as much as divine differs from
human substance.
The believers in the non‐natural character of sudden conversion have had
practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class‐mark distinctive
of all true converts. The super‐normal incidents, such as voices and
visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented
scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected
with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still,
be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second
birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God,
the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it
has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may
even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
Throughout Jonathan Edwards’s admirably rich and delicate description of
the supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious
Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that
unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally
high degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly read a clearer
argument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis that no
chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as
elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and
regeneration are matters of degree.
All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a
chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the
fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted. There
are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life. If a
flood but goes above one’s head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter
of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our
own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how
much higher some one else’s centre may be. A small man’s salvation will
always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts _for him_, and
we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look
discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these
spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have
been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at
all?(125)
If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a
grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men and
converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms which
regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance,
but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck’s
laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary
spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,(126)
has analyzed the cases of seventy‐seven converts or ex‐candidates for
conversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that
sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal
self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility
and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses,
religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these
relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose
transformation had been “striking,” “striking” transformation being
defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to
the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth,
however rapid.(127) Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you
know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking. Professor Coe
had a number of persons of this class among his seventy‐seven subjects,
and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a
subclass which he calls “spontaneous,” that is, fertile in self‐
suggestions, as distinguished from a “passive” subclass, to which most of
the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that
self‐suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these
persons of an environment which, on the more “passive” subjects, had
easily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are
difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe’s numbers are small. But his
methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect;
and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is
that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom
three factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second,
tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type;
you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden
conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.
Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden
conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well
says; for “the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological,
nothing definable in terms of _how it happens_, but something ethical,
definable only in terms of _what is attained_.”(128)
As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is
often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic
level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies
and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man _is_ born
anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the
particular shape to his metamorphosis. “Sanctification” is the technical
name of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before
you. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the
assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.
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One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final
purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be
misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability
to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind
of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be
gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits.
His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious
margin, is thus a _conditio sine qua non_ of the Subject’s becoming
converted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians,
ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a
subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the
Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not
see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal,
indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary
sense‐material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and
combined, will account for all his usual automatisms. But just as our
primary wide‐awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of
things material, so it is logically conceivable that _if there be_ higher
spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition
of their doing so _might be_ our possession of a subconscious region which
alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might
close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.
Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature
in conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the
orthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might
impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal human
specimen. But in any case the _value_ of these forces would have to be
determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency
would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than
diabolical.
I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left
lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once
more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive
conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this
point of our inquiry to be held to _exclude_ all notion of a higher
penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get
access to us only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 515 ff.)
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Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the
conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of
higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw
examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of
such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference
which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of
his own conversion. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer
of 1827.
“My sadness,” he says, “was without limit, and having got entire
possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent
external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their
source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then
that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my
reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to
act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes
by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource
save in _some influence from without_. I remembered the promise of
the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel
had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from
necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this
promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my
soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action,
capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and
exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the
rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength,
abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other
title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw
myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life.
From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that
my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had
entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of
Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little
by little did the rest.”(129)
It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of
Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such
experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously _is_
can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource,
and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective
conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ’s
accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.