graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent
actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically,
is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical
theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that
we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary
motor‐centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or
the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these
experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in
religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as
Antonia Bourignon’s, that “I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit
to another power than mine,” is shown by the context to indicate
inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some
eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it
is probably the bulky volume called, ’Oahspe, a new Bible in the
Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,’ Boston and London,
1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New
York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the
head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The
latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is
“Zertoulem’s Wisdom of the Ages,” by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901.
323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49‐56, abridged.
324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses’s and Isaiah’s
commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah,
chap. vi.
325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and
Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s
case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a
basis of religious revelation.
326 NÖLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller
account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR’S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch.
iii.
327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations
accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an
obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote
the following extract:—
“It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr.
Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of
revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these
revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people,
believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established
through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a
prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God’s holy will.
Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared
directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through
dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without
visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy
Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and
spoken to our prophet and revelator.”
328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.
329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the
morbid mind, and between the once‐born and the twice‐born types, of
which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162‐167), cease to be the
radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice‐born look down
upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once‐born as being
“mere morality,” and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” an
orthodox minister is reported to have said, “is excluded from the
highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his
character.” It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the
twice‐born—holding as it does more of the element of evil in
solution—is the wider and completer. The “heroic” or “solemn” way in
which life comes to them is a “higher synthesis” into which healthy‐
mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not
evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons
(see pp. 47‐52, 362‐365). But the final consciousness which each
type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical
significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed
to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several
temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the
mind‐cure form of healthy‐mindedness, we found abundant examples of
regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is
a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the
consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short‐circuit and
get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in
many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual
as a once‐born or a twice‐born subject.
330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.
331 “Prayerful” taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463
ff.
332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian
Wolff, in whose dry‐as‐dust head all the learning of the early
eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a
baby‐like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to
expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural
things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and
its utility:—
“We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable
conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men
and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most
reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God’s invisible being
from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth
contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race
of man could not be preserved or continued.... The sun makes
daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and
daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can
commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night‐time
would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without
our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the
field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at
night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see
everything that is on the earth’s surface, not only near by, but
also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things
according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not
only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are
traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which
knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the
help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been
impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great
advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself
living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his
undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be
sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he
had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields.... From
the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this
point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account
astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can find
the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun‐dials, and
generally speaking, we should have no sun‐dials if we had no sun.”
Vernünftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 1782,
pp. 74‐84.
Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institution of “the
great variety throughout the world of men’s faces, voices, and
handwriting,” given in Derham’s Physico‐theology, a book that had
much vogue in the eighteenth century. “Had Man’s body,” says Dr.
Derham, “been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or
any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this
wise Variety would never have been: but Men’s Faces would have been
cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of
Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of
Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given
the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what
Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world
eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our
persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice
between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between
Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male
or Female; but all would have been turned topsy‐turvy, by being
exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill‐Natured, to the Fraud
and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty
Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not!
Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of
Mistaking Men’s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging
Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath
ordered the Matter, every man’s Face can distinguish him in the
Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand‐writing can speak for him
though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in
future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of
the divine Superintendence and Management.”
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable
signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart
of eighteenth century Anglicanism.
I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham’s “Vindication of God by
the Institution of Hills and Valleys,” and Wolff’s altogether
culinary account of the institution of Water:—
“The uses,” says Wolff, “which water serves in human life are plain
to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal
drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks
that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is
brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches
thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown
without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks
which in England and other places they produce from fruit....
Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should
live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity
and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the
earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more
manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this
same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our
clothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding‐
mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then
one will get a still greater idea of the use of water.”
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty,
discourses as follows: “Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a
strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost
any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly
and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably
in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the
hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent
and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air
of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the
hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys.
“So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to
the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit
to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an
easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably,
languish, and pine away.
“To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great
convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places
for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens
to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly
winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so
rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in
winter.
“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and
the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and
lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless
excrescences of our ill‐formed globe; but the admirable tools of
nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of
its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and
level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not
mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be
no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but,
instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher
lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and
perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.
“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler
they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of
the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our
sublunary world.”
333 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One
need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions
by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the
lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due,
according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the
circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and
concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which
contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in
opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most
“natural” movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it
does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural
motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the
explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It
moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm
parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine’s
speculations: “Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it
preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it
ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire
itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and
which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all
that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy
cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal,
which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight
pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots
it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and
unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial
qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and
destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally
fastened our attention.
If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic
invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary
ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of
receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a
wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the _usnia_, or mossy
growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other
materials equally unpleasant—the whole prepared under the planet
Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a
splinter of wood, dipped in the patient’s blood, or the bloodstained
weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound
itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,—I
quote now Van Helmont’s account,—for the blood on the weapon or
splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused
to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there
results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin‐german,
the blood in the patient’s body. This it does by sucking out the
dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this
it has to implore the aid of the bull’s fat, and other portions of
the unguent. The reason why bull’s fat is so powerful is that the
bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and
vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of
revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it
out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment
ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but
simply to the energy of the _posthumous character of Revenge_
remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the
unguent. J. B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by
WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650.—I much abridge the original in my
citations.
The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural
facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is
the true rationale of the case. “If,” he says, “the heart of a
horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be
impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch
becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the
fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a
conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse.
In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is
kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow
transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the
coroner’s inquest suffered a fresh hæmorrhage or cruentation at the
presence of the assassin?—the blood being, as in a furious fit of
anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived
against the murderer, at the instant of the soul’s compulsive exile
from the body. So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by
including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg,
which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you
shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass
from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly
again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman,
the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels
had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon
Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of
a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his
own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few
days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had
expired, near about the same punctilio of time. There are still at
Brussels eye‐witnesses of this occurrence,” says Van Helmont; and
adds, “I pray what is there in this of superstition or of exalted
imagination?”
Modern mind‐cure literature—the works of Prentice Mulford, for
example—is full of sympathetic magic.
334 Compare Lotze’s doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the
notion of a thing as it is “in itself” is by conceiving it as it is
_for_ itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private
sense of “pinch” or inner activity of some sort going with it.
335 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale
as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious
conception of the universe seems to many mind‐curers ’verified’ from
day to day by their experience of fact. “Experience of fact” is a
field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist,
methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such “facts” as
mind‐curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such
rude heads of classification as “bosh,” “rot,” “folly,” certainly
leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious
interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality,
would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We
know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be
true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of
the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed
by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist’s
tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an
apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently
now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call
them effects of “suggestion.” Even the stigmata of the cross on
Saint Francis’s hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.
Similarly, the time‐honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is
on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that
he has the name of “hystero‐demonopathy” by which to apperceive it.
No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist
phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed—even
“prophecy,” even “levitation,” might creep into the pale.
Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not
necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the
personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to
primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final
human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to
foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of
progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this
were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day
appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than
the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist
at present so confidently announces it to be.
336 Hume’s criticism has banished causation from the world of physical
objects, and “Science” is absolutely satisfied to define cause in
terms of concomitant change—read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The
“original” of the notion of causation is in our inner personal
experience, and only there can causes in the old‐fashioned sense be
directly observed and described.
337 When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the best
thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,” I
recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual
terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference,
however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint
Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the
intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the
intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing
effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under
those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one
should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian
Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New
York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of
philosophy properly so called:—
“Religion,” writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313,
436, et passim), “answers to a transient state or condition, not to
a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an
expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the
imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to
its estate, and that is scientific philosophy.”
In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des
Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums
it up in a single formula—the ever‐growing predominance of the
rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the
emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of
purely intellectual sentiments. “Of religious sentiment properly so
called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the
unknowable _x_ which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain
attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that
characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this
more simply, _religion tends to turn into religious
philosophy_.—These are psychologically entirely different things,
the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the
other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great
inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling
organism of man.”
I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion
lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin
(Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x.) and
Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, viii. to xii.) to
make it a purely “conservative social force.”
338 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to
278.
339 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.
340 Above, p. 184.
341 Above, p. 145.
342 Above, p. 400.