Chapter XXI: Part 21

The facts of order from which the physico‐theological argument
starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary
human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no
argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him
will fail to constitute a knock‐down proof of his existence. It will
be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him
already.

293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling,
desire, and will.

294 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7.

295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science
Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.

296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive
justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on
that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in
some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has
largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it,
has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of
criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion
that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing
sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and
rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our
modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon
such a basis.

297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London
and New York, 1880, pp. 243‐250, and 291‐299, much abridged.

298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and
London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH
[PRINGLE‐PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890,
passim.

The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul
of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague,
Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885;
in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in
his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2
vols., New York and London, 1901‐02. I doubtless seem to some of my
readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this
lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor
Royce’s arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In
the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould,
there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for
tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy
being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a
universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no
religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.
Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be
followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only
Professor Royce’s arguments, but others for monistic absolutism
shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their
great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying
passive under the reproach of superficiality.

299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7.

300 Newman’s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system
that he can write: “From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I
cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.” And
again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: “I
loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s sight, as if it were
the sight of God.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.

301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical
importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under
the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and
must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.).
For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over‐pressure,
stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There
are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their
debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their
letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties
fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes
with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day
stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with
ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of
us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a
mass of lying and sophistication.

302 In Newman’s Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a
splendid passage expressive of this æsthetic way of feeling the
Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.

303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the “meek lover of
the good,” alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own
sakes, with the elaborate “business” that goes on in Catholic
devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more
complex businesses. An essentially worldly‐minded Catholic woman can
become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with
her confessor and director, her “merit” storing up, her patron
saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his
attention as a professional _dévote_, her definite “exercises,” and
her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization.

304 Above, p. 362 ff.

305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work
by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.

306 Example: “The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in
Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as
the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, ‘You
Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to
church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under
water.’ ” R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.

307 AUGUSTE SABATIER: Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me
éd., 1897, pp. 24‐26, abridged.

308 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Müller, by
FREDERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898.

309 The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with
George Müller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194,
219.

310 Ibid., p. 126.

311 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.

312 Ibid., p. 323.

313 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even
more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber’s
English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor,
along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689,
set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other
five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how
in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of
trouble:—

“With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one
more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung
about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, ‘Go round the
binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.’ So the
boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then
I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them
withal. But seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do?’ Then
casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike
hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point
four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that
man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled
the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD’S wonderful
providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it
down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to
take one man in one hand, and throw at the other’s head: and looking
about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing
nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do now?’ And then it pleased
GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of
the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me
so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife
and sheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut
the man’s throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he
immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after.”—I have
slightly abridged Lyde’s narrative.

314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and
others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to
Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand,
or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances,
Boston, 1898 (?).

315 C. HILTY: Glück, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.

316 “Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “any one thing in the creation is
sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful
mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from
milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not,
whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is
God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground;
great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion;
who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These
things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you
are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this
station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what
else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a
nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan,
the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my
duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song.”
Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER‐HIGGINSON translation, abridged.

317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon “Help Thou Mine Unbelief,” in
Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page
the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and
Madame Guyon on p. 286.

318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.

319 Op. cit., Letter XXX.

320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the
world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.

321 Above, pp. 24, 25.

322 A friend of mine, a first‐rate psychologist, who is a subject of
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.

343 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “I do not know how to deal
with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It
overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am
fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_.” Again, after an
inspiring interview, he writes: “I went homewards, intoxicated with
joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in
solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took
a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens,
regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily
back—I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must
have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.” A.
GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.

This primacy, in the faith‐state, of vague expansive impulse over
direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman’s lines (Leaves of
Grass, 1872, p. 190):—

“O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,
as the trees and animals do....
Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”

This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by
its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production,
would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.
Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive
destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source
in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the
exceedingness of the possible over the real.

344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346‐349.

345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536,
July, 1901.

346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s
extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily
seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what
W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):
“Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and
purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All
religious views of life are anthropocentric.” “Religion is that
activity of the human impulse towards self‐preservation by means of
which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through
against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely
towards the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of
his own strength are reached.” The whole book is little more than a
development of these words.

347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others
gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.

348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the reality” of one’s
higher part; 2, to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3,
to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.

349 “When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness
possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and
_identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough
to be me. The ‘objectivity’ of it ought in that case to be called
_excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness.” RÉCÉJAC: Essai sur les
fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.

350 The word “truth” is here taken to mean something additional to bare
value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe
that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.

351 Above, p. 455.

352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305.
For a full statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his
posthumous work, “Human Personality in the Light of Recent
Research,” which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green &
Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a
general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal
region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the
first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural
series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as
curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized
nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work
upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my
paper: “Frederic Myers’s Services to Psychology,” in the said
Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.

353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483‐4, and also what is
said of the subconscious self on pp. 233‐236, 240‐242.

354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff.

355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader’s
familiarity with the notion of it:—

“If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you
come in and begin to weep and wail, ‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the
darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes
in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives,
‘Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes’? It requires no
ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a
moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the
effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one
whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state
that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God
within, and instead of condemning, say, ‘Rise, thou effulgent One,
rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless,
rise almighty, and manifest your nature.’ ... This is the highest
prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering
our nature.” ... “Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is
your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it
for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the
reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art
Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become
pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that
already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply
tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God
behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the
eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it
were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know
It?” SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part
iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the
Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.

356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth
to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in
spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:—

“For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was
revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I
don’t know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach
myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come.
Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most
criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped
brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have
learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and
pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I
have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more
strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I
have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look
at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day
will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has
a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there.”
Flournoy Collection.

357 “The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter,
is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of
electro‐magnetism.” W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx.
p. 112.

358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer,
is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly
in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to
reinforce the impression on the reader’s mind:—

“Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought]
and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known
through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act
of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi‐conscious
experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not
super‐consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self‐
hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational,
common‐sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense‐
perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to
a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be
nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be
calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not
hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of
peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The
power can be as surely used as the sun’s rays can be focused and
made to do work, to set fire to wood.” The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp.
4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.

359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term “Over‐soul,” but as a rule
they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of
communion. “God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion,
and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize.

360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world
makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the
Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world” of
fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest
unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds
work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in
at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal
affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all
the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too
late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world
absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard
a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought
has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular
weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is
on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd
evolution from the God of David’s psalms!

361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897,
p. 165.

362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human
Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.

363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.