Chapter V: Part 5

“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts,
mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our
backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into
the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.
The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will
attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as
air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied
with one’s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into
the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day,
and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful
exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has
never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought‐
forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here
suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and
nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and
superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world,
with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes
into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune
and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so
that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of
external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego
gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the
Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which
is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul‐contact
with the Parent‐Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health,
and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.”(63)

When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away—doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_. You will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of “union” form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy‐mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy‐mindedness and mind‐cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life.

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In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons to‐day—“scientists” or “positivists,” they are fond of calling themselves—who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho‐physical, which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out science’s conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal.

But here we have mind‐cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind‐cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own peculiar methods and weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.

How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is one:—

“One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two
months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right
ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to
use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully
guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the
positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): ‘There is
nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be
sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.’ Well, I never
had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.”

The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account.

“I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not
been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling
increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and
faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an
attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the
grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind‐cure
teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon
came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to
test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with
some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step
gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send
for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until
morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most
beautiful experiences of my life.

“I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie
down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.’ I gave up all
fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and
obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto
me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfect confidence that all would be
well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me
every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in
harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There
was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness
of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and
faith.

“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;
but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_.”

These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over‐scrupulous for those who _can_ get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim?

I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many‐sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind‐cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure‐ house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co‐eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to‐day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.(65)

The case of mind‐cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to‐day with this very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention.

Appendix

(See note to p. 121.)

CASE I. “My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one
of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been
a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and
writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out
from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great
exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest
standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me
I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when
I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things
that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it;
I had no great hope of getting any good from it—it was a _chance_
I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new
possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only
chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some
friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help;
the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little
carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted
was that of another person’s thought or feeling silently projected
on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as
we sat still together. I believed from the start in the
_possibility_ of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to
shape, helping or hindering, the body’s nerve‐activities, and I
thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief
in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any
mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that
might have brought imagination strongly into play.

“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first
with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite
suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising
within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting‐places, of
power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had
long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I
began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change
was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount
for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I
came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The
lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground
instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a
way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality
of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and
should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength
if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after
this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as
this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith
and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence
in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct
statement all that one bases one’s conclusions on, but I have
always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at
least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to,
that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the
result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state;
and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a
very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an
excited imagination, or a _consciously_ received suggestion of an
hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result
of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite
below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more
energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought
was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of
this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what
would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such
opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the
conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an
arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and
the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the
central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres,
can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can
be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to
bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable
differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but
show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the
means we should take to make them effective. That these results
are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and
others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination,
enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but
in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly
seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that
as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane
of the normally _un_conscious mind, so the strongest and most
effective impressions are those which _it_ receives, in some as
yet unknown, subtle way, _directly_ from a healthier mind whose
state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces.”

CASE II. “At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and
hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful
experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was
placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about
which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.
This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and
philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and
tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner
changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and
commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared. Even
the expression of my face changed noticeably.

“I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion,
both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive
toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable,
coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache
induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew
serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared.
I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview
with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every one with confidence
and inner calm.

“I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of
selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms,
but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as
express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has
been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the
immanence of God and the Divinity of man’s true, inner self.”

LECTURES VI AND VII. THE SICK SOUL.

At our last meeting, we considered the healthy‐minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual’s character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world’s life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.

Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy‐mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an “inadequate” knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When men make mistakes, he says,—

“One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to
help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude
(as every one does conclude) that these affections are good
things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall find that
not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious and
evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along
better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and
remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form a
particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages of sadness,” he
continues, “I have already proved, and shown that we should strive
to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since
uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of
complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind.”(66)

Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the beginning been the critical religious act, healthy‐mindedness has always come forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according to such healthy‐minded Christians means _getting away from_ the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of keeping healthy‐mindedness on top. By it a man’s accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the healthy‐minded type in the radical sense in which we have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had some very healthy‐minded ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his conception of God.

“When I was a monk,” he says, “I thought that I was utterly cast
away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say,
if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy
against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet my
conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence and lust of
my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was
continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast
committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and such
other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in
vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had
rightly understood these sentences of Paul: ‘The flesh lusteth
contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and
these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do the things
that ye would do,’ I should not have so miserably tormented
myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as now
commonly I do, ‘Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for
thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.’ I
remember that Staupitz was wont to say, ‘I have vowed unto God
above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I
never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such
vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to
perform it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto
me for Christ’s sake, I shall not be able, with all my vows and
all my good deeds, to stand before him.’ This (of Staupitz’s) was
not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation; and this
must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be
saved. For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They
look unto Christ their reconciler, who gave his life for their
sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in
their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned.
Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against
the flesh, lest they should _fulfill_ the lusts thereof; and
although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves
also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet are they
not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of
life, and the works which are done according to their calling,
displease God; but they raise up themselves by faith.”(67)

One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy‐ minded opinion of repentance:—

“When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be, do
not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of
our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will
make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that
thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor,
and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace,
telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting
it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of
better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul,
open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical
suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine.
Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tournament with
others, and falling in the best of the career, should lie weeping
on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his
fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the
course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his
race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen
once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy
which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the
divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and
conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou
oughtest to use—not to lose time, not to disturb thyself, and reap
no good.”(68)

Now in contrast with such healthy‐minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy‐minded way of taking life, I should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.

If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All‐in‐All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an _Individual_, and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be _that_ individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to‐day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only _obvious_ escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.

Now the gospel of healthy‐mindedness, as we have described it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy‐mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.(69) Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and _not_ to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co‐ extensive with the whole actual, is a mere _extract_ from the actual, marked by its deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff.

Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident—so much “dirt,” as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The mind‐cure gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the method of all science; and now here we find mind‐cure as the champion of a perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention at such length.

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Let us now say good‐by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy‐mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a mal‐adjustment with _things_, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.(70) These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.

Recent psychology has found great use for the word “threshold” as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low “difference‐threshold”—his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a “pain‐threshold,” a “fear‐threshold,” a “misery‐threshold,” and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy‐minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery‐line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain‐threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.

Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain‐threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to the healthy‐minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison‐house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once‐born and their sky‐blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, “Hurrah for the Universe!—God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.

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To begin with, how _can_ things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano‐string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.

Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again,—at intervals. But with this the healthy‐minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.

Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy‐mindedness as never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, “Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!” Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this wise, how must it be with less successful men?

“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “against the course
of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and
burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I
have not had four weeks of genuine well‐being. It is but the
perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”

What single‐handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure.

“I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith
and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last
Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst
forth, and I shall be at rest.”—And having a necklace of white
agates in his hand at the time he added: “O God, grant that it may
come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to‐day,
for the Judgment to come to‐morrow.”—The Electress Dowager, one
day when Luther was dining with her, said to him: “Doctor, I wish
you may live forty years to come.” “Madam,” replied he, “rather
than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of
Paradise.”

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world’s demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.

And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. “There is indeed one element in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”(71) And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life’s significance is reached?(72)

But this is only the first stage of the world‐sickness. Make the human being’s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over the misery‐threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all‐encompassing blackness:—

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under
the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and
behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so
dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a
reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and
their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any
more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in
them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they
shall be many.”

In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joy‐destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief that healthy‐mindedness can give is by saying: “Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!” or “Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!” But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy‐go‐lucky contentment with one’s brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for _that_ cure. The fact that we _can_ die, that we _can_ be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.

It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, “and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.” And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain‐threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.

This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy‐mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.

The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy‐minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks—Homer’s flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,(73) and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.(74) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all‐encompassing death, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice‐born people whose religion is non‐naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation.

Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: “Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret.” The Stoic said: “The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies.” Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature’s boons. Trustful self‐abandonment to the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust‐ and‐ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man’s primitive intoxication with sense‐happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world‐sick soul.(75) They mark the conclusion of what we call the once‐born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice‐born religion would call the purely natural man—Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.

Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to _judge_ any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.

The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice‐ born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy‐minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’s very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface.

One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name _anhedonia_ to designate this condition.