Chapter VI: Part 6

“The state of _anhedonia_, if I may coin a new word to pair off
with _analgesia_,” he writes, “has been very little studied, but
it exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for
some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any
affection for her father and mother. She would have played with
her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the
act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter
entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case of
a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic
disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional
reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he
could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his
home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved him as little,
he said, as a theorem of Euclid.”(76)

Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms which he thus describes:—

“I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school,
or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring
into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And
when these impressions were past, all day long without respite I
suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on
despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned!
I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had
never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned in that
direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me in
that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I
suffered in a measure what is suffered there.

“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of
heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of
anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It
was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows
less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in
inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love—all these
words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have
talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling
anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping
anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my
great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived
any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract
heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for
eternity.”(77)

So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self‐mistrust and self‐despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases that connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.

“I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep
since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by
bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by nightmares, dreadful
visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear,
presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where
is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess
of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I
not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie
awake all night, suffer without interruption—such is the fine
legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand
is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a
middle way. But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say
God, but why? All I have known so far has been the devil. After
all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along,
thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor
means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily
prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent
enough—I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being
either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I
ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is
tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed
against him even if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would
but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all! But I
stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved, for I can
write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God!
what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless
between an evening and a morning; and how true and right I was
when in our philosophy‐year in college I chewed the cud of
bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in
life than gladness—it is one long agony until the grave. Think how
gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine,
coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred,
who knows how many more years!”(78)

This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious systems.

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Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a well‐marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life’s values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy’s intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark on each of these two points.

First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.

It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it _as it exists_, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse‐like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non‐logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves _gifts_,—gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non‐logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage‐setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery.

Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues.

In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. “It is as if I lived in another century,” says one asylum patient.—“I see everything through a cloud,” says another, “things are not as they were, and I am changed.”—“I see,” says a third, “I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything.”—“Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world.”—“There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression.”—“I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things.”—Such are expressions that naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed state.(79)

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double‐faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.

At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not “how to live,” or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the excitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead. Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self‐evident. The questions “Why?” and “What next?” began to beset him more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time; but as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death.

These questions “Why?” “Wherefore?” “What for?” found no response.

“I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on
which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold
on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force
impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It
cannot be said exactly that I _wished_ to kill myself, for the
force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more
general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old
aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.
It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.

“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope
in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every
night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting,
lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end
to myself with my gun.

“I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven
to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.

“All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer
circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a
good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large
property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I
was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever
been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without
exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I
was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a
physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of
my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my
brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.

“And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my
life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the
very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid
jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so
long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows
sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What
is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in
it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.

“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a
wild beast is very old.

“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler
jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this
well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And
the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey
of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be
devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush
which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands
weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate;
but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other
black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing
off its roots.

“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish;
but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves
of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue
and licks them off with rapture.

“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable
dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot
comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey
which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer,
and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the
branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable
dragon and the mice—I cannot turn my gaze away from them.

“This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every
one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to‐day?
Of what I shall do to‐morrow? What will be the outcome of all my
life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in
life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does
not undo and destroy?

“These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid
child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human
being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I
experienced, for life to go on.

“ ‘But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘there may be something I
have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that
this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.’ And I
sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with
no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously
and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man
who is lost and seeks to save himself,—and I found nothing. I
became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had
sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And
not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing
which was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of
life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.”

To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice,—“and from such a way,” he says, “I can learn nothing, after what I now know;” or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,—which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life.

Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.

“Yet,” says Tolstoy, “whilst my intellect was working, something
else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed—a
consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force
that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw
me out of my situation of despair.... During the whole course of
this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end
the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all
that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and
observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining
emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst
for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement
of my ideas,—in fact, it was the direct contrary of that
movement,—but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of
dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst
of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of
dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some
one.”(80)

Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.

When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a _restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come,—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute,—is not the simple ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling‐block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.

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We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in literature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over the condition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half‐hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self‐contempt and despair.

“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now I am farther from
conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at
the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas,
I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any
of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people
of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell
of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must
reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely
upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I
never was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick,
though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and
would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my
words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I
then go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog
that shook if I did but stir; and was as there left both by God
and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.

“But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes
than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and
corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as
water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart
with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me
for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am
forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some
years together.

“And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts,
birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a
sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they
were not to go to hell‐fire after death. I could therefore have
rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed
the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been
in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul
to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was
like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken
to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I
could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My
heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a
thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor
sometimes scarce desire to shed one.

“I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so
know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid
to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything
but a man! and in any condition but my own.”(81)

Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly describes the high‐water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan’s.

“Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed
accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales
seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of
the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my
ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every
one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to
acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes
it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most
guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity
and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole
world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system
of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would
be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And
when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before
morning. I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing
with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul
to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have
often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away from my
danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their
place!”(82)

Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness.

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The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.

“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general
depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into
a dressing‐room in the twilight to procure some article that was
there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just
as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black‐haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all
day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall,
with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray
undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian
cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking absolutely non‐human. This image and my fear entered into
a species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I
felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against
that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck
for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of
my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if
something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I
became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was
changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a
horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the
insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never
felt since.(83) It was like a revelation; and although the
immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me
sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the
dark alone.

“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how
other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so
unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.
My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a
perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may
well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of
my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience
of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.”

On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these last words, the answer he wrote was this:—

“I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had
not clung to scripture‐texts like ‘The eternal God is my refuge,’
etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy‐laden,’ etc.,
‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ etc., I think I should have
grown really insane.”(84)

There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man’s original optimism and self‐satisfaction get leveled with the dust.

In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood‐freezing heart‐palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.

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Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy‐minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid‐minded way, as we might call it, healthy‐mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy‐minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat‐holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy‐minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.

In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid‐mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy‐mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum‐skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to‐ day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.(85)

It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy‐mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.

The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which we have recently been dwelling on.

LECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION.

The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy‐ minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be twice‐born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once‐born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one‐storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice‐ born, on the other hand, the world is a double‐storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky‐blue healthy‐minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God’s truth.(86)

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The psychological basis of the twice‐born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.

“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first
time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my
brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is
dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self
thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at
the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.

“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.
Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on
foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me
that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or
put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”(87)

Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this point.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s autobiography.

“I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength,
and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to
suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe‐lace was untied would
feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string;
as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself
unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any
one who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was
afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather
than bear the pain of reproving the ill‐doer; when I have been
lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I
have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather
than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the
platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from
quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in
private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed
unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault
with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and
how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty
platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass
for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to
make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on
the platform, opposition makes me speak my best.”(89)

This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject’s life. There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.

Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance—the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A “dégénéré supérieur” is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, “Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” he impulsively said, “Let him go if he will,” and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious self, so‐called, of which we must ere‐long speak more directly.

Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order‐making and struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and “conviction of sin” that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man’s interior is a battle‐ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:—

“Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantôt l’homme d’en haut, et tantôt l’homme d’en bas;
Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,
Comme dans le désert le sable et la citerne.”

Wrong living, impotent aspirations; “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” as Saint Paul says; self‐loathing, self‐despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.

Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form of self‐condemnation and sense of sin. Saint Augustine’s case is a classic example. You all remember his half‐pagan, half‐Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, “_Sume, lege_” (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, “not in chambering and wantonness,” etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.(91) Augustine’s psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.

“The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to
overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So
these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other
spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I
understood by my own experience what I had read, ‘flesh lusteth
against spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ It was myself indeed in
both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself
than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was through
myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me,
because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to
earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to
be freed from all bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled
by them.

“Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the
efforts of one who would awake, but being overpowered with
sleepiness is soon asleep again. Often does a man when heavy
sleepiness is on his limbs defer to shake it off, and though not
approving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it was better to
surrender to thy love than to yield to my own lusts, yet, though
the former course convinced me, the latter pleased and held me
bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call, ‘Awake, thou
sleeper,’ but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘Presently; yes,
presently; wait a little while.’ But the ‘presently’ had no
‘present,’ and the ‘little while’ grew long.... For I was afraid
thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease
of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see
extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own
soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to
offer.... I said within myself: ‘Come, let it be done now,’ and as
I said it, I was on the point of the resolve. I all but did it,
yet I did not do it. And I made another effort, and almost
succeeded, yet I did not reach it, and did not grasp it,
hesitating to die to death, and live to life; and the evil to
which I was so wonted held me more than the better life I had not
tried.”(92)

There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shall have much to say about this higher excitability.

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I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I read a brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth’s sins were, as you will see, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved to be his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.