2. The solution is a sense that _we are saved from the wrongness_ by

making proper connection with the higher powers. In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:— The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives,(347) the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. _He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a _MORE_ of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck._ It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these very simple general terms.(348) They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it;(349) and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms. So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the objective “truth” of their content?(350) The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most pertinently arises is that “MORE of the same quality” with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a “more” merely our own notion, or does it really exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of that “union” with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced? It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They all agree that the “more” really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of “union” with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes. At the end of my lecture on Philosophy(351) I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis. The time has now come for this attempt. Who says “hypothesis” renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The “more,” as we called it, and the meaning of our “union” with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the “more” as Jehovah, and the “union” as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over‐belief. We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the “more,” which psychologists may also recognize as real. The _subconscious self_ is nowadays a well‐accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness(352) is as true as when it was first written: “Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.”(353) Much of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive timidities, “dissolutive” phenomena of various sorts, as Myers calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life. Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its _farther_ side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with “science” which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as “higher”; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true. This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over‐beliefs begin: here mysticism and the conversion‐rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations(354) and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world.(355) Here the prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith. Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least, decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheism on non‐mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched.(356) These ideas will thus be essential to that individual’s religion;—which is as much as to say that over‐beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over‐beliefs. Disregarding the over‐beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in _the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come_,(357) a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, _is literally and objectively true as far as it goes_. If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over‐belief—though I know it will appear a sorry under‐belief to some of you—for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.(358) But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal. God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.(359) We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands. As far as this goes I probably have you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects. The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or “know,” if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are _all_ saved, in spite of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God’s existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up or freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience, and bring a _real hypothesis_ into play. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man’s experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject’s absolute confidence and peace. That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra‐ marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the absolute world‐ruler, is of course a very considerable over‐belief. Over‐ belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one’s religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new _facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required. This thoroughly “pragmatic” view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith‐state and the prayer‐state, I know not. But the over‐ belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over‐belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word “bosh!” Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament,—more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over‐belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over‐beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks? POSTSCRIPT. In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification that I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position more amply and consequently more clearly. Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic supernaturalism; for the “crasser” variety “piecemeal” supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which to‐day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to have displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world’s details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different “‐ology,” and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must. Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science at their face‐value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.(360) But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God’s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience _en bloc_, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail. I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law; but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word “judgment” here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on the contrary, _execution_ with it, is _in __ rebus_ as well as _post rem_, and operates “causally” as partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a gnosticism(361) pure and simple on any other terms. But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed. I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where I belong. If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of “prayerful communion,” especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every‐day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the “subliminal” door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs. The difference in natural “fact” which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in “eternity,” I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove “spirit‐return,” though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book. The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the “God” of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be “one and only” and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with _something_ larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both “pass to the limit” and identify the something with a unique God who is the all‐inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set. Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.(362) Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above.] Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still to‐day) that unless there be one all‐inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, _all_ is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was said on pages 131‐133, about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details. Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail—all of us are willing, whenever our activity‐ excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For practical life at any rate, the _chance_ of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.(363) But all these statements are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book. INDEX. Absolute, oneness with the, 419. Abstractness of religious objects, 53. ACHILLES, 86. ACKERMANN, MADAME, 63. Adaptation to environment, of things, 438; of saints, 374‐377. Æsthetic elements in religions, 460. Alacoque, 310, 344, 413. Alcohol, 387. AL‐GHAZZALI, 402. ALI, 341. ALLEINE, 228. ALLINE, 159, 217. Alternations of personality, 193. ALVAREZ DE PAZ, 116. AMIEL, 394. Anæsthesia, 288. Anæsthetic revelation, 387‐393. ANGELUS SILESIUS, 417. Anger, 181, 264. “Anhedonia,” 145. Aristocratic type, 371. ARISTOTLE, 495. Ars, le Curé d’, 302. Asceticism, 273, 296‐310, 360‐365. Aseity, God’s, 439, 445. Atman, 400. Attributes of God, 440; their æsthetic use, 458. AUGUSTINE, SAINT, 171, 361, 496. AURELIUS, see MARCUS. Automatic writing, 62, 478. Automatisms, 234, 250, 478‐483. BALDWIN, 347, 503. BASHKIRTSEFF, 83. BEECHER, 256. BEHMEN, see BOEHME. Belief, due to non‐rationalistic impulses, 73. BESANT, MRS., 23, 168. Bhagavad‐Gita, 361. BLAVATSKY, MADAM, 421. BLOOD, 389. BLUMHARDT, 113. BOEHME, 410, 417, 418. BOOTH, 203. BOUGAUD, 344. BOURGET, 263. BOURIGNON, 321. BOWNE, 502. BRAINERD, 212, 253. BRAY, 249, 256, 290. BROOKS, 512. BROWNELL, 515. BUCKE, 398. Buddhism, 31, 34, 522. Buddhist mysticism, 401. BULLEN, 287. BUNYAN, 157, 160. BUTTERWORTH, 411. CAIRD, EDWARD, 106. CAIRD, J., on feeling in religion, 434; on absolute self, 450; he does not prove, but reaffirms, religion’s dicta, 453. CALL, 289. CARLYLE, 41, 300. CARPENTER, 319. Catharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289. Catholicism and Protestantism compared, 114, 227, 336, 461. Causality of God, 517, 522. Cause, 502. CENNICK, 301. Centres of personal energy, 196, 267, 523. Cerebration, unconscious, 207. Chance, 526. CHANNING, 300, 488. CHAPMAN, 324. Character, cause of its alterations, 193; scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214. Causes of its diversity, 261; balance of, 340. Charity, 274, 278, 310, 355. Chastity, 310. Chiefs of tribes, 371. Christian Science, 106. Christ’s atonement, 129, 245. Churches, 335, 460. CLARK, 389. CLISSOLD, 481. COE, 240. Conduct, perfect, 355. Confession, 462. Consciousness, fields of, 231; subliminal, 233. Consistency, 296. Conversion, to avarice, 178. Conversion, Fletcher’s, 181; Tolstoy’s, 184; Bunyan’s, 186; in general, Lectures IX and X, passim; Bradley’s, 189; compared with natural moral growth, 199; Hadley’s, 201; two types of, 205 ff.; Brainerd’s, 212; Alline’s, 217; Oxford graduate’s, 221; Ratisbonne’s, 223; instantaneous, 227; is it a natural phenomenon? 230; subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240; fruits of, 237; its momentousness, 239; may be supernatural, 242; its concomitants: sense of higher control, 244, happiness, 248, automatisms, 250, luminous phenomena, 251; its degree of permanence, 256. Cosmic consciousness, 398. Counter‐conversion, 176. Courage, 265, 287. Crankiness, see Psychopathy. CRICHTON‐BROWNE, 384, 386. Criminal character, 263. Criteria of value of spiritual affections, 18. CRUMP, 239. Cure of bad habits, 270. DAUDET, 167. Death, 139, 364. DERHAM, 493. Design, argument from, 438, 492 ff. Devoutness, 340. DIONYSIUS AREOPAGITICUS, 416. Disease, 99, 113. Disorder in contents of world, 438. Divided Self, Lecture VIII, passim; Cases of: Saint Augustine, 172, H. Alline, 173. Divine, the, 31. Dog, 281. Dogmatism, 326, 333. DOWIE, 113. DRESSER, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516. Drink, 268. Drummer, 476. DRUMMOND, 262. Drunkenness, 387, 403, 488. “Dryness,” 204. DUMAS, 279. Dyes, on clothing, 294. Earnestness, 264. Ecclesiastical spirit, the, 335, 338. ECKHART, 417. EDDY, 106. EDWARDS, JONATHAN, 20, 114, 200, 229, 238, 239, 248, 330. EDWARDS, MRS. J., 276, 280. Effects of religious states, 21. Effeminacy, 365. Ego of Apperception, 449. ELLIS, HAVELOCK, 418. ELWOOD, 292. EMERSON, 32, 56, 167, 205, 239, 330. Emotion, as alterer of life’s value, 150; of the character, 195, 261 ff., 279. Empirical method, 18, 327 ff., 443. Enemies, love your, 278, 283. Energy, personal, 196; mystical states increase it, 414. Environment, 356, 374. Epictetus, 474. Epicureans, 143. Equanimity, 284. Ether, mystical effects of, 392. Evil, ignored by healthy‐mindedness, 88, 106, 131; due to _things_ or to the _Self_, 134; its reality, 163. Evolutionist optimism, 91. Excesses of piety, 340. Excitement, its effects, 195, 266, 279, 325. Experience, religious, the essence of, 508. Extravagances of piety, 339, 486. Extreme cases, why we take them, 486. Failure, 139. Faith, 246, 506. Faith‐state, 505. Fanaticism, 338 ff. Fear, 98, 159, 161, 263, 275. Feeling deeper than intellect in religion, 431. FIELDING, 436. FINNEY, 207, 215. FLETCHER, 98, 181. FLOURNOY, 67, 514. Flower, 476. FOSTER, 178, 383. FOX, GEORGE, 7, 291, 335, 411. FRANCIS, SAINT, D’ASSISI, 319. FRANCIS, SAINT, DE SALES, 11. FRASER, 454. Fruits, of conversion, 237; of religion, 327; of Saintliness, 357. FULLER, 41. GAMOND, 288. GARDINER, 269. Genius and insanity, 16. Geniuses, see Religious leaders. Gentleman, character of the, 317, 371. GERTRUDE, SAINT, 345. “Gifts,” 151. Glory of God, 342. GOD, 31; sense of his presence, 66‐72, 272, 275 ff.; historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493; mind‐curer’s idea of him, 101; his honor, 342; described by negatives, 417; his attributes, scholastic proof of, 439; the metaphysical ones are for us meaningless, 445; the moral ones are ill‐deduced, 447; he is not a mere inference, 502; is _used_, not known, 506; his existence must make a difference among phenomena, 517, 522; his relation to the subconscious region, 242, 515; his tasks, 519; may be finite and plural, 525. GODDARD, 96. GOERRES, 407. GOETHE, 137. GOUGH, 203. GOURDON, 171. “Grace,” the operation of, 226; the state of, 260. GRATRY, 146, 476, 506. Greeks, their pessimism, 86, 142. Guidance, 472. GURNEY, 527. GUYON, 276, 286. HADLEY, 201, 268. HALE, 82. HAMON, 367. Happiness, 47‐49, 79, 248, 279. HARNACK, 100. Healthy‐mindedness, Lectures IV and V, passim; its philosophy of evil, 131; compared with morbid‐mindedness, 162, 488. Heart, softening of, 267. HEGEL, 389, 449, 454. HELMONT, VAN, 497. Heroism, 364, 488, note. Heterogeneous personality, 169, 193. Higher criticism, 4. HILTY, 79, 275, 472. HODGSON, R., 524. HOMER, 86. HUGO, 171. Hypocrisy, 338. Hypothesis, what make a useful one, 517. HYSLOP, 524. IGNATIUS LOYOLA, 313, 406, 410. Illness, 113. “Imitation of Christ,” the, 44. Immortality, 524. Impulses, 261. Individuality, 501. Inhibitions, 261 ff. Insane melancholy and religion, 144. Insanity and genius, 16; and happiness, 279. Institutional religion, 335. Intellect a secondary force in religion, 431, 514. Intellectual weakness of some saints, 370. Intolerance, 342. Irascibility, 264. JESUS, HARNACK on, 100. JOB, 76, 448. JOHN, SAINT, OF THE CROSS, 304, 407, 413. JOHNSTON, 258. JONQUIL, 476. JORDAN, 347. JOUFFROY, 176, 198. Judgments, existential and spiritual, 4. KANT, 54, 448. Karma, 522. KELLNER, 401. Kindliness, see Charity. KINGSLEY, 385. LAGNEAU, 285. Leaders, see Religious leaders. Leaders, of tribes, 371. LEJEUNE, 113, 312. LESSING, 318. LEUBA, 201, 203, 220, 246, 506. Life, its significance, 151. Life, the subconscious, 207, 209. LOCKER‐LAMPSON, 39. Logic, Hegelian, 449. Louis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350. Love, see Charity. Love, cases of falling out of, 179. Love of God, 276. Love your enemies, 278, 283. LOWELL, 65. Loyalty, to God, 342. LUTFULLAH, 164. LUTHER, 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382. Lutheran self‐despair, 108, 211. Luxury, 365. LYCAON, 86. Lyre, 267. Mahomet, 171. See MOHAMMED. MARCUS AURELIUS, 42, 44, 474. MARGARET MARY, see ALACOQUE. Margin of consciousness, 232. MARSHALL, 503. MARTINEAU, 475. MATHER, 303. MAUDSLEY, 19. Meaning of life, 151. Medical criticism of religion, 413. Medical materialism, 10 ff. Melancholy, 145, 279; Lectures V and VI, passim; cases of, 148, 149, 157, 159, 198. Melting moods, 267. Method of judging value of religion, 18, 327. Methodism, 227, 237. MEYSENBUG, 395. Militarism, 365‐367. Military type of character, 371. MILL, 204. Mind‐cure, its sources and history, 94‐97; its opinion of fear, 98; cases of, 102‐105, 120, 123; its message, 108; its methods, 112‐123; it uses verification, 120‐124; its philosophy of evil, 131. Miraculous character of conversion, 227. MOHAMMED, 341, 481. MOLINOS, 130. MOLTKE, VON, 264, 367. Monasteries, 296. Monism, 416. Morbidness compared with healthy‐mindedness, 488. See, also, Melancholy. Mormon revelations, 482. Mortification, see Asceticism. MUIR, 482. MULFORD, 497. MÜLLER, 468. MURISIER, 349. MYERS, 233, 234, 466, 511, 524. Mystic states, their effects, 21, 414. Mystical experiences, 66. Mysticism, Lectures XVI and XVII, passim; its marks, 380; its theoretic results, 416, 422, 428; it cannot warrant truth, 422; its results, 425; its relation to the sense of union, 509. Mystical region of experience, 515. Natural theology, 492. Naturalism, 141, 167. Nature, scientific view of, 491. Negative accounts of deity, 417. NELSON, 208, 423. NETTLETON, 215. NEWMAN, F. W., 80. NEWMAN, J. H., on dogmatic theology, 434, 442; his type of imagination, 459. NIETZSCHE, 371, 372. Nitrous oxide, its mystical effects, 387. No‐function, 261‐263, 299, 387, 416. Non‐resistance, 281, 358, 376. Obedience, 310. OBERMANN, 476. O’CONNELL, 257. Omit, 296. “Once‐born” type, 80, 166, 363, 488. Oneness with God, see Union. Optimism, systematic, 88; and evolutionism, 91; it may be shallow, 364. Orderliness of world, 438. Organism determines all mental states whatsoever, 14. Origin of mental states no criterion of their value, 14 ff. Orison, 406. Over‐beliefs, 513; the author’s, 515. Over‐soul, 516. Oxford, graduate of, 220, 268. Pagan feeling, 86. Pantheism, 131, 416. PARKER, 83. PASCAL, 286. PATON, 359. PAUL, SAINT, 171, 357. PEEK, 253. PEIRCE, 444. Penny, 323. PERREYVE, 505. Persecutions, 338, 342. Personality, explained away by science, 119, 491; heterogeneous, 169; alterations of, 193, 210 ff.; is reality, 499. See Character. PETER, SAINT, OF ALCANTARA, 360. PHILO, 481. Philosophy, Lecture XVIII, passim; must coerce assent, 433; scholastic, 439; idealistic, 448; unable to give a theoretic warrant to faith, 455; its true office in religion, 455. Photisms, 251. Piety, 339 ff. Pluralism, 131. Polytheism, 131, 526. Poverty, 315, 367. “Pragmatism,” 444, 519, 522‐524. Prayer, 463; its definition, 464; its essence, 465; petitional, 467; its effects, 474‐477, 523. “Presence,” sense of, 58‐63. Presence of God, 66‐72, 272, 275 ff., 396, 418. Presence of God, the practice of, 116. Primitive human thought, 495. PRINGLE‐PATTISON, 454. Prophets, the Hebrew, 479. Protestant theology, 244. Protestantism and Catholicism, 114, 227, 330, 461. Providential leading, 472. Psychopathy and religion, 22 ff. PUFFER, 394. Purity, 274, 290, 348. Quakers, 7, 291. RAMAKRISHNA, 361, 365. Rationalism, 73, 74; its authority overthrown by mysticism, 428. RATISBONNE, 223, 257. Reality of unseen objects, Lecture III, passim. RÉCÉJAC, 407, 509. “Recollection,” 116, 289. Redemption, 157. Reformation of character, 320. Regeneration, see Conversion; by relaxation, 111. REID, 446. Relaxation, salvation by, 110. See Surrender. Religion, to be tested by fruits, not by origin, 10 ff., 331; its definition, 26, 31; is solemn, 37; compared with Stoicism, 41; its unique function, 51; abstractness of its objects, 54; differs according to temperament, 75, 135, 333, and ought to differ, 487; considered to be a “survival,” 118, 490, 498; its relations to melancholy, 145; worldly passions may combine with it, 337; its essential characters, 369, 485; its relation to prayer, 463‐466; asserts a fact, not a theory, 489; its truth, 377; more than science, it holds by concrete reality, 500; attempts to evaporate it into philosophy, 502; it is concerned with personal destinies, 491, 503; with feeling and conduct, 504; is a sthenic affection, 505; is for life, not for knowledge, 506; its essential contents, 508; it postulates issues of fact, 518. Religious emotion, 279. Religious leaders, often nervously unstable, 6 ff., 30; their loneliness, 335. “Religious sentiment,” 27. RENAN, 37. Renunciations, 349. Repentance, 127. Resignation, 286. Revelation, the anæsthetic, 387‐393. Revelations, see Automatisms. Revelations, in Mormon Church, 482. Revivalism, 228. RIBET, 407. RIBOT, 145, 502. RODRIGUEZ, 313, 314, 317. ROYCE, 454. RUTHERFORD, MARK, 76. SABATIER, A., 464. Sacrifice, 303, 462. SAINT‐PIERRE, 83. SAINTE‐BEUVE, 260, 315. Saintliness, Sainte‐Beuve on, 260; its characteristics, 272, 370; criticism of, 326 ff. Saintly conduct, 356‐377. Saints, dislike of natural man for, 371. Salvation, 526. SANDAYS, 480. SATAN, in picture, 50. SCHEFFLER, 417. Scholastic arguments for God, 437. Science, ignores personality and teleology, 491; her “facts,” 500, 501. “Science of Religions,” 433, 455, 456, 488‐490. Scientific conceptions, their late adoption, 496. Second‐birth, 157, 165, 166. SEELEY, 77. Self of the world, 449. Self‐despair, 110, 129, 208. Self‐surrender, 110, 208. SÉNANCOUR, 476. SETH, 454. Sexual temptation, 269. Sexuality as cause of religion, 10, 11. “Shrew,” 347. Sickness, 113. Sick souls, Lectures V and VI, passim. SIGHELE, 263. Sin, 209. Sinners, Christ died for, 129. Skepticism, 332 ff. SKOBELEFF, 265. SMITH, JOSEPH, 482. Softening of the heart, 267. Solemnity, 37, 48. Soul, 195. Soul, strength of, 273. SPENCER, 355, 374. SPINOZA, 9, 127. Spiritism, 514. Spirit‐return, 524. Spiritual judgments, 4. Spiritual states, tests of their value, 18. STARBUCK, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208‐210, 249, 253, 258, 268, 276, 323, 353, 394. STEVENSON, 138, 296. Stoicism, 42‐45, 143. Strange appearance of world, 151. Strength of soul, 273. Subconscious action in conversion, 236, 242. Subconscious life, 115, 207, 209, 233, 236, 270, 483. Subconscious Self, as intermediary between the Self and God, 511. Subliminal, see Subconscious. Sufis, 402, 420. Suggestion, 112, 234. Suicide, 147. Supernaturalism its two kinds, 520; criticism of universalistic, 521. Supernatural world, 518. Surrender, salvation by, 110, 208, 211. Survival‐theory of religion, 490, 498, 500. SUSO, 306, 349. SWINBURNE, 421. SYMONDS, 385, 390. Sympathetic magic, 496. Sympathy, see Charity. Systems, philosophic, 433. Taine, 9. TAYLOR, 246. Tenderness, see Charity. TENNYSON, 383, 384. TERESA, SAINT, 20, 346, 360, 408, 411, 412, 414. Theologia Germanica, 43. Theologians, systematic, 446. “Theopathy,” 343. THOREAU, 275. Threshold, 135. Tiger, 164, 262. Tobacco, 270, 290. TOLSTOY, 149, 178, 184. TOWIANSKI, 281. Tragedy of life, 363. Tranquillity, 285. Transcendentalism criticised, 522. Transcendentalists, 516. TREVOR, 396. TRINE, 101, 394. Truth of religion, how to be tested, 377; what it is, 509; mystical perception of, 380, 410. “Twice‐born,” type, 166, 363, 488. TYNDALL, 299. “Unconscious cerebration,” 207. Unification of Self, 183, 349. “UNION MORALE,” 272. Union with God, 408, 418, 425, 451, 509 ff. See lectures on Conversion, passim. Unity of universe, 131. Unreality, sense of, 63. Unseen realities, Lecture III, passim. Upanishads, 419. UPHAM, 289. Utopias, 360. VACHEROT, 502. Value of spiritual affections, how tested, 18. VAMBÉRY, 341. Vedantism, 400, 419, 513, 522. Veracity, 7, 291 ff. VIVEKANANDA, 513. VOLTAIRE, 38. VOYSEY, 275. War, 365‐367. Wealth‐worship, 365. WEAVER, 281. WESLEY, 227. Wesleyan self‐despair, 108, 211. WHITEFIELD, 318. WHITMAN, 84, 395, 396, 506. WOLFF, 492, 493. WOOD, HENRY, 96, 99, 117. World, soul of the, 449. Worry, 98, 181. Yes‐function, 261‐263, 299, 387. Yoga, 400. YOUNG, 256. FOOTNOTES 1 As with many ideas that float in the air of one’s time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re‐interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its _fons et origo_ was Luther’s wish to marry a nun:—the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex‐deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one’s point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We “hunger and thirst” after righteousness; we “find the Lord a sweet savor;” we “taste and see that he is good.” “Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,” is a sub‐title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe. Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the “orison of quietude”: “In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here.... Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord.” And again: “Consider the little infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness.” Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i. In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: “Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water‐brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God.” _God’s Breath in Man_ is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain non‐ Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration. These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:—but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age _par excellence_ would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past? The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any _general_ assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex‐theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex‐ organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religion’s meaning or value. In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence, _somehow_, of the mind upon the body. 2 For a first‐rate example of medical‐materialist reasoning, see an article on “les Variétés du Type dévot,” by Dr. Binet‐Sanglé, in the Revue de l’Hypnotisme, xiv. 161. 3 J. F. NISBET: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi, xxiv. 4 MAX NORDAU, in his bulky book entitled _Degeneration_. 5 H. MAUDSLEY: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 257, 256. 6 Autobiography, ch. xxviii. 7 Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of association by similarity. 8 I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895). 9 I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written. 10 Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged). 11 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186. 12 Feuilles détachées, pp. 394‐398 (abridged). 13 Op. cit., pp. 314, 313. 14 Book V., ch. x. (abridged). 15 Book V., ch. ix. (abridged). 16 Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth’s translation. 17 Book IV., § 23. 18 Benham’s translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody Emerson: “Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso,—that I know it is His agency. I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine.” R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188. 19 Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical _differentia_. 20 The New Spirit, p. 232. 21 I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and friend, Charles Carroll Everett. 22 Example: “I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us.” AUGUSTUS HARE: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare. 23 Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527. 24 Example: “Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is.” B. de St. Pierre. 25 Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26. 26 E. GURNEY: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384. 27 Pensées d’un Solitaire, p. 66. 28 Letters of Lowell, i. 75. 29 I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy’s permission, from his rich collection of psychological documents. 30 Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. 31 In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122. 32 C. HILTY: Glück, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18. 33 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91. 34 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she “could always cuddle up to God.” 35 JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32. 36 STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306. 37 “I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations,” writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude—each of them more optimistic than the last. This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The truth‐telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:— “In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don’t condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased—no, not exactly that—I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this—my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all.” Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67. 38 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182‐186, abridged. 39 I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia. 40 Song of Myself, 32. 41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation. 42 “God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanic‐optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast. 43 “As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or mænadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.” R. L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355. 44 “Cautionary Verses for Children”: this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind‐cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America. 45 I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the former. Mr. Dresser’s works are published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood’s by Lee & Shepard, Boston. 46 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on “the Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures” is published in the American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind‐ cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes: “In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive medicine and folk‐medicine of to‐day, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics—Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion.... Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable” (pp. 33, 34 of reprint). 47 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought _minus_ Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21‐25, abridged. 48 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38. 49 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54. 50 Whether it differs so much from Christ’s own notion is for the exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind‐curers do. “What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist?” asks Harnack, and says it is this: “ ‘The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.’ That is the ‘coming of the kingdom,’ or rather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work of redemption, _but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission_. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills; he never spends time in asking whether the sick one ‘deserves’ to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well.” Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39. 51 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered passages together. 52 The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD’S Glasgow Lectures of 1890‐92 passages like this abound:— “The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ passes with scarce a break into the announcement that ‘the kingdom of God is among you’; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference _in kind_ between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division, and ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be ‘perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.’ The sense of alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: ‘As in heaven, so on earth.’ The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms ‘Son’ and ‘Father’ at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a principle of reconciliation.” The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147. 53 It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes more and more the form of mind‐cure experience and academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects. 54 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind‐curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own “subconscious” self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico‐materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting‐out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually) “higher” ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.—Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho‐physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here. 55 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning “merit.” “Illness,” says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), “is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one’s self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gay says, ‘this one is of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.’ ” According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away. Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt’s Life by Zündel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non‐ fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to‐day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of Healing” were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as “diabolical counterfeits” of his own exclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole be counted into the mind‐cure movement. In mind‐ cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms. 56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members. 57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46. 58 DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58. 59 DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33. 60 TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214. 61 TRINE: p. 117. 62 Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66. 63 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged). 64 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends. 65 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience. 66 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x. 67 Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510‐514 (abridged). 68 MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged). 69 I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind‐cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part. 70 Cf. J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf‐Arbitre, 1884, _passim_. 71 He adds with characteristic healthy‐mindedness: “Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.” 72 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self _in posse_ at least. But the world deals with us _in actu_ and not _in posse_: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All‐ knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All‐knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life. 73 E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: “Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.” 74 E.g., Theognis, 425‐428: “Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.” See also the almost identical passage in Œdipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: “Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—“How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals.”—“For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered.” The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic. 75 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly‐wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: “By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term _contentment_. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman’s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.” 76 RIBOT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54. 77 A. GRATRY: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119‐121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:— An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents she writes:— “Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good‐by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head.” To her brother she writes: “Good‐by forever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter.” S. A. K. STRAHAN: Suicide and Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131. 78 ROUBINOVITCH ET TOULOUSE: La Mélancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged. 79 I cull these examples from the work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900. 80 My extracts are from the French translation by “ZONIA.” In abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage. 81 Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached passages continuously. 82 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand. 83 Compare Bunyan: “There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast‐bone would have split asunder.... Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.” 84 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff. 85 Example: “It was about eleven o’clock at night ... but I strolled on still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till morning.”—Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112. 86 E.g., “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping‐coughs,” etc. EMERSON: “Spiritual Laws.” 87 Notes sur la Vie, p. 1. 88 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractères, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifiés, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés, as so many diverse psychic types. 89 ANNIE BESANT: an Autobiography, p. 82. 90 SMITH BAKER, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893. 91 LOUIS GOURDON (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine’s writings immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life, but it was to the neo‐platonic spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraced until four years more had passed. 92 Confessions, Book VIII., chaps. v., vii., xi., abridged. 93 TH. JOUFFROY: Nouveaux Mélanges philosophiques, 2me édition, p. 83. I add two other cases of counter‐conversion dating from a certain moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection, and the narrator is a woman. “Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or less skeptical about ‘God;’ skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied ‘Yes,’ as was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, ‘No, you do not.’ I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in some terrible way.... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: ‘I have no use for a God who permits such things.’ This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it. I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any personal relations with him since this painful experience.” The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel’s burden, or that touch of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly begin to crystallize out. Tolstoy writes: “S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows how he ceased to believe:— “He was twenty‐six years old when one day on a hunting expedition, the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to the custom he had held from childhood. “His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked at him. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said, ‘Do you still keep up that thing?’ Nothing more was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has never prayed again; he never takes communion, and does not go to church. All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which he then and there adopted; not because he made any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight. These words but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were actions with no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no longer keep them up.” My Confession, p. 8. 94 Op. cit., Letter III., abridged. I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of “falling in love,” falling out of love, may be so termed. Falling in love also conforms frequently to this type, a latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. The free and easy tone in this narrative gives it a sincerity that speaks for itself. “For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience, which almost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a girl who, young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look back on her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have fallen so low as to be worked upon to such an extent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into a regular fever, could think of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I pictured her attractions, and spent most of the time when I should have been working, in recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the last degree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me no decided answer yes or no, and the queer thing about it was that whilst pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she was unfit to be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes. Although for a year we took our meals at the same boarding‐house, so that I saw her continually and familiarly, our closer relations had to be largely on the sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy of another one of her male admirers, and my own conscience despising me for my uncontrollable weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that I really thought I should become insane. I understand well those young men murdering their sweethearts, which appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it. “The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her notes and letters, and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despised her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have never had a single moment of loving thought towards one who for so many months entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather hated her memory, though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction. At any rate, from that happy morning onward I regained possession of my own proper soul, and have never since fallen into any similar trap.” This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different levels of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced against each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happens so unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer’s words, “some outside power laid hold.” Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p.