RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
23
of the body. To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both
out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with
the whole range of its variations. The study of hallucinations has
in this way been for psychologists the key to their comprehension
of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to the right
comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative
conceptions, “fixed ideas,” so called, have thrown a flood of light
on the psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions
have performed the same service for that of the normal faculty
of belief.
Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the
attempts, of which I already made mention, to class it with psy-
chopathical phenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane
temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration
(to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called),
has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with
a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more prob-
able that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his
temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no special
affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,
1
for most
psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more
commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic tem-
perament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired,
often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky
person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to
fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately
into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest
till he proclaims it, or in some way “works it off.” “What shall
I think of it?” a common person says to himself about a vexed
question; but in a “cranky” mind “What must I do about it?” is the
form the question tends to take. In the autobiography of that
high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following pas-
sage: “Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few
care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything
in its support. “Some one ought to do it, but why should I?” is the
ever reëchoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. “Some one ought
1
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.
24
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
to do it, so why not I?” is the cry of some earnest servant of man,
eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these
two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.” True enough!
and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies
of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a
superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce — as
in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they
are bound to coalesce often enough — in the same individual, we
have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that
gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere
critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess
them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions
or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso,
Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox.
To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which,
as we shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete
religious evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious
belief confers. Take the trance-like states of insight into truth which
all religious mystics report.
1
These are each and all of them special
cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religious
melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have quâ religious, is at
any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious
trance is trance. And the moment we renounce the absurd notion
that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or
its origin is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimental
results and inner quality, in judging of values, — who does not see
that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious
melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by
comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties
of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider
their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they
were outside of nature’s order altogether?
I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this
supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious
phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcert-
ing, even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the
1
I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in the Psychological Review, ii.
287 (1895).