382
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion
as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions
of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to
square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of
time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For
our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-
bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively
recent date such distinctions as those between what has been verified
and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the
personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.
since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find there
everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one means
whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more manifest
when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of
our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters. . . . When one goes into a
grinding-mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get a
still greater idea of the use of water.”
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty, discourses as follows: “Some
constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be
indifferent to almost any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and
feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some
the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in
the feculent and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the
valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong
in the warmer air of the valleys.
“So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the vales, is an admirable
easement, refreshment, and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind;
affording those an easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish,
and pine away.
“To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great convenience of the
hills, and that is affording commodious places for habitation, serving (as an eminent author
wordeth it) as screens to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly
winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations
both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.
“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the rivers their conveyance,
and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and
useless excrescences of our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived
and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surface
of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not mountain-
ous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no
conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the
higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink,
and also drown large tracts of land.
“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler they may seem incom-
modious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the great Creator, and wisely appointed by
him for the good of our sublunary world.”
CONCLUSIONS
383
Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought
fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed,
your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been con-
tradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of
view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself
exclusively to the æsthetic and dramatic aspects of events.
1
1
Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One need only recall
the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle, as, for example, his
explanation of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due,
according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular
movement. The circle is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving
line, which contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite direc-
tions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most “natural” movement; and the long arm
of the lever, moving, as it does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural
motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by Herodotus
of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because of the cold which drives
it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine’s speculations:
“Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such
power to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself,
which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful
colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy
cinders? . . . Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that
a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture
rots it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness, the sympathies and
antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength
and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention.
If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invoked on every page.
Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there
were a variety of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar,
or a bear; powdered earthworms, the usnia, or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a
hanged criminal, and other materials equally unpleasant — the whole prepared under the
planet Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped
in the patient’s blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this
ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well, — I quote
now Van Helmont’s account, — for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it
the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of the oint-
ment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german, the
blood in the patient’s body. This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic impression
from the wounded part. But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull’s fat, and other
portions of the unguent. The reason why bull’s fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time
of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a
higher flame of revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it out,
says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed, not to any
auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the posthumous character of
Revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the unguent.
J. B. V
AN
H
ELMONT
: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by W
ALTER
C
HARLETON
, London,
1650. — I much abridge the original in my citations.