RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
17
as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about
his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we
get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form
of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and
pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically
founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then,
in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite
illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance
some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general
with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of
our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even
our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for
every one of them without exception flows from the state of their
possessor’s body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of
fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every
simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior
to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes
use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory
of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may ac-
credit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes,
by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting
them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical
and inconsistent.
Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with
ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind
superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning
their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different
reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them;
or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential
fruits for life. When we speak disparagingly of “feverish fancies,”
surely the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem
— for aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit
might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate
and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 de-
grees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their
inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we
praise the thoughts which health brings, health’s peculiar chemical
18
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment.
We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the
character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as
good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their
serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our
esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do
not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not
always agree. What immediately feels most “good” is not always
most “true,” when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience.
The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic
instance in corroboration. If merely “feeling good” could decide,
drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But
its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted
into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length
of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is
the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual
judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experi-
ence — we shall hereafter hear much of them — that carry an
enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when
they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to every
one; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or
tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons
follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer
to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of
so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy
which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these
lectures end.
It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any
merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding
strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological
causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. “Genius,” said
Dr. Moreau, “is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic
tree.” “Genius,” says Dr. Lombroso, “is a symptom of hereditary
degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral
insanity.” “Whenever a man’s life,” writes Mr. Nisbet, “is at once
sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be
a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid
RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
19
category. . . . And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater
the genius, the greater the unsoundness.”
1
Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to
their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease,
consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the value of the fruits?
Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine
of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the
productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that no
neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them
here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of
logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad
to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn
the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of
contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and
they are many) by using medical arguments.
2
But for the most part
the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical line of
attack either confines itself to such secular productions as every
one admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself
exclusively to religious manifestations. And then it is because the
religious manifestations have been already condemned because the
critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds.
In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any
one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author’s neurotic
constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by
experiment, no matter what may be their author’s neurological
type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value
can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon
them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and
secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations
to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and
moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might
have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not
now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other
tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her
1
J. F. N
ISBET
: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London, 1893, pp. xvi, xxiv.
2
M
AX
N
ORDAU
, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.
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