By the Same Author | Title Page | Copyright Page | Dedication Page | Preface | Contents | I | II | III | IV, & V | VI, & VII | VIII | IX | X | XI, XII, & XIII | XIV, &XV | XVI, &XVII | XVIII | XIX | XX | Postscript | Index |
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"IF
we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief
concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be:
'It is happiness.' How to
gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret
motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral
life wholly from the experiences of happiness
and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring;
and, even more in the religious
life than in the moral life,
happiness and unhappiness seem to be
the poles round which the interest revolves. We need
not go so far as to say with
the author whom I lately
quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion,
nor need we call mere laughter
a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment
may produce the sort
of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift
of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the
more complex ways of experiencing
religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner
paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift
of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself
to be. "With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true;" |
(Our bold, color, brackets, links, underlines, and violet bold italic problematics.) James uses European spelling. He hyphenates to-day. He contracts 'not' as n't stand alone! He is profoundly gender biased, however, he often respectfully refers Nature and creation "she." He proliferates some old English, which we must say, we enjoy immensely. He has some enormous footnotes which run most of multiple pages. Strange, indeed. We retain page integrity to best of our abilities from original 1902 copyrighted first edition text. We offer intra text commentary in various ways: highlights, brackets and links according to this Our bold and color highlights follow a code:
Our many Quantonics' local~online references include (an even more extended list):
Doug wants to offer some personal comments here, regarding his interpretations of James' opus. 'Catholics' beware. Doug's comments here on page 78 of James' VoRE turned into a multi page essay in its own right. It grew so large, we moved it to Quantum Gosticism for Healthy~Mindedness. It stands alone, as a Doug icon, a memorial and a tribute to James' fabulous efforts in VoRE. Allow your reviewer to juxtapose happiness and unhappiness both classically and quantumly: Classically - dichon(unhappiness, happiness). Quantumly - quanton(unhappiness,happiness). Classically our interaction juxtaposition is mechanical, formal, objective, state-ic, socially-dialectically-positive-or-negative, stable, etc. Quantumly our interrelationship superposition is qualitative, emerqant, subjective, fluxing, only quantum~positive, dynamic~pragmatic~absolutely~animate (stindyanic), etc.
From a quantum complementarospective then, James makes a huge mistake of 'reason' here. Have you noodled what it is? James writes, "If a creed makes
a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it.
Such a belief ought to be
true;" however, said
creed will make any human unhappy too. Most classical creeds
constrain and use OSFA
'class constraint' to do so. Ditto canon 'law' and social organizational
'structure.' Trouble is, Simply, James treats, here, subjective reality as though it were objective! And it is an important observation. Why? Humans do this relentlessly, and it is a major failure of classical human thing-king, a major failure of CTMs. If happiness is part of belief then belief is subjective, indeed, quantum~subjective. Happiness is always changing, always evolving and fluxing. Happiness is a wave of feeling which ebbs and flows like an ocean compenetrating a beach. We need quantum wave functions to 'describe' happiness and happiness' complement, quanton(hapiness'_complement,happiness), and we cann¤t do that objectively, classically. To do so requires that we reify happiness, stop its waving, make it hold still, turn it into classical concrete, make it unreal. Again, let us quote Bruno de Finetti: We offer a potent one from third paragraph of Chapter VI, 'Observation and Thought,' of his 1937 paper, Foresight: Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources:
Classicists do this treat subjectives objectively almost continuously and James just did it for us again. Flux, quantum flux, cann¤t be classically 'true.' To make matters even more omnifficult for classicists, quantum reality issi flux! Happiness, like belief, simply is n¤t an classical either-or oppositive dichotomy. We can make an inference here of James' implicit and tacit acceptance of belief as individual [i.e., n¤t classically 'social,' n¤t metastatically catholic] and thus massively heterogeneous, and for each believer, ephemeral and probably ineffable. See Quantonics' What Are Sophisms? See our QELRs of intellect, intelligence, judge, logic, real, true, understand. Doug - 5Sep2006. Page top index. |
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79 |
therefore it is true such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the 'immediate inferences' of the religious logic used by ordinary men.
"In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day. "In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. 'Cosmic emotion' inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been ideal- 1 C. Hilty: Glück, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18. |
But now it appears, perhaps, that we have misinterpreted James... He speaks of our complaint as only "logic used by or di nary men." So what do extra or di nary (æxtra~amd~ømnih~nary) w¤~mæn usæ? See amd. James appears to already anticipate our complaint... Hilty's dialectic protrudes: "only experienced [exclusionary]," "nearness [locus and lisrability]," " irrefutably clear [Ockham, minimalism, reduction, etc., as classical simplicity]," " here below [dichon(above, and below) as an excluded-middle]," " the best [radically final authority]," " proof, no other [state, scalarbation, metric repetition as tools of verification]," "equally [absence of change, evolution are prerequisites of any classical notion of 'proof']," "convincing [dialectic is a classical 'con job']," and "point [classical points simply do n¤t, cann¤t 'exist']." Doug's brackets of exegesis.
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"ized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac,if you but love [God], you may do as you incline, is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good. "It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies, than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden."
1 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91. |
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81 |
"In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent 'liberal' developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an 'admirable example. Theodore Parker is another, here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence.2
1 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up to God." 2 JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32. |
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Another good expression of the 'once-born' type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars. I quote a part of it:
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One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite 'temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind. of congenital anæsthesia.2 1 STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306. . 2 "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 |
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The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.
[Footnote continued from previous page...] "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. " |
Author's brackets in quoted text. Page top index. |
85 |
"Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and' ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good. "Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion., He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn;2 hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter. "Whitman is often spoken of as a 'pagan.' The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In" 1 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp.182-186, abridged. 2 I refer to The Conservator, edited ,by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia. |
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"neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.
"No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:
"Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each" 1 Song of Myself, 32. 2 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation. |
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87 |
"ring true, and do
not mix or
interfere with one another,
so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses
unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not
reckon sin; nor had they
any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make
them insist, as so many of us insist, that what immediately
appears as evil must be ' good in the making,' or
something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad,
for the earlier Greeks. They
neither denied the ills of
nature, Walt Whitman's
verse, 'What is called good is perfect and what is called bad
is just as perfect,' would have been mere silliness to them,
nor
did they, in order to escape
from those ills, invent' another
and a better world' of the
imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods
of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive
reactions, this freedom from all moral
sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan
feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary
and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected
twist,1 and this diminishes its effect on many readers
who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole
quite willing to admit that in important
respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets. 1God 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. |
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88 | mindedness is a way of feeling happy
about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is
an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract
way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their
essence for the time being,
and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness,
conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being,
deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although,
when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to
perform for
one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about
facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex
to lie open to so simple a criticism. In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up. But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to |
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89 | many of the facts that seem at first
to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse
to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore
their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far
as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may
still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you
make them evil or good by
your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts
which proves to be your principal concern. The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling [i.e., poetic crying Doug], mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others ? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs. In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or |
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persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must
be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous
part in the history of the
religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some
care. But we need not go
so far at present. More ordinary nonmystical conditions of
rapture suffice for my immediate
contention. All invasive moral
states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil
in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot,
the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When
the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause,
death may lose its sting, the grave its victory.
In these states, the ordinary
contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher
denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil,
and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience
of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in
the heroic opportunity and
adventure. 1 "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 [archaic burden Doug]. The prim, obliterated, |
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The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during
the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory
of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness
with which the old hell-fire theology was more
harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers,
far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather
to making little of it. They ignore,
or even deny, eternal punishment,
and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.
They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned
Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly
and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and'
muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers
would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an
ideal element of Christian character. I am not
asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing
out the change. 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. |
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92 | embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either
been trained scientifically, or
been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun
to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness
and irrationality of the orthodox
Christian scheme. As examples are better than descriptions, I
will quote a document received in answer to Professor
Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind
may by courtesy be called a religion, for
it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic
and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals.
I think you will recognize in him, coarse-meated and incapable
of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type. Q. What does Religion mean to you? A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I teetotally disbelieve in a God. The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die there being no immortality in either case. Q. What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc.? A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh. |
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Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared providential ? A. None whatever. There
is no agency of the superintending kind. A little judicious observation
as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince anyone of
this fact. |
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94 | To my mind a current far more important
and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural
science towards healthy-mindedness is that which has recently
poured over America and seems to be gathering force
every day, I am ignorant
what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain,
and to which, for the sake
of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the'
Mind-cure movement.' There are various sects of this 'New Thought,'
to use another of the names
by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound
that their differences may be neglected for
my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology,
as if it were a simple thing. It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers, a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings. One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of 'law' and 'progress' and 'development' ; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power |
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of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy
of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative
contempt for doubt, fear,
worry, and all nervously
precautionary states of mind.1 Their belief has in
a general way been corroborated by the practical experience
of their disciples; and this experience forms
to-day a mass imposing in amount. 1 , 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. |
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innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in
with them (for in everything
human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook
the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some
of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed
that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible
to read it at all. 1 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. 2 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 |
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To come now to a little closer quarters
with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is
nothing more
than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact
that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres
of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live
more habitually. The shallower
and lower sphere is I,hat of the fleshly sensations, instincts,
and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests.
But whereas Christian theology has always considered fro 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). |
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wardness to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of the beast in it is fear; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion.
The 'misery-habit,' the 'martyr-habit, 'engendered by the
prevalent' fearthought,' get pungent criticism from the mind-cure
writers: 1 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought minus Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged. |
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old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line of particular fears and trouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Bradley's' unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.'
Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from such quotations. 1 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38. 2 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54. |
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how widely their notion
of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary
Christians.1
1 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. |
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tence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree.
Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have many answers from correspondents the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. 1 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered passages together. |
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My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:
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learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without. |
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104 |
Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment, they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying.
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105 |
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God's life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.1 1 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 |
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But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a 'mystery' or ' problem,' or in 'laying to heart' the lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs.. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind-cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a lie, '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 au 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. |
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107 | and anyone who mentions it is a
liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids
us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course,
as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative
omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits
of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil,
a mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of
a life of good? After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the Diätetik der Seele [The Hygiene of the Mind] into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: 'Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.' 'Thoughts are things,' as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are' forces,' and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one's desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one's side by opening one's own mind to their influx. On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran |
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and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism
and works, with his anxious
query, 'What shall I do to be saved?' Luther and Wesley replied:
'You are saved now, if you would but believe it.' And the mind-curers
come with precisely similar words
of emancipation. They speak, it is true,
to persons for whom the conception
of salvation has lost its ancient theological
meaning, but who labor nevertheless
with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with
them; and 'What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole,
well? ' is the form of their
question. And the answer is: 'Y ou are well, sound,
and clear already, if you did but know it.' " The whole
matter may be summed up in one sentence," says one of the
authors whom I have already
quoted, " God is well, and so are you. You must awaken
to the knowledge of your real being." 1 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. |
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should hardly take so large a place
in dignified Gifford lectures.
I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of
these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind
of the enormous diversities
which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants,
their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must
be classed under different heads. The result is that we have
really different types of religious experience; and, seeking
in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded
type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual
types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet
our lectures may possibly
serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first
thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the
clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally
'correct' type, 'the deadly
respectable' type, for which
to ignore others is a besetting
temptation) is that nothing
can be more stupid than to
bar out phenomena from our notice,
merely because we are incapable
of taking part in anything like them ourselves. Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom at any rate at a certain stage in their development a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day and night," they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure |
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and vexation in their hands, and
only makes them twofold more
the children of hell they were before.
The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible
fever and torment. Their
machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so
hot and the belts are so tightened. Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the 'surrender' of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power. Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They know ; for they have actually felt the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will. |
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A story which revivalist
preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night
slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch
which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery
for hours. But finally his
fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell
to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he
had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been
spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell
us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide
absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying
on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never
save. 1 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 |
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When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion,
we shall learn something more
about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word
about the mind-curer's methods. 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. |
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lutely nothing, or did nothing
until mind-cure came to the rescue.1 1 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 Ed ward 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. |
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In what can the originality
of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,
until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set
free in some group of human beings? 1 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. |
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115 |
it forms a specific moral combination, well represented
in the world.
1 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom,
46. |
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Wherein, I should like to know, does this intrinsically differ from the practice of 'recollection' which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation.
All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are
of course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely
spiritual part of the exercise is identical in |
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both communions, and in both communions
those who urge it write with authority,
for they have evidently experienced
in their own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some
mind-cure utterances: "High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful. "The soul's real world is that which it ha.s built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we will, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum. . . . Whenever the thought is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought-forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the' still, small voice' is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul- |
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118 |
contact with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain." 1 When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so
deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness
as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold
shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect
you will have long since passed away
doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down pour encourager
les mitres. You will then be convinced, I trust, that these
states of consciousness of , union' form
a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul
may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live
by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which
they have acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical
reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject
of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already
only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this
systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientific
method and the scientific life. 1 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged). |
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119 | everything is conceived of under
the form of personality.
The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces,
and for the sake of individual
ends. For him, even external
nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were
so many elementary powers. Now
science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved
that personality, so far from being an elementary force
in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary
forces, physical, chemical,
physiological, and psycho-physical,
which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing
individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far
as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then
inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive
thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things,
they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the
method of experimental verification. Follow out science's conceptions
practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore
personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The world
is so made that all your expectations will be experientially
verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from
which you infer them impersonal and universal. But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclama- |
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tion and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results.
Here, in the very heyday of science's authority,
it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy,
and succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and weapons.
Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain
ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely
throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief,
not only not
impugned, but corroborated by its observation. "One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): 'There is nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.' Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day." The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account. " I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling increased rapidly, until I had pains in an my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, an the symptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind-cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter |
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thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
These are exceedingly trivial instances1 but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to themselves to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not everyone can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than everyone can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupulous for those who can get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing veri- 1 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends. |
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122 | fied in such experimental ways as
this, to give them up at word
of command for more scientific therapeutics. What
are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim?
I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religions experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using dif- |
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ferent conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just
as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts
by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus,
or by quaternions, and each
time come out right? On this view religion and science, each
verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life,
would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized
personal forces, seems at
any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the
field to-day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest
experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with
reality.1 APPENDIX CASE I. "My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of 1 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. |
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124 | immediate and great exhaustion.
I had been under the care of doctors
of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose
power to help me I had had great faith, with no or
ill result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly
losing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough
in mental healing to make me try it; I had no great hope of getting
any good from it it
was a chance I tried, partly because
my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemed to
open, partly because it was
the only chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from
whom some friends of mine had got, or
thought that they had got, great help; the treatment was a silent
one; little was said, and that little carried no conviction to
my mind; whatever influence was exerted was that of another person's thought or feeling silently projected on
to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as
we sat still together. I believed from the start in the possibility
of such action, for I knew
the power of the mind to shape, helping or
hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy
probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong
conviction nor any mystic
or religious faith connected
with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly
into play. "I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, bad long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in |
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125 | it had been the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one's conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state; and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an excited imagination, or a consciously received suggestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres, can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective. That these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane | Page top index. |
126 | of the normally
unconscious mind, so the strongest and most effective impressions
are those which it receives, in some as yet unknown, subtle
way, directly from a healthier mind whose state, through
a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces." CASE II. "At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis. This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared. Even the expression of my face changed noticeably. "I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh [throat mucus and buildup, especially excessive; due inflammation Doug 31Aug2006]. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet everyone with confidence and inner calm. " I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the immanence of God and the Divinity of man's true, inner self." |
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