LECTURE 01: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

The Varieties of Religious Experience

LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this

desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of

receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of

European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not

a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from

Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or

literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to

cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were

visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the

Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans

listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure

it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.

Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American

imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of

this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.

Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the

first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe‐

struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s

class‐room therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first

philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was

immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of

reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self

promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official

here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries

with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that

it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic

obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say

only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to

run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go

by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the

Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the

United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher

matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,

as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English

speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.

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As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this

lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the

history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch

of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the

religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other

of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,

therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to

invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.

If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather

religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must

confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in

literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works

of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of

a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full

significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and

perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most

concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the

religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their

ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern

writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The

_documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be

sought for in the haunts of special erudition—they lie along the beaten

highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the

character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer’s lack of

special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and

paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some

time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no

detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more

adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth

from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable

and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he

will necessarily, by his control of so much more out‐of‐the‐way material,

get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What

is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of

question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize

this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point

a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have

referred.

In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of

inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it

come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,

What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once

here? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_

or proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what

the Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate

a _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from

the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the

mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding

them together.

In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two

orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its

derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher

criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential

point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what

biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various

contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their

several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are

manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the

answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use

should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,

be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other

question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as

to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for

purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called

a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might

indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible’s worth. Thus if

our theory of revelation‐value were to affirm that any book, to possess

it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of

the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and

express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill

at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a

book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and

deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner

experiences of great‐souled persons wrestling with the crises of their

fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the

existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the

value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never

confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same

conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of

the Bible’s value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment

as to the foundation of values differs.

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I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because

there are many religious persons—some of you now present, possibly, are

among them—who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who

may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential

point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of

religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically

and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual

history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,

and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of

deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.

Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since

such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of

much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the

point.

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,

exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and

eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who

follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be

Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by

others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by

imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this

second‐hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original

experiences which were the pattern‐setters to all this mass of suggested

feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in

individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute

fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line;

and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective

enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious

geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more

perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to

abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of

exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner

life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no

measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they

have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all

sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.

Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped

to give them their religious authority and influence.

If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is

furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he

founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of

shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a

return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever

known in England. So far as our Christian sects to‐day are evolving into

liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox

and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment

that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound.

Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to

county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior

power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a

psychopath or _détraqué_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in

entries of this sort:—

“As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and

saw three steeple‐house spires, and they struck at my life. I

asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately

the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being

come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk

into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As

soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge

and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a

great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I

commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it

was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I

put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor

shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a

mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the

Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, ‘Wo to the bloody city of

Lichfield!’ So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud

voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I

went into the market‐place, and to and fro in the several parts of

it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of

Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying

through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood

running down the streets, and the market‐place appeared like a

pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt

myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to

the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them

again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over

me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a

stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so

to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.

After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I

should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody

city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and

the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during

the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen

many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in

the Emperor Diocletian’s time a thousand Christians were martyr’d

in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the

channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the

market‐place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of

those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,

and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon

me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.”

Bent as we are on studying religion’s existential conditions, we cannot

possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must

describe and name them just as if they occurred in non‐religious men. It

is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our

emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any

other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object

is to class it along with something else. But any object that is

infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if

it must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with

a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or

apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it

would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”

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The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the

thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites

of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And

elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their

properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural

things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature

with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that

its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine,

in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:

“Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have

their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as

there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue

are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of

the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely

everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the

somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors

are actually able to perform—menaced and negated in the springs of our

innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to

undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed

in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their

significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than

the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value

is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which

unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental

acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his

temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is

merely a matter of over‐instigated nerves. William’s melancholy about the

universe is due to bad digestion—probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’s

delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter

would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in

the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of

reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of

criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them

and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.

The...