SUBJECT: Happiness
ASPECT/PERSPECTIVE: Religions as paths to happiness
SUMMARY: THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS
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; therefore it is true- such,
rightly or wrongly, is one of the 'immediate inferences' of the religious logic used by ordinary men.
"The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer, * "may be experienced in its reality-
indeed only experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made
irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable feeling of
happiness which is connected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and
altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of
God's reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from
which every efficacious new theology should start."
* C. HILTY: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.
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 is 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 idealized 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.
"God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W. Newman, * "the once-born and
the twice-born," and the once-born he describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict Judge,
not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent
and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies:
they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections:
yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves at all. This
childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no more
shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in fact, they have
no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists. *(2) He is
to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disordered
world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in
their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to
tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as
yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their
simple worship."
* The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.
*(2) I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up
to God."
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. *
* JOHN WEISS: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.
"Orthodox scholars say: 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true-
God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth,
cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not
conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent
evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow,
and try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is
much 'health in me'; and in any body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of
consumption and Saint Paul." In another letter Parker writes: "I have swum in clear sweet waters all
my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough,
it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when
I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none
but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight, When I recall
the years... I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a
mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the
religious."
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:
"I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if
almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an
advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and
rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what
these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful
to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive
his suggestions to me.... I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the
half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were
facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all
my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost
of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life
because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it.... A child
who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God,
and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life
more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of
wrath and wholly incapable of good." *
* STARBUCK: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.
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 anaesthesia. *
* "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 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.
The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.
"His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, seemed to be strolling or sauntering about
outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying
aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of
natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to
ordinary people. Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any
one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as be did. He was very fond of
flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as
much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few
as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds
seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and
children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him
felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and
he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously,
those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the
opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would
not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It
did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long
observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real.
He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or
against any trades or occupations- not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor
any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and
death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He
never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was
angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it." *
* R.M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.
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; *
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.
* I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.
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 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.
"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth." *
* Song of Myself, 32.
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:
"Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far
than thou.... Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday
when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the
string." *
* Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.
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 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, * 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.
* "God 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.
If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and
sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more
voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy
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 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, 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 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 non-mystical 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.
The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with
important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more
or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention
from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end
on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we
recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and
better than the world that really is. *
* "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. The
prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic- or monadic
foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me." R.L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii.
355.
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.
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with
Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that
'theory of evolution' which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five
years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion
of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our
generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and
progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it
might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find 'evolutionism' interpreted thus
optimistically and 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.
Q. Have you had any experience 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 any one of this fact.
Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?
A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron,
Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc. Of songs, the Star-spangled Banner, America,
Marseillaise, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation. I
greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sundays
into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I have dropped the
bicycle. I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts
and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things
as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the deepest law.
Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present
status a thousand years hence.
Q. What is your notion of sin?
A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development not being yet
advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of years
hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one
will have any idea of evil or sin.
Q. What is your temperament?
A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at
all.
If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His
contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining
at his distance from the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may
be encouraged by popular science.
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 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. * 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.
* '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-care 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.
The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have had their health restored.
The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude
has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has
gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect
influence of this has been great. The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that
one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the 'Gospel of Relaxation' of the 'Don't Worry
Movement,' of people who repeat to themselves, 'Youth, health, vigor!' when dressing in the
morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many
households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable
sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general
tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent.
But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the 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.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the
extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the
fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should
be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and
clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and
protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and
practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group. * It matters nothing that,
just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any
possibility be influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point
is that so large a number should exist who can be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be
studied with respect. *(2)
* 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 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).
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 that of the fleshly
sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas
Christian theology has always considered frowardness 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.
"Fear," to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to
constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental
equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear element of forethought is not
stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but
is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent,
and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue. To assist in the
analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word fearthought to
stand for the unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word 'worry' as fearthought
in contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined fearthought as the self-imposed or
self-permitted suggestion of inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the category
of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable things." *
* HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought minus Fearthought, Menticulture
Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged.
The 'misery-habit,' the 'martyr-habit,' engendered by the prevalent 'fearthought,' get pungent
criticism from the mind-cure writers:
"Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social
conventions or customs and alleged requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the
world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and
occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we
shall suffer certain children's diseases, diseases of middle life,, and of old age; the thought that we
shall grow 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.'
"Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable volunteers from daily life,- the fear of
accident, the possibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the
outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we
must forthwith fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow... sympathy means to
enter into and increase the suffering." *
* H.W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.
"Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer
world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his
whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken
pattern and specification.... Think of the millions of sensitive and responsive souls among our
ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love, exuberance, and vitality, constantly
poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of
morbidity." *
* HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54.
Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from such
quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians. *
* 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.
Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The
spiritual in man appears in the mind-cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious;
and through the subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of
grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different
writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of
the modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of
view:
"The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that
manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I
call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul,
Omnipotence, 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.
"The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness
with this Infinite Life. and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree
that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves
to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do
we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the
degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for
ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize
our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery
to the power. house of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can
rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of
the Universe combine to help us heavenward." *
* R.W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered
passages together.
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.
"The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of
separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in
serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: 'I and my Father are one,' has no further need
of healer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness
can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose
feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If one
with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable
spark?
"This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own
case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and
lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are to-day, although my belief
in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I
have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert
that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with
excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be
sick?- since 'Greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against us.'"
My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:
"Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking down, and had several attacks of
what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides
having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in
charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all
the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession
of me.
"I think that the one thing which impressed me most was 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.
"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health as such, because that comes
of itself, as an incidental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it,
beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which we usually make the
object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for,
but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as
accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of
the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our
hearts, so that all else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you'- as quite incidental and as a
surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of
our being.
"When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for
primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as
success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic
undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many
kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them- I
mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly
approved by the masses, although they may be unreal and even unhealthy superfluities."
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.
"I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year. [Details of ill-health are given which
I omit.] I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily
growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I
suddenly heard as it were these words: 'You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.'
These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could
have put them there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which
continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to
take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: 'There is nothing but Mind;
we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I
could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was there for me in this way; 'There is nothing
but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use;
and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of
bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience.' That day I commenced accordingly to take
a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself: 'The Power that created
the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.' By holding these suggestions through the evening
I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: 'I am soul, spirit, just one with God's Thought of me,' and
slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years [the distress-turns had usually
recurred about two o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I
had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat
anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental
suggestions of Truth, which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them; they came
about two weeks apart.
"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.
"2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well.
"3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my
body where I had suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I
resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in this form.
"4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint voice. Again refusal to
acknowledge.
"5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal. Then
came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I
was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me the perfect and completed
separation between what I was and what I appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after
this of my real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me two
years of hard work to get there) I expressed health continuously throughout my whole body.
"In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known this Truth to fail when I applied
it, though in my ignorance I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the
simplicity and trustfulness of the little child."
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. *
* 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 '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 must 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 thought 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 an 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.
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, and any one 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 Diatetik der Seele 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 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: 'You 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."
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force
to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message,
foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic
triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the
crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations) * to play a part almost as great in the
evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day.
* 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.
But I here fear that I may begin to 'jar upon the nerves' of some of the members of this academic
audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think, 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 and vexation in their hands, and only make 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 so
tight.
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.
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.
The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated
that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the
Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of
persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving
your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or
sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena
which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether
we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal
explanation. *
* 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 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.
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.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous
part in all spiritual education. But the word 'suggestion,' having acquired official status, is
unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon
investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases.
'Suggestion' is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over
belief and conduct. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others. Ideas
efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere.
The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they
may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its
savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word 'suggestion' as if it were a banner
gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to
nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by this he seems to mean
our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form.
Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done." And this in spite of the
actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely nothing, or did nothing until mind-cure came
to the rescue. *
* 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. a 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 Edward 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 Zundel (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 inter-position. 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
cares 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.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind-cure
with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church
Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. 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?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always
the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official,
respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages
every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its
everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many,
indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the
Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards, "concerning all those saints that are not lively
Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by
some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to
hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead." *
* 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.
The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers, of minds who unite
healthy-mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too
pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either
the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar
mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident
that it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world.
Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the
subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added
systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked
something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at random:
"The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most
strongly insists,- the development namely from within outward, from small to great. *
Consequently one's thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be
literally like a step in the dark. *(2) To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New
Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One
is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the
chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably
in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, this is
called 'entering the silence.'" *(3)
* H.W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.
*(2) DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58.
*(3) DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33.
"The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by
simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere
the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping,
protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer. * One of the most intuitive men we
ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly,
and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this
self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so
completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as
effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval wood. Taking
his difficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which he expected
a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive until the reply came, and never once through
many years' experience did he find himself disappointed or misled." *(2)
* TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.
*(2) TRINE: p. 117.
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.
"It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places and circumstances makes us
see him present, lets us commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and
affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose this recollection of God, neither
in prosperity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse
yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance of your business, for you can always
remember that God sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget
him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot practice this exercise continuously,
at least make yourself as familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter
draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm
your soul." *
* Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.
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 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 has 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-contact with the Parent-Soul, and an influx of life, love,
virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain." *
* HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged).
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 autres. 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.
In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion to science on the one hand,
and to primeval savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons to-day 'scientists' or
'positivists,' they are fond of calling themselves- who will tell you that religious thought is a mere
survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened
examples has long since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more
fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought 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 proclamation 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.
How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives
which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly
concrete turn. Here is one:
"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, all 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 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.
"I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie down in the stream of life and let it
flow over me.' I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient.
There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid
of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all
was well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the
Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my
mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only of love and
happiness and faith.
"I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; but when I woke up in the
morning, I was well."
These are exceedingly trivial instances, * 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 every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every one
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
verified 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?
* See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.
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 religious
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 different 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. *
* 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.
The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to
bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to-day with this very brief
indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will
have to receive much more explicit attention.
LECT_IV_&_V|APP
LECTURES IV AND V
APPENDIX
CASE 1. "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 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, had 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 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
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 tranquility 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. 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 every
one 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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