LECTURE 01: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
Manage episode 427226420 series 3584468
LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.
It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this
desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of
receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of
European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not
a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from
Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or
literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to
cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were
visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the
Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans
listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure
it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.
Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American
imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of
this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.
Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the
first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe‐
struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s
class‐room therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first
philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was
immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of
reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self
promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official
here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries
with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.
But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that
it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic
obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say
only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to
run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go
by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the
Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the
United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher
matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,
as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English
speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this
lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the
history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch
of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the
religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other
of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,
therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to
invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must
confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in
literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works
of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of
a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full
significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and
perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most
concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the
religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their
ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern
writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The
_documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be
sought for in the haunts of special erudition—they lie along the beaten
highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the
character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer’s lack of
special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and
paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some
time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no
detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more
adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth
from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable
and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he
will necessarily, by his control of so much more out‐of‐the‐way material,
get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.
The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What
is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of
question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize
this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point
a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have
referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of
inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it
come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once
here? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_
or proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what
the Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate
a _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from
the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the
mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding
them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two
orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its
derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher
criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential
point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what
biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various
contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their
several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are
manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the
answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use
should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,
be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other
question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as
to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for
purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called
a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might
indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible’s worth. Thus if
our theory of revelation‐value were to affirm that any book, to possess
it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of
the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and
express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill
at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a
book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and
deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner
experiences of great‐souled persons wrestling with the crises of their
fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the
existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the
value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never
confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same
conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of
the Bible’s value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment
as to the foundation of values differs.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because
there are many religious persons—some of you now present, possibly, are
among them—who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who
may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential
point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of
religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically
and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual
history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,
and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of
deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since
such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of
much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the
point.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,
exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and
eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who
follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be
Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by
others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by
imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this
second‐hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original
experiences which were the pattern‐setters to all this mass of suggested
feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in
individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute
fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line;
and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective
enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious
geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more
perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to
abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of
exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner
life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no
measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they
have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all
sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.
Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped
to give them their religious authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is
furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he
founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of
shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a
return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever
known in England. So far as our Christian sects to‐day are evolving into
liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox
and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment
that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound.
Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to
county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior
power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a
psychopath or _détraqué_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in
entries of this sort:—
“As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and
saw three steeple‐house spires, and they struck at my life. I
asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately
the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being
come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk
into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As
soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge
and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a
great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I
commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it
was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I
put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor
shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a
mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the
Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, ‘Wo to the bloody city of
Lichfield!’ So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud
voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I
went into the market‐place, and to and fro in the several parts of
it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of
Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying
through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood
running down the streets, and the market‐place appeared like a
pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt
myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to
the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them
again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over
me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a
stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so
to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.
After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I
should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody
city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and
the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during
the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen
many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in
the Emperor Diocletian’s time a thousand Christians were martyr’d
in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the
channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the
market‐place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of
those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,
and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon
me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.”
Bent as we are on studying religion’s existential conditions, we cannot
possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must
describe and name them just as if they occurred in non‐religious men. It
is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our
emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any
other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object
is to class it along with something else. But any object that is
infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if
it must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with
a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or
apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it
would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the
thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites
of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And
elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their
properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural
things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature
with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that
its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine,
in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:
“Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have
their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as
there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue
are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of
the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely
everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the
somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors
are actually able to perform—menaced and negated in the springs of our
innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed
in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their
significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than
the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value
is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which
unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental
acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his
temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is
merely a matter of over‐instigated nerves. William’s melancholy about the
universe is due to bad digestion—probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’s
delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter
would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in
the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of
reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of
criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them
and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.
The...
5 bölüm