August 22, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



303 



plete religion, and such a religion as essential 

 to complete life. Justified or not, his conclu- 

 sion is due to a sympathy which, necessary for 

 insight as it is, belongs to the very spirit of 

 science when it takes the form of psychology 

 and advances into human nature. One may 

 wish in some particulars to amend the con- 

 clusion, but one must own one's debt for an 

 incomparable rendering of the facts. 



In undertaking his 'descriptive survey' the 

 lecturer warns his hearers to distinguish be- 

 tween assertions of psychological or physical 

 fact and assertions of spiritual value. The 

 value of a man's religious propensities cannot 

 be judged by the circumstances of their origin. 

 The opening chapter, on 'Religion and Neu- 

 rology' — announced as a lecture at Edinburgh 

 under the vivacious title 'Is Religion a Ner- 

 vous Disease?' — deals with the 'medical ma- 

 terialism' which would explain away the in- 

 tenser spiritual experiences as due to bodily 

 disturbance. "Medical materialism finishes up 

 Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road 

 to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occip- 

 ital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs 

 out Saint Teresa as an hysteric. Saint Francis 

 of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George 

 Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, 

 and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats 

 as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's 

 organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a 

 gastro-duodenal catarrh." To which Mr. 

 James answers that by the first principle of 

 physiological psychology "there is not a single 

 one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy 

 or morbid, that has not some organic process 

 as its condition. * * * If -^ve only knew the 

 facts intimately enough we should doubtless 

 see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the 

 sturdy atheist as decisively as it does that of 

 the Methodist under conviction anxious about 

 his soul. When it alters in one way the blood 

 that percolates it we get the Methodist, when 

 in another way the atheist form of mind." 

 Since all thoughts have physical conditions, 

 no thought is by that mere fact discredited. 

 Nor is the distinction between healthy and 

 unhealthy physical conditions decisive in the 

 matter. A temperament nervously imbal- 

 anced, however inferior from the standpoint 



of personal comfort and longevity, is compat- 

 ible with high social usefulness, may even, in 

 certain forms of such usefulness, be a power- 

 ful aid. We must judge the spiritual value 

 of mental states by experience of their results 

 for life. This is something upon which their 

 bodily antecedents shed no light. "When we 

 speak disparagingly of 'feverish fancies,' 

 surely the fever-process as such is not the 

 ground of our disesteem — for aught we know 

 to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit 

 might be a much more favorable temperature 

 for truths to germinate and sprout in than 

 the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 de- 

 grees. It is either the disagreeableness itself 

 of the fancies, or their inability to bear the 

 criticisms of the convalescent hour." "By 

 their fruits ye shall know them, not by their 

 roots." 



As a purely negative argument, the repulse 

 of an attack, this is admirably conclusive. 

 But when the positive principle is laid down, 

 when consequences are presented as the sole 

 test of religion, there is something else to be 

 said. Origin cannot disprove value, but then 

 consequences cannot prove truth. If religion 

 undertakes to tell of the supernatural, we may 

 know it by its fruits as valuable, but not as 

 true. This, however, seems upon the whole to 

 be the author's view. When in the final chap- 

 ter it becomes a question, not of human value, 

 but of objective truth, his standards are of 

 another order. In that chapter, however, he 

 first recognizes as tenable the position that 

 religion is a purely human and natural phe- 

 nomenon, existing for its psychological func- 

 tion; its supernaturalism being but a sym- 

 bolic expression of natural fact. In that case 

 of course religion grown clear-sighted would 

 assert as literal truth nothing for which uni- 

 versal experience did not vouch; the test of 

 value and the test of truth would coincide. 

 His own analysis is quite consistent with this 

 position. "There is a certain uniform deliv- 

 erance in which all religions appear to meet." 

 This deliverance tells of " (1) an uneasiness, 

 and (2) its sohation. The uneasiness, reduced 

 to its simplest terms, is the sense that there 

 is something wrong about us as we naturally 

 stand. The solvition is a sense that we are 



