The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 8

age, when the uproar
of the sexual life is past?
The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at
the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one
does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the
content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things
differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any
GENERAL assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often
is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the
sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without
the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the blood, the

brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, this
final proposition may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become
profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences from it
which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value. In this sense the
religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and
the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its
point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence,
SOMEHOW, of the mind upon the body.
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of
discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use
it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard
as overstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted
soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic
disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be
our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive
value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this
medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too
simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical
materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to
Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital 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. All such mental overtensions,
it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of
diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted
action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And
medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined.[2]
[2] For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an
article on "les varietes du Type devot," by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the
Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.

Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern
psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good,
assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental
states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If
we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism
insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint
Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure;
George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly
auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which--and the rest.
But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of
mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual
significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just
referred to, 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.
Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious
emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we
should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy
atheist as decisively as it does those 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, we get the
atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our
longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally
organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite
illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance
some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general
with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our
thoughts and feelings,