[ p. 193 ]
THE discussions of the last four lectures have served to throw into relief the principle that the development of personality depends upon its orientation to that which lies beyond itself. It is this that is expressed in the religious emphasis upon faith and worship. Spiritual healing, whether in its effects upon the body or in the forgiveness of sin, was seen to rest upon the response of faith to some object or ideal. And the structure of the group and its authority suggested the same principle. It remains to enquire whether this objective and creative reality can be equated with God,
As a first step we have to consider the claim of the mystics to a direct experience of God. This claim takes many forms, but its essence is a special sense of significance and reality attached to certain experiences. The evidence of the mystics themselves is to some extent discounted by their very diverse interpretations. And the evidence for a less specific ‘ sense of presence,’ though striking, is at least equally obscure.
Otto, in his theory of the ‘ numinous,’ has analyzed out a ‘ nonrational ’ element as essential to all true religious experience, having as its core this ‘ sense of presence ’ and characterized, in its primary forms, by mystery, awe, and fascination. The value of this theory lies in its stress upon the personal as underlying objectivity. Its difficulties lie in its vulnerability to psychological analysis.
The psychological evidence proper is concerned with the heightening of the sense of reality in certain mental conditions and its lowering in others. Examples can be seen in nitrous oxide exaltation, and in melancholia. But these do not affect the evidence for a real objectivity of personal values, but only shew their distortion. And these distorted forms are a real clue to the values underlying more normal experiences, both those of the mystics and those of everyday religious life.
An examination of the ‘ reality-principle ’ of the psychologists reveals its essentially personal character. It also suggests a certain [ p. 194 ] truth in theories of ‘ degrees in reality.’ At the highest level come the personal and the creative, but modern psychological theory has not adequately combined the two. Religious experience, to which it is essential that its object should be regarded as real, effects this combination, and there are good grounds for accepting the validity of this highest level of reality, with its full significance for theism.
[ p. 195 ]
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, surely the Lord is in this place ; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place ! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. Genesis xxviii. 16, 17.
IN each of the last four lectures we left our argument in an unfinished state. It was as though we drew near some goal, and then, at the last, the way became uncertain, and we spoke of a vision that might perchance be the truth, rather than of an achieved and logical security, from which but a few further steps would bring us to the end of our journey. It will be convenient at this stage to pause and to consider what progress we have actually made.
The main and outstanding fact is the obvious truth that the journey is not complete, and this is equally true whether we look at the situation as psychologists or as theologians. We began by stating the form which the attack upon theistic belief has taken in the hands of the psychologists, but though it was clear enough that the attack is formidable, it was equally clear that the psychological position, if there be such a thing at all, is not one from which a comprehensive view of reality can be obtained. The writers who gave the most adequate account of the facts of human behaviour spoke of a creative adaptation to reality, but they were wholly obscure as to the meaning of this process, Freud’s reality-principle means nothing more than the hard facts of life, viewed with a pessimism which is rather temperamental than scientific. [1] Jung’s creative libido is as blind [ p. 196 ] as the racial unconsciousness from which it springs. [2] Both Freud and Jung alike find no end in the process save the crude biological ends, transient in the individual, and only a shade less transient in the species. All else, the glory of nature and art, the splendour of sacrifice, the age-long structure of man’s religion, with the mythologies and churches in which all that is highest in human life have been enshrined, is a mere phantom-world, in which man clings for a little space to eternity, until time, the blind, unhasting lord of life and death, closes a door, and he is not. [3] Yet it was these same writers who forced us back to an explanation of human development that was personal, and so not wholly blind. In their stress upon the love-life they did not rest content with narrow biological interpretations, but extended the term love to cover the whole field of personal relationships. [4] And we found other writers, notably McDougall and Shand, using this principle as the key to personal development. So we pass to a whole series of facts for which psychology, as a science, provides no explanation at all. Consciousness itself wholly resists its analysis, and the most thorough-going empirical psychology of the moment has been forced to write it off as a mere [ p. 197 ] irrelevance. [5] And why these fantasy-structures of love should carry so intense a conviction of worth for those minds in which they are formed remains a mystery. Yet this mystery is as much a part of the truth of life as the crudest necessities of Freud’s reality-principle. That man is capable of fashioning and dwelling in so fair a world of his own is at least a fact, and its full significance is not seen as yet.
When we turned to consider some of the phenomena of religion we found ourselves moving in the same world of values and of incompleteness. At every point our discussion ran parallel with psychological explanations, and there was common ground throughout in the principle that the development of personality depends upon its orientation to that which lies beyond itself. And if psychology is obscure when it comes to the definition of this reality upon which its processes depend, religion has not been much less obscure when it has endeavoured to set before men an intelligible, and even tolerable, concept of the God of their worship. For that man must worship is beyond all question. He can dispense with formal creeds, and he may not recognize the object of his worship by the name of God, but the fact and attitude of worship is one of the most fundamental things in his life, and has been in history as well as in theory a prime condition of his growth to such manhood as is his.
We started therefore from faith, upon which worship depends and of which it is the expression, as the basic fact of the religious life, and we found it so closely akin, in its rudimentary forms, to that suggestibility of which psychology speaks that it was difficult to separate the two. [6] If there is much suggestion in religion it is equally true that there is much faith in psychology. And the whole process of faith, as of suggestion, revealed itself as personal throughout, developed at every point of love. But love cannot exist save between persons. The love of things, whether [ p. 198 ] it be that felt by hedonist or scientist, is never and can never be a love of things for their own sakes. Always behind the thing, even though more than half hidden in the shadows, stands the person. All the evidence of psychoanalysis bears witness to this truth. The problems of life are problems of the self and of other selves. Our world is one in which love is indeed creative and in which faith leaps in response to love.
We came next to consider spiritual healing, perhaps the most continuous and persistent claim which man has made upon the unseen world of his faith. And here, amid a great confusion as to the facts, two things stood out clearly: first, the unquestionable evidence of the creative power of faith in restoring health and peace of mind ; and secondly, the remarkable and seemingly unquenchable belief of man that it must be so. The psychologists were critical and talked of the optimism which rests upon compensatory fantasy, but when we turned to the cures wrought by the psychologists themselves we found the same principles everywhere operative. Under the most diverse names and in the most violently opposed systems of treatment, faith and love were the effective weapons in every technique. [7] It is not as cases, certified and written down under some psychological label, that patients come for their healing. Throughout the whole wide range of functional disorder, a range so wide that the organic is being included ever more and more within its scope, person seeks help from person. And where faith and love fail the treatment fails.
Yet our facts were incomplete and difficult. There still remains the great problem of the sheer physical evil of the world. There appears to be much in our own human life, as well as in the world about us, intractable to the power of faith. In many things we may and must have recourse to simple physical means, which seem to operate in their [ p. 199 ] own right as things. Drugs, and the surgeon’s knife, as we know them, have no personal properties. And to seek the way out by demanding miracles, so that we may escape from this bondage of the physical by a short cut in which reality denies its own fundamental rationality, is to evade the claim of love upon us. [8] Yet, apart from miracle, reality does not as yet wear the appearance of a God wholly loving and wholly personal. Our suffering lies too near the heart of things for that.
But again we note that the psychologist is no nearer a solution than the religious man in his worst perplexities of faith. For both alike the one aspect of life that counts is personal, and the laws of creative personality, whatever the Behaviourist may say, remain its own. Whether it be in the despair of our problems, or in the triumph of our overcoming, we challenge the rigid world-order of the scientist. And the last word is not spoken. We do not know what faith has yet in store for man.
Our discussion of sin passed to some extent over the same ground, serving in the main to reveal the fundamental character of our problems as resulting from a failure of faith and a refusal of love. The psychologists do not escape from this view of sin when they deal with it as moral disease, for their one hope of treating such moral disease successfully rests in an attempt to awaken the latent personal resources of the ego, through processes in themselves personal. [9] Where, as in certain of the major psychoses, this appeal cannot be made, there is no human hope of a cure. The key to psychological healing lies in the transference, and there is the closest possible parallel between this and the Christian way of forgiveness. Both methods are wholly personal, both depend upon a readjustment of relationships which begins at priest or physician and passes out into every relationship of the social environment. But it still remains to ask whether man’s forgiveness, [ p. 200 ] creative as it is of new and personal life, is, as the Christian Church proclaims, more than the forgiveness of man. It is true, and the fact is suggestive, that the sinner demands just this assurance. But the ground upon which we can give it is not yet made plain. [10]
This led us to the fourth stage in our collection of material. Do we reach such an objective sanction, higher than that of any individual man, in the life of the Church ? Is the power of religion upon the believer simply the power of the organized group upon its members ? And here the facts of group-psychology were striking enough, but it soon appeared that the group does not explain its own existence. [11] The Church has indeed authority because as a Church it is a social group, [12] and its sanctions have all the characteristics which the psychologists analyse out so clearly. There is the primitive and compelling dominance by which the crowd renders its members at once suggestible and heedless of all save the emotion of the moment. There is the more subtle and abiding influence of prestige, all the more powerful for its enshrinement in traditions and symbols, with an ever-changing wealth of significance which sets them wellnigh beyond criticism. And there is, from time to time, the strong link of a common purpose, based upon ideals which at any rate in part rank high in moral worth. But all this does not explain the existence of the Church. The simple explanation that it is the work of God amongst men does not appeal to the psychologist, since he has already analysed God away as a fantasy arising within the life of the group. Perchance he is right, as touching such gods as he knows. And yet it may be that behind the shadowgods of his analysis there moves a Reality that his criticism does not touch. For the life of the group shows once more a strangely creative quality. Like the individual it seems in every case to owe at once its origin and its development [ p. 201 ] to that which lies beyond itself. [13] In this characteristic Church and State, and every human society, are at one. And so once more we are forced back upon the mystery of reality itself, for which psychology offers no solution that is more than a bare negation or an empty acquiescence. The evil of the world is not only seen in individual suffering and individual sin. It dominates the life of the group as well, and if we are to judge by history alone we may well ask whether the creative power of which we have spoken can possibly be either rational or good.
Yet once again the psychologists give hints of a solution. It was Freud who pointed out to us that the very existence of the social group seems to depend upon the same principles of love and faith which we found everywhere to be the conditions of personal development. [14] That in many groups love has not developed far, and faith remains at a low level of suggestibility, so that irrational and impulsive forces dominate the group-life, bears witness less to the power of evil than to the immaturity of man and of nations. If there be a Creator-God, His work is not yet done.
So far, then, as our discussion with the psychologists is concerned, we have little need to quarrel with them so long as they keep within the limits of their science. Their criticism of religious beliefs and systems, if at times severe, has been a help and not a hindrance, ‘ the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain,’ [15] When they deny the objectivity of our fantasy-structures, and tell us that much of our religious practice is mere suggestion, they still do not invalidate the essential facts which we claimed as true at the outset, the facts of personality itself as real, of values which exist for and in personality, of freedom, now seen more clearly as love which can [ p. 202 ] make response to love, and of reality itself as something other than ourselves. At that point psychology leaves us, but all the evidence which we have brought forward goes to show the central importance of faith and love in the world of personal being. That the solid, resistant world of things has existence too we need not doubt, but to declare that this existence of thinghood is ultimately dominant is to make nonsense of psychology as well as of religion. Even as the worship of the Church would be empty without a God, so the theories of the psychologists are incomplete unless there is something within the inner character of reality itself which underlies the creative appearance of life and explains this predominance of faith and love.
There remain, then, two questions for our enquiry, and then our task is ended, so far as the limits of these lectures permit. Is there any direct empirical evidence for the existence of this objective, creative reality which we have postulated ? And does it agree, sufficiently for faith, if not wholly for understanding, with the claims of Christian theism ? The second of these questions will be the subject of our final lecture. For the answer to the first we must turn to the mystics and to the psychologists who have commented upon their experiences, and their evidence must be our next concern.
The mystics unite in declaring that their experience lies beyond all description, and then pass on to describe it with a singular fluency and freedom. Nevertheless they agree that at the last their words fail. [16] Sometimes they move in the imagery and symbolism of the emotions. Sometimes they pass over into the abstractions of a philosophy which finds no positive terms adequate to embrace its concepts. But in either case there is no question of the intense reality of the expertize. Alike in its intensity and in [ p. 203 ] its isolation it is closely akin to feeling, and very far removed from our commonplace approach to the realities of every day. ‘ In this knowledge,’ says St. John of the Cross, ‘ since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. . . . This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.’ [17]
Yet, despite this overmastering and ineffable character of these experiences, they seem to the mystic to open a door which leads to new realms of knowledge. ‘ They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain ; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.’ [18] The mystic cannot explain, but he knows that he has known and not merely felt, and often that knowledge remains an abiding possession which no criticism can ever touch. Two examples must suffice, one from a letter of James Russell Lowell :
I had a revelation last Friday evening. … I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of something. I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems. [19]
[ p. 204 ]
And a second, from St. Teresa :
One day, being in orison, it was granted to me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God, I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul. . . . The view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it. [20]
This sense of illumination is the special characteristic of those mystical states which are significant for our purpose, [21] and the determination of its real character is of great importance for the study of religion. For though the mystics seem to be unable to convey to others any body of truth which cannot be reached by more ordinary channels of experience and reasoning, it is nevertheless possible that the intensity of their special apprehension of reality may serve, as extreme cases serve to test the truth of some general geometrical theorem, to set our fundamental problem in a clearer light.
James, in his description of mystical states, [22] gives two further marks by which they are usually characterized. Their transience does not specially concern us, except that it seems to indicate a connection with physical conditions which, upon any theory, might have been anticipated as probable. The definite sense of passivity is more important. Sometimes it is a mere luxury of self-abasement, almost without spiritual or ethical worth, as in some of the ecstasies [ p. 205 ] of St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque. [23] Sometimes it is an overwhelming sense of the presence of God, to which the soul yields in what St. Teresa calls ‘ The Sleep of the Powers,’ a This is no sleep, but a most intense and conscious peace of the whole being. ‘ The powers of the soul are incapable of occupying themselves with any other object than God ; they are altogether taken up with the enjoyment of this excess of glory.’ [24] It is from this stage that the mystic passes into the ecstasy or rapture, [25] in which the senses lose their proper functioning, [26] and soul and body alike are utterly overcome in the enjoyment of that which is beyond all understanding or telling, [27] To St. Teresa the rapture is to be distinguished even from the Spiritual Marriage, or the experience of Union. They are the same in essence, but the one exceeds the other as a great fire exceeds a small. [28] Whatever else may be true of this condition, in which all initiative of the soul is lost and even its very sense of independent being, it is unquestionably an experience of the Other, and it is of the most overmastering quality. And though the psychological critic may easily show motives [ p. 206 ] and mechanisms utterly unsuspected by the mystic, and readily illustrated from cases of mental disorder, it still remains necessary to explain how this strong sense of the Other arises. So far from destroying the validity of the mystical experience by pointing to its pathological parallels, the critic may only be proving to us that even under the greatest distortion in which drugs, sin, and moral disease can involve the soul, there are still to be seen traces of the creative and renewing activity of God.
What, then, are we to conclude from this evidence of the mystics ? That they have been able to convey to the world any new truth seems to be negatived by all the facts. The actual content of their revelations is never anything particularly new or original. [29] When, as in the passage from St. Teresa cited above there is a vision of some new synthesis, some deeper apprehension of meaning, words and concepts fail as the trance passes. [30] The modern mystic, the Mile. Vé of Flournoy, puts the matter with astonishing clearness and honesty : ‘ All the traditional ideas about God and His action in us seem to me now so weak, insufficient, and limited. And yet if I try to analyse what I know of God in addition to these ideas, I find nothing. I could weep [ p. 207 ] over my inability to describe what I feel again and again. The content is at a minimum.’ [31] In fact, the only completely general pronouncement of the mystics is their claim that they have been in touch with the Divine. There they have received a new assurance and conviction as the truths which they had received, possibly unconsciously, from their training and environment, and these truths are sometimes stated with a different emphasis and arrangement as a result of the mystic’s reflection upon his experience. But the essence of the ecstasy is not in these truths, but, so all the mystics claim, in the immediate certainty and knowledge of the presence of God. In this, if in nothing else, there is agreement between Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Hindu. The Presence of which they are so profoundly aware may be the God of Christianity, or Jesus, or the Blessed Virgin, or Brahma, or Krishna, or a vague sense of mystery and significance undefined. [32] The terms change, but the experience is the same. All that is really new is its force and conviction, and the memory of having lived in one moment at least of surrender which admitted no challenge to its absoluteness and authority.
The verdict of the psychologists upon all this varies with their philosophy rather than with their psychology. The direct psychological criticism of the mystical states, and their parallel with mental aberrations is too obvious to be missed, and no serious psychologist could be found who would accept the testimony of the mystics at its face value. But for some, as for Leuba, the whole business of mysticism is a record of man’s deluded interpretation of [ p. 208 ] states for which no rational explanation was as yet available, and of his unenlightened efforts to achieve, through belief in the causal activities of the personal gods of mythology, among whom the God of Christianity is included, that which can now be accomplished more securely by the methods of science. [33] For others the mystical experience has real validity, though not in the terms which the mystics themselves employ. If it does not tell us what Reality is, it is at least a testimony to an existence and a significance of Reality utterly unlike the existence and significance of the immediate objects of sense. ‘ The mystic’s consciousness, so far as it is something more than merely emotional, is an intuition of the “ Beyond. ” ’ [34]
William James is the pioneer among psychologists in this view of the significance of mysticism. It is true that his interest is in a particular psychological theory. He is seeking to vindicate the special place and importance of the subliminal self, as that border region in which the soul passes out into contact with spiritual forces and values fraught with unimagined and perchance unlimited possibilities. [35] Thus his discussion of the sense of presence is confined to a citation of examples, collected with a view to illustrating its mystery, but without even an attempted psychological analysis of the signs and modes by which the sense of presence normally apprehends its object. [36] As to the more complex mystical conditions James puts his conclusion under three headings : [37]
‘ (i) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
‘ (2) No authority emanates from them which should [ p. 209 ] make it a duty for those who stand outside to accept their revelations uncritically.
‘ (3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.’
But when we come to ask what exactly it is to which our pragmatic devotion is invited the result is tantalizingly meagre : ‘ Mystical states, indeed, wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.’ [38]
Leuba, the most drastic of all the critics of mysticism, has dealt with this faithfully, and not altogether undeservedly. [39] James, he says, ‘ has erred, not in considering “ pure ” experience as unassailable, but in unwittingly regarding as such more than the “ given.” He has confused [ p. 210 ] pure experience with elaborations of it. It is because of that error that he was a believer in mysticism ; or, one should perhaps say that he has committed that error because he wished to believe in a mystical revelation,’ Leuba is undoubtedly right in saying that the terms which James uses, even though they are less definite than the language of a St. Teresa when she speaks of the presence of God, are still interpretations of an experience and are not directly given in the experience itself. They definitely imply a concept of that Other with which the self can come into touch, ‘ a union of the individual with Someone or Something else.’ [40] For Leuba himself the mystical sense of union is produced not by a higher understanding in which two terms of experience are brought under a general principle or included in a larger whole, but by a mere blurring of their individual features until they are degraded to a level of undifferentiated simplicity. [41] The mystic, he thinks, is reduced in his ecstasy to a condition in which he is no longer able to detect real distinctions and his sense of illumination is due to bare physical release and not to any access of knowledge. His comfort is the comfort of bodily relaxation, and not of the divine peace. His negation of self is merely the negation of the senses with their distracting demands for activity.
But if Leuba is right in his criticism of James, his own interpretation of the mystical experience is open to exactly the same criticism. For he too gives us not the experience itself, but an exposition of it in terms of his own restricted scientific standpoint. He complains that James does not give us ‘ pure experience,’ but the complaint holds equally against himself and, indeed, against us all. Neither scientist nor saint can communicate experience as it is lived, save by a process of sharing which is itself an experience, transformed and slain if we ever attempt to put it into words.
[ p. 211 ]
The substance of the whole matter seems to be simply that the mystic is supremely sure of the reality of his experience. He is so sure and so profoundly moved by his assurance that words fail him when he endeavours to pass on to others the things that he has heard and seen. He is apt to make inferences as to the object of that experience, usually identified with the God of his particular tradition, which attach to God the characters of the experience itself. [42] Thus the God of the mystics tends to be an Absolute, ineffable, identically one with all being, as in the unity of the mystic rapture. The tendency towards Pantheism is familiar to any student of historical mysticism. But all this is inference from the primary mystical experience. The essence of the experience is simply its intense reality. That and that alone is the source of its astonishing authority and its ’ givenness,’ And the value of the witness of the mystics is not that it confirms any particular theology, but that it displays the typical ego-other relationship, characteristic of all experience that can be called personal, in a form which stresses the objectivity of the Other as definitely as certain other experiences, also of an abnormal type, stress the ego. [43] Mysticism in short gives us with assurance [ p. 212 ] a That or a Something, but we must pass beyond the word of the mystic and use our ordinary discursive reason if we would know the meaning of the gift.
Leuba’s comment on this position seems to be entirely justified :
When you have said, as Professor Hocking does, that the ‘ That ’ of mystical ecstasy has no meaning until interpreted, that it is mind-stuff or ‘ neutral-stuff,’ out of which in an active mind, knowledge issues, logic compels you, it seems, to hold that the same is true of all the ‘ thats ’ immediately given in any other experience. The immediately-given in ecstasy is no longer isolated as a unique phenomenon ; it is now properly classified together with the meaningless and yet potentially meaningful Something which is at the root of every psychical experience whatever. For, not only in mystical ecstasy but also in every perceptual or affective experience, something unassailable and ineffable is given. Thus, the metaphysical effort to find God is provided with a much broader intuitive basis than that of mystical ecstasy alone ; its basis includes the given in conscious experience generally. In the search for God no position of vantage may now be claimed a priori for the immediately given in trance experience. [44]
This is indeed well said, but the apologist for theism may rightly use it in a manner very different from that intended by its author. [^46] For Leuba it is a matter of scientific [ p. 213 ] concern, and rightly so, that the mystical experiences should not be set in a class apart and allowed an interpretation involving categories of thought over which science has no control. But for the Christian it is a matter of quite equal concern that his faith should not be supposed to rest upon bizarre and supra-normal experiences occurring, with no great regularity, in the lives of certain exceptional persons, who cannot, as it appears, even tell us exactly what those experiences have been. We find ourselves, in fact, again in the difficulty with which we were faced in the discussion of spiritual healing. The claim to miraculous cures was not a help but rather a hindrance to belief in God. But cures that sprang from faith seemed to be a real witness to a creative love upon which that faith might rest. So in this matter of ecstasies. Our claim is that all experience, if rightly understood, carries, in the very fact that it is an experience of conscious personality, a witness to that creative reality upon which all personality depends for its life and growth. And Leuba’s argument is a first and a necessary step towards the maintenance of that claim.
But we have still to ask whether we may not be able to find direct evidence for this interpretation of experience without depending upon the obscure and doubtful testimony of the more extreme mystical states. For, after all, we are aware of personal relationships in our ordinary life, and it is stretching logic to its utmost bounds to declare that this awareness rests upon a continuing process of inference, so habitual as to have become automatic and unconscious. In this we are all as sure, and as incapable of fitting words to our assurance, as the most incoherent [ p. 214 ] of the mystics. When we say that we know those whom we love we do not in the least mean that we can describe them. We simply know, and the That or Something of our knowing is more than all the words which flow from our knowledge. The poet and the lover are as eloquent as the mystic in declaring that they cannot tell their love. In this simple, commonplace, and ever ineffable mystery of everyday life we have touched the very core of our problem. Can we apply this evidence directly, without involving ourselves in difficulties as to trances, states, and the rest, to support assurance in a Presence that is more than man ? The enquiry was effectively opened by James in his famous chapter upon the Reality of the Unseen, [45] to which reference has already been made. Here, in a whole series of examples, he was able to illustrate an undefined sense of presence, of intense but formless clearness. ‘ In all three instances,’ says one of his informants, ‘ the certainty that there in outward space there stood something was indescribably stronger than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception.’ [46] Such experiences are not uncommon, and they have little or nothing to do with the mystical trance. Nor do they at all necessarily involve a belief in God as their source. The writer of the passage just quoted regarded the whole sensation as ‘ horrible.’ And it is obvious that a whole series of gruesome ghost-stories, true enough, whatever be their explanation, could have been included side by side with the more optimistic material which James so obviously prefers. The general conclusion which he reached has been of great importance : ‘ It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “ something there,” more [ p. 215 ] deep and more general than any of the special and particular " senses " by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.’ [47] The passage which follows [48] has commonly been ignored by James’s critics. In it he suggests the possibility that the normal work of the senses begins by the arousal of this realityfeeling, and that anything else, whether an idea or, in particular, a religious conception, which could awaken it would have the same appearance of reality as the ordinary world about us. This is obscure in itself, but important in its correlation of the abnormal experiences which he proceeds to relate with the normal occurrences of daily life.
It was the lure of the abnormal which stirred the interest of critics, and discussion of the problem has proceeded upon two lines. Considerable work has been done with a view to experimental verification of the ‘ sense of presence,’ regarded as a ‘ sixth sense,’ [49] and there is now a good deal of evidence for the view that these special experiences are due partly to misinterpretations of obscure sensations and partly to strong emotional associations aroused by causes of which the subject is unaware. On the other hand, the attempt has been made, most notably by Otto, to isolate certain aspects of experience containing this specific quality as a direct, nonrational element in man’s psychical life and constituting the primitive ground of religion.
[ p. 216 ]
Otto’s theory of the ‘ numinous ’ starts from Schleiermacher’s suggestion that religion takes its rise in the feeling of dependence. [50] He points out that in religious experience this is not feeling in the ordinary sense of the word. For lack of a better phrase we have to speak in the language of the emotions, and Otto terms it ‘ creature-feeling ’ or ‘ creature-consciousness.’ It is the mood of Abraham when he said ‘ Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes,’ [51] and it is far more than a mere feeling of dependence. ‘ It is the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures,’ [52]
And this emotion is not a feeling which primarily concerns the self. It is here that Otto parts company with Schleiermacher, in whose view, he says,
the religious emotion would be directly and primarily a sort of ^//"-consciousness, a feeling concerning one’s self in a special determined relation, viz. one’s dependence. Thus according to Schleiermacher, I can only come upon the very fact of God as the result of an inference, that is, by reasoning to a cause beyond myself to account for my ‘ feeling of dependence.’ But this is entirely opposed to the psychological facts of the case. Rather, the ‘ creature-feeling ’ is itself a first subjective concomitant and effect of another feeling element, which casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate and primary reference to an object outside the Self. But this object is just what we have already spoken of as ’ the numinous,’ For the ‘ creature-feeling ’ and the sense of dependence to arise in the mind the ‘ numen ’ must be experienced as present, a ‘ numen praesens,’ as in the case of Abraham. [53]
The next step in the enquiry is to distinguish the special characteristics of the numinous, and these Otto sums up in [ p. 217 ] a now familiar formula, mysterium tremendum. The numinous itself cannot be defined directly. Its nature ‘ can only be suggested by means of the special way in which it is reflected in the mind in terms of feeling.’ [54] The feelings of which the numinous is the object are closely related to feelings familiar as parts of our general emotional life. Otto’s analysis falls into two parts. The element covered by the term tremendum has the characteristics of awe, of a sense of ‘ overpoweringness, ’ and of a sense of living energy or urgency. It is precisely the emotion felt by Jacob when he said ‘ How dreadful is this place,’ [55] the sense of primitive holiness which the terror of the Lord inspires. [56] The awe is akin to shuddering and horror, and the panic dread of the Greeks, [57] and in the higher forms of religion it becomes the hushed stillness of that ineffable Something which holds the spirit in the ‘ creature-feeling ’ of personal abasement, [58] in the peace ‘ which passeth all understanding,’ Throughout this analysis what is distinctive is the sense of the ’ Beyond,’ the ’ Other,’ This is expressed especially in the element of ‘majesty’ or ‘overpoweringness’ [59] but is already contained [ p. 218 ] in awe, which is like fear in some of its outward manifestations and yet is utterly distinct from it in the character of the object by which it is inspired. The overwhelming sense of the numinous comes out still more clearly in such experiences as those termed by Goethe ‘ daemonic.’ [60] an element by no means uncommon in mysticism, in which the onset of God’s love has been again and again felt, almost literally, as ‘ a consuming fire. ’ [61]
The analysis of the mysterium can be summed up in the phrase the ‘ Wholly Other,’ and this passes over into the final element of fascination, [62] in which the circle of the numinous is complete. ‘ The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less Something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The " mystery " is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him ; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to a pitch of dizzy intoxication.’ [63]
In all this we are clearly on the border-line of the [ p. 219 ] experiences commonly described as mystical, but the types of feeling of which Otto is speaking go far beyond the limits of mysticism. They are deeply rooted in common life, and there are few in whom they cannot be aroused from time to time. In their crude forms they are familiar to the savage, and though civilization may transform them it has by no means weakened their power. Thus from the earliest beginnings of human history the mystery of reality has made itself known to men, [64] at first in strange inrushes of emotion, such as that overwhelming daemonic terror that was so completely other than fear, and later, as the rational and the non-rational were interwoven, [65] in the holy peace of the soul that knows in its ordered worship the Real Presence of its God.
The value of Otto’s discussion is beyond question, and its influence has been immense. Yet in detail it seems to lie open to very damaging psychological criticism. The effort to define the numinous by the aid of ceitain characteristic emotions invites the answer that in the situations specified these emotions are really aroused by perfectly natural and suitable stimuli. And the explanation that they are used only as ideograms conveys no clear meaning, since we have at once to ask why these ideograms and no others are specially appropriate. Even the daemonic aspect of the primitive forms of the numinous may be due to a [ p. 220 ] special type of emotional reaction which occurs naturally in situations where man is utterly helpless against the forces which circumstances unleash against him. It is, in fact, identical with the emotional content of a nightmare, which has as its background the strong desires and the utter dependence and helplessness of the child.
But the most serious criticism of Otto’s theory is that which we have already accepted in the case of experiences of a sense of presence. It would in the end be disastrous for religion if its validity were ever made to depend upon the interpretation of certain special types of experience. It may be true that this sense of the numinous which Otto describes has a peculiar quality of impressiveness, but at the most its value is that it calls our attention to an element of Otherness which is present in every part and aspect of our life. Otherwise we are left with a dualism which in the end leaves this ordinary world out of account in God’s creation. And that may not be.
Possibly the most valuable comment on Otto is one made unwittingly and in a different connection by Leuba and McDougall. I quote the former :
In the presence of grand, or particularly beautiful, natural scenery many persons ‘ feel ’ the presence of God. As McDougall remarks, this is, no doubt, because the main emotions evoked are those of admiration and reverence emotions that involve negative self-feeling. Now, negative self-feeling is an attitude referring to persons. Thus, one is led to the thought of a personal power as the cause of the impression. [66]
Clearly the criticism applies exactly to Otto’s conception of the numinous, but the conclusion to be drawn from it is the very opposite of that intended by its author. It is surely a striking fact that natural scenery, or situations in [ p. 221 ] which this sense of littleness or abasement is aroused, should make their appeal to impulses primarily adapted to personal relationship. The obvious inference is that the personal is, at the least, very closely interwoven with these experiences, not simply because a person is their subject, but because the fundamental relationship upon which they rest is itself inherently personal. Thus Otto’s theory becomes strong evidence for this personal aspect, at least of certain elements, and those universal, in man’s psychic life.
But the theory is only of value if we can go further still. We have already seen that the whole range of man’s instinctive and emotional life bears the marks of purpose, and that its ends in man cannot be separated from ends that are personal in reference. At the same time we have seen upon all his experience the marks of reality, the living contact of the spirit with that which lies without and beyond. And if we accept Otto’s analysis of the numinous, even in the reduced sense which psychological caution may allow, it is because we would claim that the sense of presence is implicit wherever man rises to any consciousness of reality at all. His world is never dead, save when consciousness fails and his free personal life is merged in thinghood. But where freedom has at all been won it seems incredible that the thing should ever finally become lord again.
An aspect of this problem for which psychological evidence is both proper and suggestive is that which is concerned with the heightening of the sense of reality in some conditions and its lowering in others. The intense and vivid character of the mystic ecstasy, with its peculiar and convincing moments of insight, finds an instructive parallel in the exaltation produced by certain drugs, [67] and by certain morbid mental states. The phenomenon of the curious sense of illumination produced by nitrous oxide [ p. 222 ] poisoning, [68] by mescal, [69] hashish, [70] and other drugs, [71] and in a lesser degree by alcohol, ether, and their allies, [72] has been fully studied. The same condition is a definite symptom of certain phases in some of the gravest mental disorders, notably in paranoia [73] in its more highly emotional forms and in the manic phase of cyclic insanity. [74] Equally important, though less frequently quoted, are the cases where reality seems to lose its normal quality, a symptom characteristic of epilepsy, [75] of the depressive phase of cyclic insanity, [76] of melancholia, [77] and of some forms of schizophrenia. [78] Tennyson, who certainly experienced the exalted conditions, [79] apparently knew these lowered states also :
. . . weird seizures, Heaven knows what :
On a sudden in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk’d and talk’d as heretofore,
I seem’d to move among a world of ghosts,
And feel myself the shadow of a dream. [80]
[ p. 223 ]
Such evidence has been quoted triumphantly by some writers as challenging the validity of the mystical experience. William James, at least in the Varieties of Religious Experience, accepts them heroically as evidence, sufficient for pragmatic optimism, of the avenue through the subliminal self to the Unseen, [81] though when it comes to the Hegelian revelations of nitrous oxide he can be as contemptuous as any of his sceptical friends. [82] For Leuba they really end the matter. So disreputable a path cannot lead to God, and the mystic way is for him no better. [83]
But this set of observations does not in the least invalidate the real objectivity of personal values. All that it proves is that our consciousness of them can be profoundly distorted. And while the exaltation produced by drugs is deeply discredited by its physical and ethical results, it is nevertheless an interesting piece of evidence for the real existence of a sense of otherness and its significance as part of the very basis of our personal life. There is in these facts a parallel, not as remote as might appear at first sight, with the case of those who wish to keep their God to themselves and who worship Him in an esoteric privacy which utterly distorts their whole relationship with Him. But to admit this does not deny or even discredit the God of the open spaces and the fresh air outside their conventicle. The sun which struggles through their stained windows is still the sun.
What does seem to emerge from the confused evidence with which, in this lecture, we have had to deal is simply, once more, the resilient objectivity of life itself. It has appeared impossible to isolate religious experiences as having any peculiar objectivity and certainty of their own. Their vindication in this respect cannot, at any rate, lie [ p. 224 ] with the psychologist. With their ethical fruits or absolute values we cannot as psychologists concern ourselves. But the reality inherent in religious experience is unquestionably one with that which underlies the whole of life.
And once more we recall that the so-called ‘ reality-principle ’ of the psychologists everywhere revealed its essentially personal character. Whether we started from psycho-analysis or from the study of instinct, whether we considered the methods of psychotherapy or the sanctions of the group, in each case we were brought back to purposive and personal considerations. The evidence might, indeed, be held to suggest a certain truth in theories of degrees in reality. Things, the sheer solid objects of the senses, do seem to have a certain curious entity of their own, however abstract this seems to be when we examine it closely. Few of us are really quite convinced by Bishop Berkeley. And yet, if this entity of ‘ things ’ has any real meaning, it seems to come to existence as a sort of residue from the personal experience in which we come to be aware of them. It is as though the whole material structure of this world in which the personal adventure of living takes place were left behind as a kind of aftermath of the creative movement of God. But the higher reality is in the adventure itself, the adventure of living, the adventure of Creation. And thus the personal and the creative form a level of reality higher than that displayed in the material order. It is in this level that the material finds its explanation, and, as it seems, its origin, and its existence is so bound up with the personal life of which it forms the setting, as the crude stuff for the creative ends of man and God, that it is perhaps impossible for the living mind of man to give it any exact meaning.
The psychologists have brought us to the point of recognizing these personal and creative elements in reality. The main weakness of psychology as a science is that it has not adequately combined the two. Frequently, indeed, it [ p. 225 ] has aspired to be a philosophy without taking its own supreme discoveries into account. The creative libido of Jung remains impersonal and blind. The personal love-life of Freud has no purpose beyond itself, and so remains empty and uncreative, seeking, and at the last with success, to sink back to the barren thinghood of death.
Whatever else is true of religious experience it is at least clear that it unites, and gives full value to, these two factors, the personal and the creative. The claim of religion is not only that its object is real, but that it is a Creator-God, capable of being loved. This conviction is the basis of the Christian life, and of the new spirit which infuses the Church, so far as it is Christian and of Christ. The world of the psychologist demands as its substance a creative reality and solves its problems in love. But the process remains as meaningless and void as the shadow procession upon the walls of Plato’s cave, [84] unless beyond it all there is a higher level of reality still, self-revealing and yet to be revealed, the Eternal, Unknowable, Ineffable, whose love hardly veils, yet sufficiently for our bearing, a glory of Splendour unapproachable.
See p. 23. ↩︎
See pp. 28 and 54. ↩︎
Leuba has made a statistical enquiry in his Belief in God and Immortality as to the extent to which psychologists retain a belief in immortality. He finds that among ‘ lesser men ’ 26-9 per cent, are believers, and among ‘ greater men ’ 8-8 per cent. ‘ One may affirm, it seems, that in general, the greater the ability of the psychologist as a psychologist, the more difficult it becomes for him to believe in the continuation of individual life after bodily death.’ Leuba repeats these statistics and this conclusion in his Psychology of Religious Mysticism, pp. 324 f. No apologist for religion ought to ignore such results, but we may be permitted to point out that an excessive attention to psychological interpretations of behaviour is not likely to encourage belief in conclusions which lie altogether outside the scope of psychology. We should expect in advance that the most fully equipped psychologists would be the most sceptical. Nor would the figures in this country, as yet not seriously affected by Behaviourism, be at all similar to those given by Leuba. The highest percentages of belief were found among historians and physical scientists. ↩︎
See pp. 33 and 184. ↩︎
See pp. 7 and 47. ↩︎
See pp. 92 ff. ↩︎
See especially p. 119. ↩︎
See pp. 99 ff. ↩︎
See pp. 143 f. ↩︎
See p. 155. ↩︎
See p. 184. ↩︎
See p. 168. ↩︎
See pp 176 and 183 ff. ↩︎
See p. 186. ↩︎
Heb. xii. 27. ↩︎
Conviction and reserve are very strikingly combined in St. Paul’i account of his own mystical experiences in 2 Cor. xii. 1-7. ↩︎
The Dark Night of the Soul, bk. 2, c. 17. ↩︎
James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 380 f. ↩︎
Letters of James Russell Lowell, by C. E. Norton, i. 69. The passage is quoted both by James (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 66) and Leuba (The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, p. 239), but James omits the very suggestive last sentence. ↩︎
Quoted by James, op. cit., p. 411. ↩︎
James, op. cit. p. 408 n., where a careful distinction is made between the essential experience of illumination, and the phenomena, alleged and real, of ‘ visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as levitation, stigmatization, and the healing of disease.’ For a warning as to the confusions inherent in the term ‘ mystical ’ cf. Thouless, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, pp. 225 ff., where a short but admirable account of classical mysticism is given, on the lines laid down by St. Teresa and developed systematically by Poulain in The Graces of Interior Prayer. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 380 f. ↩︎
Leuba (The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, pp. 109 ff.) gives more than sufficient illustration, with references to the literature, both official and critical. ↩︎
Autobiography, cc. 16, 17. Cf. The Interior Castle, Fifth Dwelling. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Op. cit. cc. 18-21. Cf. The Interior Castle, Sixth Dwelling. ↩︎
This is the obvious and natural explanation of the primary experiences of levitation, though these experiences have been greatly inproved in the telling, and, indeed, have been developed by unconscious interpretation and suggestion. The loss of the sense of touch which is our surest hold on earth inevitably led to a belief in the possibility of floating in the air. Dreams of flying have often the same intense reality, and for similar reasons. It has been found possible to produce the experience of levitation, with witnesses to its happening, by direct suggestion. ↩︎
‘ The will is doubtless occupied with loving, but it does not understand how it loves. As to the understanding, if it understands, it is by a mode of activity not understood by it ; and it can understand nothing of that which it hears. As to me, I do not think it understands, because, as I have said, it does not understand itself ’ (he. cit.). ↩︎
The most important direct result of mystical revelations has been the Apostolat du Sacré Coeur, enjoined in the 'ecstasies of St. Marguerite Marie. Quite apart from the morbid character of these ecstasies, and the utter irrelevance of the miracles which confirmed them, the revelations themselves add nothing whatever to the sum of theological knowledge. The great scholastic theologians were in several cases mystics, but even in the case of St. Bonaventura mysticism leaves little mark on the theology, and is seldom directly mentioned (see especially Comm. in sent, ii. 23, art. 2, q. 3). St. Teresa is an admirable psychologist and a great administrator, but no more. In general, mysticism may be said to have encouraged Pantheism and Quietism, both of which are of less even than doubtful orthodoxy. ↩︎
James (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 410) quotes such a revelation from the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola. But though the visions of the mystery of the divine wisdom in creation, and of the Holy Trinity, are here claimed to have been retained in the memory of the Saint, it still does not appear that there was anything specially new in the revelation, or at any rate that he was able to communicate it to others. ↩︎
Une Mystique Moderne (see above, p. 153), p. 42. ↩︎
Cf. H. G. Wells, First and Last Things, p. 60 : ‘ At times, in the silence of the night, and in rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion of myself and something great that is not myself. . . . These moments happen and they are the supreme fact of my religious life to me ; they are the crown of my religious experience,’ See also the passages quoted by James, Varieties of Religious Experience pp. 385 ff . ↩︎
Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, pp. 330 ff . ↩︎
Pratt, The Religions Consciousness, p. 412. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 508 ff. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 58 ff. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 422 f. ↩︎
James, op. cit. p. 428. ↩︎
The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, pp. 308 ff. Cf. Coe’s article ‘ The Sources of the Mystical Revelation ’ in the Hibbert Journal for January 1908. Here there is a careful analysis of the experiment of self-hypnosis, and a comparison with the mystic trance. The conclusion is that all the special features of the trance are without significance for the supposed revelation : ‘ The mystic acquires his religious convictions precisely as his non-mystical neighbour does, namely, through tradition and instruction grown habitual, and reflective analysis. The mystic brings his theological beliefs to the mystical experience ; he does not derive them from it.’ Pratt, to whom I owe the reference, entirely concurs (The Religious Consciousness, p. 450). ↩︎
Leuba, op. cit. p. 309. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Here and throughout this paragraph I am mainly following Hocking, especially in The Meaning of God in Human Experience, and The Meaning of Mysticism as seen through its Psychology, in Mind, N.S., vol. xxi. 1912, pp. 38 ff. ‘ These words, unitary, immediate, ineffable, which at all events apply to the mystic’s experience, are precisely the words which the metaphysician applies to the mystic’s doctrine. And I suggest that the misinterpretation of mysticism here in question is due to the fact that what is a psychological report (and a true one) is taken as a metaphysical statement (and a false one). From the fact that one’s experience of God has been “one, immediate, and ineffable,” it does not follow that God Himself is merely “ one, immediate and ineffable ” and so a Being wholly removed from all concrete reality " (The Meaning of Mysticism, p. 43). ↩︎
It may seem strange to compare the intense egoism of the paranoiac with the mystical ecstacy, but the parallel is in some ways very close. It is very difficult indeed to interpret paranoia unless the hypothesis of the ego has real meaning. The undesirability of this most intractable of all mental disorders does not destroy its evidential value. But the paranoiac is quite incapable of interpreting the self -reference of his delusions, and here his case, though far worse than that of, even the most aberrant of the mystics, is parallel to theirs. ↩︎
Leuba, in fact, completely misunderstands Hocking’s argument, as his own citations sufficiently show. He is so anxious to discredit the evidence of the mystical states that he does not see that Hocking is arguing for an interpretation of all experience in terms of an intuition which is direct and of which the Object is what men have understood by God. See especially The Meaning of God in Human Experience, pp. 295 ff . : ‘ We have made all social experience depend upon a conscious knowledge in experience of a being, who in scope and power might well be identified with God . . our first and fundamental social experience is an experience of God. . . . I shall always be more certain that God is, than what he is … reality from the beginning is known as God. The idea of God is not an attribute which in the course of experience I come to attach to my original whole idea : the unity of my world which makes it from the beginning a whole, knowable in simplicity, is the unity of other Self-hood. God then is immediately known, and permanently known, as the Other Mind which in creating Nature is also creating me. Of this knowledge nothing can despoil us ; this knowledge has never been wanting to the self-knowing mind of man.’ ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 53 ff. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 60. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 58. The passage is quoted and criticized by Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 10 n. ↩︎
Ibid. : ‘If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality ; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be.’ ↩︎
A good summary in Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, pp. 280. ↩︎
Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 9. Here Otto points out that Schleiermacher had already made the distinction ‘ of pious or religious dependence from all other feelings of dependence.’ But he regards this as insufficient. The ‘ creature-feeling ’ can only be called ‘ feeling ’ at all by analogy. ↩︎
Gen. xviii. 27. ↩︎
Otto, op. cit. p. 10. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 10 I. ↩︎
Otto, op. cit. p. 12. ↩︎
Gen. xxviii. 17. ↩︎
Exod. xxiii. 27 ; Job. ix. 24, xiii., xxi. ↩︎
Otto, op. cit. p. 15 : ‘ Its antecedent stage is “ daemonic dread ” (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off -shoot, the “ dread of ghosts.” It first begins to stir in the feeling of “ something uncanny,” “ eerie,” or “ weird.” It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting point for the entire religious development in history. “ Daemons ” and “ gods ” alike spring from this root, and all the products of “ mythological apperception ” or “ fantasy ” are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. . . . We ought to go further and add that the natural man is quite unable to shudder (grauen) or feel horror in the real sense of the word. For shuddering is something more than “ natural,” ordinary fear. It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings.’ ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 18. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 20 : ‘ It is especially in relation to this element of majesty or absolute overpoweringness that the creature-consciousness, of which we have already spoken, comes upon the scene, as a sort of shadow or subjective reflection of it. Thus in contrast to the “ overpowering,” of which we are conscious as an object over against the self, there is the feeling of one’s own abasement, of being but “ dust and ashes ” and nothingness,’ Otto (op. cit. p. 15) expressly declares his view to be closely akin to that of Marett in The Threshold of Religion (cf. the section on ‘ The Birth of Humility ’). ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 24. ↩︎
Ibid. Cf. Deut. iv. 24 ; Heb. xii. 29. The thought passes, as in 2 Thess. i. 8, over into that of the apocalyptic ‘ wrath ’ of God, but in the mystics the fire of love has become almost a physical sensation. Cf. Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris, and the experiences (or symptoms) of St. Catherine of Genoa (Von Hugel, The Mystical Element in Religion, i. 187 and 209 ; ii. 19) and St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque (Memoirs, ed. Longuet, 1876 edition, p. 322). ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 37 f. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 31. ↩︎
Otto, op. cit. pp. 136 ff. : ‘It is not only the more developed forms of religious experience that must be counted underivable and a priori. The same holds good throughout, and is no less true of the primitive, ‘ crude,’ and rudimentary emotions of ‘ daemonic dread ’ which, as we have seen, stand at the threshold of religious evolution. Religion is itself present at its commencement : religion, nothing else, is at work in these early stages of mystic and daemonic experience. ↩︎
It is an entire misunderstanding of Otto to believe that he ignores the rational aspect of religion. He stresses its importance at the very outset (op. cit. p. i), and speaks of ‘ the intimate interpenetration of the non rational with the rational elements of the religious consciousness, like the interweaving of warp and woof in a fabric ’ (p. 47). Cf. pp. 113 f., and p. 140. ↩︎
Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, p. 291 n., quoting McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 130 ↩︎
On the whole subject cf. Leuba, op. cit, pp. 8-36, where a general summary and many references are given. ↩︎
James, The Will to Believe, pp. 294 ff. ; Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 387 ff . ↩︎
Weir Mitchell, ‘ The Effect of Anhalonium Lewinii ’ in British Medical Journal, 1896, ii. pp. 1625-8 ; Havelock Ellis, in Popular Science Monthly, 1902, Ixi. pp. 52-71. ↩︎
Havelock Ellis, he. cit. ; Dunbar, ‘ An Essay on Hasheesh,’ Medical Review of Reviews, 1912, p. 62. Other references are given by Leuba, loc.cit. ↩︎
For opium De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is the classical example. ↩︎
Leuba, op. cit. p. 18 ff. The following may serve as an introduction to the large literature upon the effects of alcohol and ether : Rivers, The Influence of Alcohol and other Drugs on Fatigue ; Partridge, Studies in the Psychology of Intemperance ; Miles, Effect of Alcohol on Psycho-physiological Functions. The first important study was Kraepelin’s, Ueber die Beeinflussung einfacher psychischer Vorgdnge durch einige Arzneimittel. The evidence is unanimous against any increase in muscular and mental efficiency, despite a certain stage of greater muscular activity and an illusion of well-being. If alcohol has any value it is in inducing relaxation. It never makes for better work. ↩︎
See Henderson and Gillespie,_ Textbook of Psychiatry_, pp. 225 ff. The paranoiac type is very difficult to define exactly. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 128. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 360 f. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 139. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 161. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 194 ff. The phenomena here are more complex, and this aspect is less clearly marked on its subjective side. ↩︎
Leuba, op. cit. p. 237 f. ↩︎
Tennyson, The Princess. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp, 389 ff. ↩︎
The Will to Believe, pp. 297 f. ↩︎
Leuba, op. cit. p. 315. ↩︎
Plato, Republic, vii. init. ↩︎