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Lectures VI and VII
THE SICK SOUL
At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded
temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional
incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to
see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in
which the individual's character is set. We saw how this
temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion,
a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is
regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend
to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more
evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay
them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his
reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying
outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over
disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds
to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse,
affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may
be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to
up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had
relations with sin.
Spinoza's philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven
into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its
fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led
altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of
evil is an "inadequate" knowledge, fit only for slavish minds.
So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When men make
mistakes, he says--
"One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance
to help to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon
conclude (as every one does conclude) that these affections are
good things. Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall
find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary
deleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest that we can
always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry
of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch
as they form a particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages
of sadness," he continues, "I have already proved, and shown that
we should strive to keep it from our life. Just so we should
endeavor, since uneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this
kind of complexion, to flee and shun these states ofmind."[66]
Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from
the beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness
has always come forward with its milder interpretation.
Repentance according to such healthy- minded Christians means
GETTING AWAY FROM the sin, not groaning and writhing over its
commission. The Catholic practice of confession and absolution
is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of
keeping healthy- mindedness on top. By it a man's accounts with
evil are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start
the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will
tell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purging
operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the
healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have
discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet
in this matter of repentance he had some very healthy- minded
ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his conception of God.
"When I was a monk," he says "I thought that I was utterly cast
away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to
say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or
envy against any brother. I assayed many ways to help to quiet
my conscience, but It would not be; for the concupiscence and
lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but
was continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou
hast committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency,
and such other sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy
order in vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if
then I had rightly understood these sentences of Paul: 'The
flesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to
the flesh; and these two are one against another, so that ye
cannot do the things that ye would do,' I should not have so
miserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to
myself, as now commonly I do, 'Martin, thou shalt not utterly be
without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the
battle thereof.' I remember that Staupitz was wont to say, 'I
have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a
better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter
I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience
that I am not able to perform it. Unless, therefore, God be
favorable and merciful unto me for Christ's sake, I shall not be
able, with all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before
him.' This (of Staupitz's) was not only a true, but also a godly
and a holy desperation; and this must they all confess, both with
mouth and heart, who will be saved. For the godly trust not to
their own righteousness. They look unto Christ their reconciler
who gave his life for their sins. Moreover, they know that the
remnant of sin which is in their flesh is not laid to their
charge, but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in the mean while
they fight in spirit against the flesh, lest they should FULFILL
the lusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage and
rebel, and themselves also do fall sometimes into sin through
infirmity, yet are they not discouraged, nor think therefore that
their state and kind of life, and the works which are done
according to their calling, displease God; but they raise up
themselves byfaith."[67]
One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual
genius, Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned
was his healthy-minded opinion of repentance:--
"When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be do
not trouble nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of
our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will
make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that
thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his
favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine
Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; and
putting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse
instead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O
blessed Soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these
diabolical suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the
mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, running at
tournament with others, and falling in the best of the career,
should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with
discourses upon his fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no
time, get up and take the course again, for he that rises again
quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen. If
thou seest thyself fallen once and a thousand times, thou
oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have given thee, that
is, a loving confidence in the divine mercy. These are the
weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and vain
thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use--not to lose
time, not to disturb thyself, and reap nogood."[68]
Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we
treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a
radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please
so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of
our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning
most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We have
now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of
looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a
general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of
taking life, I should like at this point to make another
philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier
task. You will excuse the brief delay.
If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the
key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down
with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in
philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself
into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a
reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other
words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become
pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit
of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or
practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly
pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly
well satisfied with a universe composed of many original
principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the
divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are
subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily
responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be
responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic
or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its
foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can
possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty
faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears
as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an INDIVIDUAL, and
in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be
as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part
whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no
longer be THAT individual at all. The philosophy of absolute
idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America
to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as <130>
much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it
would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue
whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there
is no clear or easy issue, and that the only OBVIOUS escape from
paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption
altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its
origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of
higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely
unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it
might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that
had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and
which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.
Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it,
casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the
monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as
Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as
an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and
consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system
of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of thesort.[69]Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to
be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of
truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,
a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very
memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal,
so far from being co-extensive with the whole actual, is a mere
EXTRACT from the actual, marked by its deliverance from all
contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff.
Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented
to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no
rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which,
from the point of view of any system which those other elements
make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and
accident--so much "dirt," as it were, and matter out of place. I
ask you now not to forget this notion; for although most
philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much
ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it
ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The
mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity
and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no
mere silly appeal to imagination to cure disease; we have seen
its method of experimental verification to be not unlike the
method of all science; and now here we find mind- cure as the
champion of a perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical
structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you
will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention at such
length.
Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking,
and turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off
the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally
fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in
healthy-mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels,
happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts
of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid
mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There
are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with THINGS,
a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such
evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the
natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the
things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and
all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for
whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer
things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or
vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the
environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self,
can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the
whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of
looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural,
removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather
to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of
something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and
never to be removed by any superficial piecemealoperations.[70]These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but
undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the
more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling,
being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive
for our study.
Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as
a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind
passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's
consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise,
pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his
attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an
amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be
immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small
differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low
"difference- threshold"--his mind easily steps over it into the
consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we
might speak of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a
"misery-threshold," and find it quickly overpassed by the
consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others
to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and
healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their
misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in
darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have
started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to
their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the
pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them
over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one
side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of
religion from one who habitually lived on the other? This
question, of the relativity of different types of religion to
different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will
became a serious problem ere we have done. But before we
confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the
unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call
them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the
secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of
consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the
once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply
cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the
Universe!--God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world."
Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment
of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into
our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.
To begin with, how CAN things so insecure as the successful
experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is
no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links
of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed?
Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as
the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea,
a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that
sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling
of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling
convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a
piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again;--and again and again--at
intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is
left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell
with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an
accident.
Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as
never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering
intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize
and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must
see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential
difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely
different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What
kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is,
"Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its
blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very
vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his
success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as
that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the
world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is
one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his
achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements
themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows
nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be
found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in
this wise, how must it be with less successful men? <135>
"I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against the course
of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and
burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I
have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the
perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again
forever."
What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as
Luther? Yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as
if it were an absolute failure.
"I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith
and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last
Judgment: I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst
forth, and I shall be at rest."--And having a necklace of white
agates in his hand at the time he added: "O God, grant that it
may come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace
to-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow."--The Electress
Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him:
"Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come." "Madam,"
replied he, "rather than live forty years more, I would give up
my chance of Paradise."
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We
strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities,
with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And
with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy
fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the
world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with
all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are
connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these
results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous
and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is
indeed one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson
writes, "that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else
we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure
is the fateallotted."[71]And our nature being thus rooted in
failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to
be essential, and thought that only through the personal
experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of
life's significance isreached?[72]
But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the
human being's sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little
farther over the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the
successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and
vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is
a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the
real goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the
great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing
blackness:--
"What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under
the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought,
and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that
which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one
dieth, so dieth the other, all are of the dust, and all turn to
dust again. . . . The dead know not anything, neither have they
any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also
their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is
done under the Sun. . . . Truly the light is sweet, and a
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a
man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember
the days of darkness; for they shall be many."
In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably
together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be
bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and
all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction.
The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject
to the joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders,
the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying:
"Stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!" or "Cheer up,
old fellow, you'll be all right erelong, if you will only drop
your morbidness!" But in all seriousness, can such bald animal
talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe
religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's
brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of
forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too
deep for THAT cure. The fact that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill
at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment
live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a
life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a
kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies
beyond the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords.
"The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common
happiness and goodness," said a friend of mine whose
consciousness was of this sort, "and nothing can console me for
their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being
possible." And so with most of us: a little cooling down of
animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal
toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the
pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual
springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy
metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will
shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth
and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely
naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin,
is sure to end in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic,
agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine
healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living
in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil
background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will
grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual,
we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact
depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands
related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of
its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however
agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding
vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease,
may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he
knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the
knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions.
They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and
they turn to a mere flatness.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the
background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common
experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our
suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon
the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be
the atmosphere which man breathes in;--and his days pass by with
zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values.
Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and
absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and
the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is
visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather
to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind
is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a
frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape,
yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the
inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will
disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human
creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more
sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night,
the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the
meaning of the total situation.
The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works
as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of
nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the
Greeks--Homer's flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun
shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages
arecheerless,[73]and the moment the Greeks grew systematically
pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigatedpessimists.[74]The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that
follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's
dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the
fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness
of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew
no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we
shall erelong see that Ilrahmans, Buddhists, Christians,
Mohammedans, twice-born people whose religion is
non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and
renunciation.
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and
modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that
the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form
of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine
for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their
classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly
in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds
of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far
as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was
reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine
than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period.
But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly
pessimistic.
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest
advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The
Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape
unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain;
therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper
raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by
aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic said: "The
only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free
possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of
these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in
nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to the joys that
freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic;
and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant
dust-and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results
from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic
hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether.
There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They
represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's
primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo.
In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has
become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past
tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and
Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes,
marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of
the world-sicksoul.[75]They mark the conclusion of what we call
the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what
twice-born religion would call the purely natural man
--Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a
religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his
moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled
contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the
complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian
may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts
for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their
simplicity.
Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to
JUDGE any of these attitudes. I am only describing their
variety. The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of
which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of
fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we
have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment
may be rubbed off from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch
of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely
forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the
mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached,
something more is needed than observation of life and reflection
upon death. The individual must in his own person become the
prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded
enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the
subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore
that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the
least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental
pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is
entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even
where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward
fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I
said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on
our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows.
Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance
absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with
personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to,
and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet
they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch
the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing
to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying
official conversational surface.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression.
Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness.
discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring.
<143> Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to
designate this condition.
"The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off
with analgesia," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it
exists. A young girl was smitten with a liver disease which for
some time altered her constitution. She felt no longer any
affection for her father and mother. She would have played with
her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the
act. The same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter
entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed the case
of a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepatic
disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of
emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out
of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his
house of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children moved
him as little, he said, as a theorem ofEuclid."[76]
Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary
condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is
imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary
condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of
a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is
well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his
autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental
isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young
Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms
which he thus describes:--
"I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,
thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic
school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was
pouring into the Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed
up. And when these impressions were past, all day long without
respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation,
verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God,
lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before
that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turned
in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had
impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and
all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
"But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of
heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of
anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to.
It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows
less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure
in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love-- all
these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could
still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable
of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about
them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to
exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither
perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or
perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my
present abode foreternity."[77]
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself,
and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her
parents she writes:--
"Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than
life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents.
It is nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have
longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a
hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it,
and now it has come. . . . It is a wonder I have put this off so
long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all
thought out of my head." To her brother she writes: "Good-by
forever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I
shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is no
forgiveness for what I am going to do. . . . I am tired of
living, so am willing to die. . . . Life may be sweet to some,
but death to me is sweeter." S. A. K. Strahan: Suicide and
Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131.
So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous
feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish,
a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life.
Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes
more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and
exasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of
suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient may rebel or
submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; and he may
or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he
should so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we
should not treat our classifications with too much respect.
Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases that
connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at
all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote
now literally from the first case of melancholy on which I lay my
hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.
"I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep
since I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by
bad dreams, and I am waked with a jump by night mares dreadful
visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear,
presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go.
Where is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this
excess of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me?
What would I not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat,
drink, lie awake all night, suffer without interruption--such is
the fine legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to
understand is this abuse of power. There are limits to
everything, there is a middle way. But God knows neither middle
way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have known so far has
been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the
devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but
with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. As you
read this, it will easily prove to you my insanity. The style
and the ideas are incoherent enough--I can see that myself. But
I cannot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot; and, as
things are, from whom should I ask pity? I am defenseless
against the invisible enemy who is tightening his coils around
me. I should be no better armed against him even if I saw him,
or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him!
Death, death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long
enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise, having
neither brain nor thoughts left. O God! what a misfortune to be
born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a
morning; and how true and right I was when in our philosophy-year
in college I chewed the cud of bitterness with the pessimists.
Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness--it is one
long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes me to
remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this
unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many
moreyears!"[78]
This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire
consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of
evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost
for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it:
the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the
querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a
religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather
towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part
whatever in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood.
Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession, a
wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to
his own religious conclusions. The latter in some respects are
peculiar; but the melancholy presents two characters which make
it a typical document for our present purpose. First it is a
well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for
all life's values; and second, it shows how the altered and
estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this
stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning
and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at
some length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark on
each of these two points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in
general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional
comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different
feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same
person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between
any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke.
These have their source in another sphere of existence
altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject's
being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all
the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to
imagine it AS IT EXISTS, purely by itself, without your favorable
or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be
almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of
negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would
then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of
its things and series of its events would be without
significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of
value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear
endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's mind. The
passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this
fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not <148> come, no
process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value
of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets
the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue
to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition,
worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they
shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical,
often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which
these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just
so are the passions themselves GIFTS--gifts to us, from sources
sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always nonlogical
and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back
to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great
things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when
he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the
spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's
materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as
the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating
colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in
the gallery.
Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the
effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the
physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable
combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex
resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological
ensues.
In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever
was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation
in the whole expression of reality. When we come to study the
phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see
that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the
subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes.
A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs
there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse
direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister,
uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no
speculation in the eyes it glares with. "It is as if I lived in
another century," says one asylum patient.--"I see everything
through a cloud," says another, "things are not as they were, and
I am changed."--"I see," says a third, "I touch, but the things
do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of
everything."--"Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come
from a distant world."--"There is no longer any past for me;
people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any
reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and
everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but
why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no
impression."--"I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the
things I see are not real things."--Such are expressions that
naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describing
their changedstate.[79]
Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the
profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The
unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical
solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and
unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering
and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in
the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,
the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying
religious solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have
moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not
"how to live," or what to do. It is obvious that these were
moments in which the excitement and interest which our functions
naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, it was now
flat sober, more than <150> sober, dead. Things were
meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. The
questions "Why?" and "What next?" began to beset him more and
more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be
answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he
would take the time; but as they ever became more urgent, he
perceived that it was like those first discomforts of a sick man,
to which he pays but little attention till they run into one
continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for
a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world
for him, means his death.
These questions "Why?" "Wherefore?" "What for?" found no
response.
"I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on
which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold
on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force
impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It
cannot be said exactly that I WISHED to kill myself, for the
force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful,
more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old
aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite
direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of
life.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope
in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where
every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going
shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of
putting an end to myself with my gun.
"I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was
driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something
from it.
"All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer
circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had
a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a
large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my
part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than
I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and
without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous.
Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I
possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met
in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I
could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no
bad effects.
"And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my
life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from
the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and
stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live
only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one
grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat.
What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or
silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a
wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler
jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this
well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And
the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey
of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be
devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush
which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands
weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate;
but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other
black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and
gnawing off its roots
"The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish;
but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves
of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his
tongue and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable
dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot
comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey
which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer,
and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the
branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the
inevitable dragon and the mice--I cannot turn my gaze away from
them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which
every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do
to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome
of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything?
Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which
awaits me does not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid
child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human
being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I
experienced, for life to go on.
"'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something
I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible
that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And
I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and
with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but
laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I
sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself--and I
found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who
before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also
found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized
that the very thing which was leading me to despair--the
meaningless absurdity of life--is the only incontestable
knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and
Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his
own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation.
Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing
the dragon or the mice--"and from such a way," he says, "I can
learn nothing, after what I now know;" or reflective
epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts--which is
only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or
manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and
plaintively clinging to the bush of life. Suicide was naturally
the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.
"Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something
else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed--a
consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force
that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw
me out of my situation of despair. . . . During the whole course
of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to
end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during
all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and
observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining
emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst
for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the
movement of my ideas--in fact, it was the direct contrary of that
movement--but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of
dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst
of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of
dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of someone."[80]
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which,
starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy's recovery, I will
say nothing in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The
only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of his
absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and the fact that the
whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and full
of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree,
and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that
comes, when any does come--and often enough it fails to return in
an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute--is not
the simple, ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex,
including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding
natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now
sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of
redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the
sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second
birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy
before.
We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy
enshrined in literature in John Bunyan's autobiography. Tolstoy's
preoccupations were largely objective, for the purpose and
meaning of life in general was what so troubled him; but poor
Bunyan's troubles were over the condition of his own personal
self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,
sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts,
fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms,
both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture
which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in
a half- hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on
his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to
this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.
"Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse, now I am farther
from conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have
burned at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for
me; alas, I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him,
nor savor any of his things. Sometimes I would tell my condition
to the people of God, which, when they heard, they would pity me,
and would tell of the Promises. But they had as good have told
me that I must reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me
receive or rely upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the
act of sinning, I never was more tender than now; I durst not
take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my
conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch; I
could not tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace
them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in all I did or said! I
found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir; and
was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all
good things.
v
"But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own
eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too.
Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my
heart as water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have
changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself
could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind.
Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; and thus I continued a
long while, even for some years together.
"And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts,
birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not
a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God;
they were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore
have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I
blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I
have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they
had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or
Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt
this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to
my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did
desire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedingly hard. If
I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed
one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
"I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so
know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid
to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself!
Anything but a man! and in any condition but myown."[81]
Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we
must also postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a
later lecture I will also give the end of the
experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist who worked in
Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly describes
the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its
beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan's.
"Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed
accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales
seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight
of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my
ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that
every one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to
acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea
sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as
the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of
the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew
the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the
whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first
thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where
shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps
in hell before morning. I would many times look on the beasts
with envy, wishing with all my heart I was in their place, that I
might have no soul to lose; and when I have seen birds flying
over my head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that I could
fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be,
if I were in theirplace!"[82]
Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection
in this type of sadness.
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of
panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to
print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in
French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous
condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise
the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general
depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into
a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was
there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just
as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all
day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall,
with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray
undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured
Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes
and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered
into a species of combination with each other THAT SHAPE AM I, I
felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against
that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck
for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception
of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as
if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely,
and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe
was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning
with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense
of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I
have never feltsince.[83]It was like a revelation; and although
the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me
sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the
dark alone.
"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how
other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so
unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of
life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to
me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you
may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations
of my own state of mind (I have always thought that this
experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing."
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant
by these last words, the answer he wrote was this:--
"I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had
not clung to scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,'
etc., 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,'
etc., 'I am the resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I
should have grown reallyinsane."[84]
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at
are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things;
another the sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the
fear of the universe;--and in one or other of these three ways it
always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get
leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or
delusion about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the
chapter of really insane melancholia, with its <159>
hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story
still--desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe
coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming
horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the
conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly
blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and
no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its
presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined
optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of
a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious
problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final
message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality
in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must
come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take
effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions,
revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural
operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions
need them too much.
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may
naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life
and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something
essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we
might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems
unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the
other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.
With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light;
with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every
unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene
about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If
religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become
the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may
have been in the past, the healthy-minded would <160> at present
show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers,
what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are
bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale
of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The
method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply
in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It
will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than
most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its
successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a
religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as
melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from
melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness
is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts
which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion
of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's
significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the
deepest levels of truth.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of
those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which
radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The
lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of
daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and
every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless
agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there
yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic
times is hard for our imagination--they seem too much like mere
museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those
museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the
foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some
fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the
victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us
to-day. Here on our very <161> hearths and in our gardens the
infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird
fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons
are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their
loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags
its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch
their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated
melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on thesituation.[85]
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the
absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are
ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are
forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system
whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or
neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question
must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a
mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as
genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic
presumption should be that they have some rational significance,
and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to
accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active
attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems
that try at least to include these elements in their scope.
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in
which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of
course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They
are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an
unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next
lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological
conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now onward we
shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which
we have recently been dwelling on.
[66]Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.
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[67]Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged). Back [68]Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii.abridged. Back [69]I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part. Back [70]Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim. Back [71]He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: "Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits." Back [72]The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off--our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life. Back [73]E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth." Back [74]E.g., Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades." See also the almost identical passage in Oedipus in Colonus, 1225.--The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground--why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?"--"How did I come to be? Whence am l? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals."--"For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered." Back [75]For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: "By the word 'happiness' every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term CONTENTMENT. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman's heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself." Back [76]Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54. Back [77]A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:-- Back [78]Roubinovitch et Toulouse: La Melancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged. Back [79]I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900. Back [80]My extracts are from the French translation by "Zonia." In abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage. Back [81]Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached passages continuously. Back [82]The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand. Back [83]Compare Bunyan. "There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split asunder. . . . Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet." Back [84]For another case of fear equally sudden, see Henry James: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff. Back [85]Example: "It was about eleven o'clock at night . . . but I strolled on still with the people. . . . Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, 'Ho hai!' involuntarily reechoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same 'Ho hai!' was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village. . . . After this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till morning."--Autobiography of Lutullah a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.Back |