Chapter IV: Part 4

“I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self‐
contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”(40)

No natural pagan could have written these well‐known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam’s young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:—

“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos
too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang
death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday
when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear
he smite, or arrow from the string.”(41)

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of _us_ insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be “good in the making,” or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature,—Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,” would have been mere silliness to them,—nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent “another and a better world” of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman’s outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,(42) and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

If, then, we give the name of healthy‐mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy‐minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy‐ mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy‐mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.

In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self‐protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.

But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or _parti pris_. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self‐ protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs.

In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non‐mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.

The systematic cultivation of healthy‐mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter‐ houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.(43)

The advance of liberalism, so‐called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy‐mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell‐fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old‐fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and “muscular” attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.

The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that “theory of evolution” which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty‐five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy‐minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck’s circular of questions. The writer’s state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse‐ meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type.

Q. _What does Religion mean to you?_

A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe,
useless to others. I am sixty‐seven years of age and have resided
in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty‐five,
consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and
some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious
people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and
morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious
convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and
sermonizing are pernicious—they teach us to rely on some
supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I
_tee_totally disbelieve in a God. The God‐idea was begotten in
ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If
I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both
mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die
with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational
pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die—there being no immortality
in either case.

Q. _What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God,
Heaven, Angels, etc.?_

A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words
mean so much mythic bosh.

Q. _Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?_

A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A
little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific
law will convince any one of this fact.

Q. _What things work most strongly on your emotions?_

A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like
Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc.,
etc. Of songs, the Star‐spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise,
and all moral and soul‐stirring songs, but wishy‐washy hymns are
my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather,
and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the
country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or
fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but
attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts
and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for
instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I
endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the
deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he
will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand
years hence.

Q. _What is your notion of sin?_

A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental
to man’s development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness
over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of
years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order
will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of
evil or sin.

Q. _What is your temperament?_

A. Nervous, active, wide‐awake, mentally and physically. Sorry
that Nature compels us to sleep at all.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster‐shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the Infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science.

To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy‐mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day,—I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain,—and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the “Mind‐cure movement.” There are various sects of this “New Thought,” to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.

It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers,—a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings.

One of the doctrinal sources of Mind‐cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of “law” and “progress” and “development”; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind‐cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all‐saving power of healthy‐minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.(44) Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to‐day a mass imposing in amount.

The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; lifelong invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy‐minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind‐ cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second‐hand. One hears of the “Gospel of Relaxation,” of the “Don’t Worry Movement,” of people who repeat to themselves, “Youth, health, vigor!” when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non‐existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self‐deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind‐cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all.

The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind‐cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.(45) It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind‐curers’ ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who _can_ be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.(46)

To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered _frowardness_ to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind‐curers say that the mark of the beast in it is _fear_; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion.

“Fear,” to quote a writer of the school, “has had its uses in the
evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of
forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of
the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I
find that the fear element of forethought is not stimulating to
those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the
natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it
becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should
be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue.
To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its
expressions, I have coined the word _fearthought_ to stand for the
unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word
‘worry’ as _fearthought in contradistinction to forethought_. I
have also defined fearthought as _the self‐imposed or self‐
permitted suggestion of inferiority_, in order to place it where
it really belongs, in the category of harmful, unnecessary, and
therefore not respectable things.”(47)

The “misery‐habit,” the “martyr‐habit,” engendered by the prevalent “fearthought,” get pungent criticism from the mind‐cure writers:—

“Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.
There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged
requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the
world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early
training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life.
Following close upon this, there is a long series of
anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children’s
diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought
that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become
childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is
a long line of particular fears and trouble‐bearing expectations,
such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles of
food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the
aches and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching
cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of hay‐fever upon the
14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on through a long
list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations,
expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train
of fateful shapes which our fellow‐men, and especially physicians,
are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with
Bradley’s ‘unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’

“Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable
volunteers from daily life,—the fear of accident, the possibility
of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of fire,
or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear
for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forthwith fear
the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with sorrow ...
sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering.”(48)

“Man,” to quote another writer, “often has fear stamped upon him
before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear;
all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death,
and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and
depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and
specification.... Think of the millions of sensitive and
responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the
dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love,
exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though
unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean
of morbidity.”(49)

Although the disciples of the mind‐cure often use Christian terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians.(50)

Their notion of man’s higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind‐cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view:—

“The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite
life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and
through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back
of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it
Kindly Light, Providence, the Over‐Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever
term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to
the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone,
so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is
outside. He is the life of our life, our very life itself. We are
partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in
that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite
Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence
the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and
so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in
degree.

“The great central fact in human life is the coming into a
conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite
Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In
just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our
oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine
inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of
the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the
Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree in
which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will
exchange dis‐ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and
pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own
divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach
the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One
need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to
any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all
the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us
heavenward.”(51)

Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind‐cure religion. I have many answers from correspondents—the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind‐cure disciples are inspired.

“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or
depression is the _human sense of separateness_ from that Divine
Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in
serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: ‘I and my
Father are one,’ has no further need of healer, or of healing.
This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for
wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine
union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on
this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific
Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the
consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?

“This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been
abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a
record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and
lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they
are to‐day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was
dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I
have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a
vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a
moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly
with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For
how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?—since ‘Greater is he
that is _with_ us than all that can strive against us.’ ”

My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:—

“Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking
down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous
prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of
insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the
digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of
doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed
up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never
recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.

“I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning
the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental
touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of
life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost
unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves _actually_, that
is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest
consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination
from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and
invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that
to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence
of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the
objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have
engrossed you without.

“I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily
health _as such_, because that comes of itself, as an incidental
result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to
have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to
above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer
things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and
die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they
should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere
outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the
bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom
of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all
else comes as that which shall be ‘added unto you’—as quite
incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the
proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of
our being.

“When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that
which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which
the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in
business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown
in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not
objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem
harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept
them—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in
their various development, these being mostly approved by the
masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy
superfluities.”

Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you these cases without comment,—they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying.

“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.
[Details of ill‐health are given which I omit.] I had been in
Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but
steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of
October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it
were these words: ‘You will be healed and do a work you never
dreamed of.’ These words were impressed upon my mind with such
power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I
believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,
which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within
two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer
(this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing but
Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal
belief; as a man thinketh so is he.’ I could not accept all she
said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way:
‘There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely
dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much
of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I
shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past
experience.’ That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of
every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself:
‘The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have
eaten.’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to
bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with
God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the
first time in several years [the distress‐turns had usually
recurred about two o’clock in the night]. I felt the next day like
an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that
would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able
to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began
to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to
me like stepping‐stones. I will note a few of them; they came
about two weeks apart.

“1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.

“2d. I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well.

“3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four‐footed beast with
a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering,
with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I
resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even
look at my old self in this form.

“4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with
faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.

“5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing
look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner
consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for
I was Soul, an expression of God’s Perfect Thought. That was to me
the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I
appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my
real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees
(though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I
expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_.

“In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience I have never known
this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I
have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have
learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child.”

But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind‐cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52)

But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi‐logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind‐curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a “mystery” or “problem,” or in “laying to heart” the lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don’t reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so‐called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind‐cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind‐curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?

After all, it is the life that tells; and mind‐cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the _Diätetik der Seele_ into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: “Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.” “Thoughts are things,” as one of the most vigorous mind‐cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind‐curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are “forces,” and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s side by opening one’s own mind to their influx.

On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind‐cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, “What shall I do to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: “You are saved now, if you would but believe it.” And the mind‐curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. _Things are wrong with them_; and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?” is the form of their question. And the answer is: “You _are_ well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.” “The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, “_God is well, and so are you_. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”

The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind‐cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day.

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But I here fear that I may begin to “jar upon the nerves” of some of the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy‐minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet—our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb‐like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico‐academic‐ scientific type, the officially and conventionally “correct” type, “the deadly respectable” type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind‐cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at a certain stage in their development—a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. “Be vigilant, day and night,” they adjure us; “hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.” But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two‐fold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti‐moralistic method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self‐ despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power.

Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_ the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.

The mind‐curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic‐ idealistic, or a medical‐materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.(54)

When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind‐curer’s _methods_.

They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. “Suggestion” is only another name for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to‐day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word “suggestion” as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.” And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely _nothing_, or did nothing until mind‐cure came to the rescue.(55)

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation. The mind‐cure with its gospel of healthy‐mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings?

The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind‐cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. “We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards, “concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead.”(56)

The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthy‐mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world.

Finally, mind‐cure has made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at random:—

“The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on
which the New Thought most strongly insists,—the development
namely from within outward, from small to great.(57) Consequently
one’s thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though
this trust be literally like a step in the dark.(58) To attain the
ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought
advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the
attainment of self‐control. One is to learn to marshal the
tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a
unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times
for silent meditation, by one’s self, preferably in a room where
the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New
Thought terms, this is called ‘entering the silence.’ ”(59)

“The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street
you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of
your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and
everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace,
Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.
This is the spirit of continual prayer.(60) One of the most
intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where
several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often
talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds
about him, this self‐centred faithful man would, in any moment of
perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him
that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and
thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he
were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him
into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which
he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive
until the reply came, and never once through many years’
experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.”(61)

Wherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the practice of “recollection” which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation.

“It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all
places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune
respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and
affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose
this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity,
nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse
yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance
of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you,
that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget
him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot
practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as
familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a
rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as
often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your
soul.”(62)

All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind‐cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind‐cure utterances:—

“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and
strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it
forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the
mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,
wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may
at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance
will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally
delightful.