III

[7]"The Legacy of Greece," p. 38.

Writing as an Englishman Dean Inge did not note the equally unsettling influence of migratory races. The European peasant in Detroit or Chicago or New York is still moredéraciné. He has not only left the soil in whose culture his ancestors had been established for generations, he has left the tradition and the discipline which have made him what he is. The necessary readjustments are immensely difficult. For the first generation they are largely a dumb puzzle, or a dull, aching homesickness or a gray laborious life whose outcome must be often strangely different from their dreams, but for the second generation the whole experience is a heady adventure in freedom not easy to analyze though social workers generally are agreed that the children of the immigrant, belonging neither to the old nor the new, are a disturbing element in American life. A city like Detroit, in which this is being written, where both movements combine, the American country and village dweller coming to a highly specialized industrial center and the European immigrant to an entirely new environment, illustrates the complex issue of the whole process.

It is just to note that the Catholic immigrant, finding in his Church the one homelike thing, is often a better Catholic in America than he was at home. A Protestant writer without accurate information would not dare to generalize on the religious dislocation of the second Catholic generation. But there must be a very great loss. The large non-churched elements in our population must be in part due to Catholic disintegration as they are certainly due to Protestant disintegration. And new movements find their opportunity in this whole group. In general, society, through such influences, has grown impatient of discipline, scornful of old methods, contemptuous of experience and strangely unwilling to pay the price of the best. The more unstable have surrendered themselves to the lure of the short cut; they are persuaded that there are quick and easy roads to regions of well-being which had before been reached only through labour and discipline and much travail of body, mind and soul.

Popular Education Has Done Little to Correct Current Confusions

Nor has the very great extension of popular education really done much to correct this; it seems rather to intensify it, for education shared and shares still the temper of the time. Our education has been more successful generally in opening vistas than in creating an understanding of the laws of life and the meaning of experience; it has given us a love of speculation without properly trained minds; it has furnished us with the catch words of science and philosophy but has not supplied, in the region of philosophy particularly, the corresponding philosophic temper. It has, above all, been fruitful in unjustified self-confidence, particularly here in America. We have confused a great devotion to higher education and the widespread taking of its courses with the solid fruition of it in mental discipline. America particularly has furnished for a long time now an unusual opportunity for bizarre and capricious movements. Nothing overtaxes the credulity of considerable elements in our population. Whatever makes a spacious show of philosophy is sure to find followers and almost any self-confident prophet has been able to win disciples, no matter to what extremes he goes.

This has not been equally true of older civilizations with a more clearly defined culture or a more searching social discipline. Something must be lacking in the education of a people in which all this is so markedly possible. The play of mass psychology (one does not quite dare to call it mob psychology) also enters into the situation. Democracy naturally makes much of the verdict of majorities. Any movement which gains a considerable number of adherents is pretty sure to win the respect of the people who have been taught to judge a cause by the number of those who can be persuaded to adopt it. This generally unstable temper, superficial, restless, unduly optimistic, open to suggestion and wanting in the solid force of great tradition has joined with the recasting of Science, Theology, Psychology and Philosophy, to open the door for the entrance of new religions, and in general, to so unsettle the popular mind as to make almost anything possible.

The Churches Lose Authority

In the field of religion certain well-defined consequences have either followed or accompanied the whole process. There has been, to begin with, a loosening of church ties. The extent of all this has been somewhat covered up by the reasonable growth of the historic churches. In spite of all the difficulties which they have been called upon to face, the statistics generally have been reassuring. The churches are attended in the aggregate by great numbers of people who are untroubled by doubts. Such as these have little sympathy with the more restless or troubled, and little patience with those who try to understand the restless and troubled; they do not share the forebodings of those who look with a measure of apprehension upon the future of Christianity. As far as they recognize disturbing facts at all they are very much like Carlyle who, when told that Christianity was upon its last legs, said, "What of that? Christianity has always been upon its last legs." And perhaps their simple faith and hope are more to the point than many opposing attitudes. The churches have grown faster than the population, or at least they had at the last census. More than that, there has been a marked increase in church activity. The churches are better organized; they are learning the secret of coöperation; they are reaching out in more directions and all of them, even the more democratic, are more hard driven from the top.

The result of all this has been a great show of action, though it is difficult now to say whether the real results of this multiplied activity have been commensurate in spiritual force and ethical fruitage with the intensity of their organized life. (The writer thinks not.) But through all this we discern, nevertheless, a marked weakening of authority as far as the Church goes and a general loosening of ties; though the churches in the regions of finance and organization drive harder than they used to drive, in the matter of creed and conduct they are driving with an easy rein. Denominational loyalties are relaxed; there is much changing from one denomination to another and within the denominations and individual churches there is, of course, a substantial proportion of membership which is only nominal.

Efforts at Reconstruction Within the Church

There are those who view with apprehension the whole future of religion. They believe that the foundations of the great deep are breaking beneath us, that Christianity must be profoundly recast before it can go on prevailingly, and they are reaching in one direction and another for constructive changes, but all this within the frontiers of historic Christianity and the Church. They want church unity but they still want a church; they want a new theology but still a theology; they want new applications of religion but still substantially the old religion. There was more of this during the war than just now. Such a book as Orchard's "Future of Religion," perhaps the most thoughtful analysis of conditions given us for a long time, was born of the war itself and already many of its anticipations seem to miss the point. Such expectations of wholesale religious reconstruction leave out of account the essential conservatism of human nature, a conservatism more marked in religion than anywhere else.

There is also a strong and telling group which is seeking so to recast and interpret inherited faiths as to make them more consonant to modern needs and more hospitable to new understandings. Such as these have accepted gladly the tested conclusions of science, the results of Biblical criticism and the revealing suggestion of both psychology and philosophy; they have sought to disentangle the essential from the unessential, the enduring from the transient. They have found in science not the foe but the friend of religion. Those intimations of unfailing force, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and reality toward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of the very presence and method of God, and they have found in just such regions as these new material for their faith. They have dealt reverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms which Christianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduring experiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality is the finality of the deep things of the soul itself. They have been able, therefore, to make new truth tributary to old faith and to interpret the central affirmations of Christianity in terms of present-day facts. They have sought to share their conclusions with others and they have really been able to carry Christianity through the transitional period of the last fifty years and continue it open-minded, strongly established, reverent and enriched rather than impoverished.

What they have done has been doubly hard, once through the sheer difficulty of the task itself, and once through the hostile and too often abusive temper with which they and their endeavours have been opposed. None the less, they have saved for Christendom a reasonable faith. Science has of late gone half-way to meet them. It is rather painfully revising a good many of its earlier conclusions and on the whole walking rather humbly just now before its God, recognizing that the last word has not yet really been said about much of anything.

An Age of Doubt and a Twilight-Zone in History

But the apparently unchanged traditions of the older forms of faith and the relatively strong position of the Church must not blind us to the generally disorganized condition of religion to-day. There is much in evidence a body of doubt which clouds the outlook of multitudes upon religion generally. Beyond debate a kind of eclipse of faith began to draw across the Western world so early as the middle of the last century. The militant skepticism of the brilliant group of younger poets who sang their defiances in the first two decades of the nineteenth century to a world which professed itself duly shocked, is wholly different from the sadness with which the more mature singers of two generations later announce their questioning and their disillusionment. The difference is just the difference between Shelley and Matthew Arnold. There is a philosophic depth in this later music which the former wholly lacked. Arnold speaks for his time when he announces himself as standing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. A profound disillusionment expressed itself in great ranges of later nineteenth century literature and confirmed the more sensitive and despairing in a positive pessimism, strangely contrasted to the self-assertive temper of the science and industry of the period. It would need a pretty careful analysis to follow all this to its roots. Something of it no doubt was due to the inability of poet and philosopher to reconcile their new understanding of life and the universe with the old religious forms but more of it was likely due to some deep exhaustion of spiritual force, an exhaustion which has from time to time marked transitional periods in the development of cultures and civilizations.

There have always been twilight zones in history, times in which the force of the old had spent itself and nothing new had come to take its place. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing through a twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through the more than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorian period darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our own time. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the more sensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of a coming shadow had fallen first of all upon them, and beyond debate, not a little of the doubt which has been so marked a feature of the last two generations in literature generally, and in the attitude of a great number of people toward religion, has been due to just this.

The Hunger of the Soul and the Need for Faith Persist

And yet, since religion is so inextinguishable a thing, changing forces and attitudes have still left untouched the hunger of the soul and the need of men for faith. Indeed the very restlessness of the time, the breaking up of the old orders, the failure of the old certainties, has, if anything, deepened the demand for religious reality and there has been in all directions a marked turning to whatever offered itself as a plausible substitute for the old, and above all a turning to those religions which in quite clearly defined ways promise to demonstrate the reality of religion through some sensible or tangible experience. If religion will only work miracles and attest itself by some sign or other which he who runs may read there is waiting for it an eager constituency. We shall find as we go on how true this really is, for the modern religious cult which has gained the largest number of followers offers the most clearly defined signs and wonders.

If religion cures your disease and you are twice persuaded, once that you really are cured and once that religion has done it, then you have something concrete enough to satisfy anybody. Or if, perplexed by death and with no faith strong enough to pierce that veil through a persuasion of the necessity of immortality established in the very nature of things, you are offered a demonstration of immortality through the voices and presences of the discarnate, then, once more, you have something concrete enough, if only you were sure of it, to settle every doubt. And finally, if the accepted religions are too concrete for you and if you desire a rather vague and poetic approach to religion made venerable by the centuries and appealingly picturesque through the personalities of those who present it, you have in some adaptation of oriental faith to occidental needs a novel and interesting approach to the nebulous reality which passes in the Eastern mind for God, an approach which demands no very great discipline and leaves a wide margin for the play of caprice or imagination.

Modern Religious Cults and Movements Find Their Opportunity in the Whole Situation. The Three Centers About Which They Have Organized Themselves

There has been, then, as the outcome of the complex of forces which we have been considering, a new approach to religion distinctive in our own time and in general taking three directions determined by that against which it has reacted, or perhaps more positively by the varying character of what it seeks. A pretty careful analysis of modern religious cults and movements shows that they have organized themselves, in action and reaction, around three centers definitely related to three outstanding deficiencies of inherited faith. I say deficiencies, though that is of course to beg the question. We saw earlier in this study how religion everywhere and always grows out of some of the few central and unexpectedly simple, though always supremely great, needs and how the force of any religion waxes or wanes as it meets these needs. Religion is real to the generality of us as it justifies the ways of God to man and reveals the love and justice of God in the whole of personal experience. Religion is always, therefore, greatly dependent upon its power to reconcile the more shadowed side of experience with the Divine love and power and goodness. It is hard to believe in a Providence whose dealings with us seem neither just nor loving. Faith breaks down more often in the region of trying personal experience than anywhere else.

All this is as old as the book of Job but it is none the less true because it is old.

The accepted theology which explained sin and sorrow in terms of the fall of man and covered each individual case with a blanket indictment justified by the condemnation of the whole of humanity has lost its force. It depended, to begin with, on a tradition of human beginnings which has not borne examination, and it was beside, in spite of all the efforts to defend it, profoundly unethical. Calvinistic theology, moreover, made a difficult matter worse by assuming for every individual a predestined fate reaching beyond death itself which a man was powerless to escape. Those chapters in the long story of theology which record the turning and groping of minds—and souls—enmeshed in this web of their own weaving and more deeply entangled still in the challenging experiences of life itself are among the most pathetic and arresting in the whole story of human thought. We ought to recognize more clearly than we have generally done and confess more frankly that our inherited explanations of the problems of pain and sorrow have been markedly unsatisfactory and have greatly contributed to the justifiable reaction against them.

One group of modern religious cults and movements, then, has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science and kindred cults are just an attempt to reconcile the love and goodness of God with pain, sickness, sorrow, and to a lesser degree with sin. How they do this remains to be seen, but the force of their appeal depends upon the fact that a very considerable and constantly growing number of people believe that they have really done it. Such cults as these have also found a place for the New Testament tradition of healing; they have also appealed strongly to those who seek a natural or a pseudo-natural explanation for the miraculous elements in religion generally. They have been expectedly reinforced by the feeling for the Bible which strongly persists among those who are not able to find in the inherited Protestant position that real help in the Bible which they had been taught they should there find, and who are not, on the other hand, sufficiently acquainted with the newer interpretations of it to find therein a resolution for their doubts and a vital support for their faith. Finally, Christian Science and kindred cults offer a demonstration of the reality of religion in health and happiness, and generally, in a very tangible way of living. Here, then, is the first region in which we find a point of departure for modern religious cults and movements.

Spiritualism organizes itself around another center. Religion generally demands and offers a faith in immortality. We are not concerned here with the grounds which various religions have supplied for this faith or the arguments by which they have supported it. Generally speaking, any religion loses ground as it fails to convince its adherents of immortality, or justify their longings therefor. Any religion supplying clear and indisputable proof of immortality will command a strong following and any seeming demonstration of immortality not particularly associated with this or that religious form will organize about itself a group of followers who will naturally give up pretty much everything else and center their entire interests upon the methods by which immortality is thus supposed to be demonstrated. Now modern Spiritualism comes in just here. It professes to offer a sure proof of immortality to an age which is just scientific enough to demand something corresponding to scientific proof for the support of its faith and not scientific enough to accept all the implications of science, or to submit to its discipline. Theosophy and kindred cults are generally a quest for deliverance along other than accepted Christian lines; they substitute self-redemption for Christian atonement, and deliverance through mystical disciplines for that forgiveness of sin and assurance of salvation in which Christianity has found its peace.

There is, of course, a vast deal of action and reaction between the newer movements themselves and between the new faith and the old. There are elements common to all religions; there are frontiers where all religions meet and somewhat merge; at some point or other almost every faith touches its contrary or becomes uncertain and shifts its emphasis. Religion is always dependent upon changing tempers and very greatly upon varying personalities; it is always in flux, impatient of definitions and refusing the rigid boundary lines within which we attempt to confine it. Though it be clearly possible, therefore, to find three distinct points of departure for the whole of the border-land cults and religions, there is running through them all a certain unity of driving force. They are in general a quest for a new type of religious reality; they are largely due to certain marked inadequacies of the more accepted religious teachings and to the want of the more accepted religious experiences to satisfy certain types. They have come to light in our own time through the failure of authority in both Catholicism and Protestantism, through the failure of the accepted understandings of the Bible to satisfy those who are still persuaded that it has a real message and through the reaction of the modern spirit upon religious attitudes. They owe much to the deficiency of the traditional explanation of sin, sorrow and suffering; they owe something to the failure of Christianity to create a Christian environment; and they owe not a little to the natural longing for some positive assurance of life after death, as well as to the quest of the soul for deliverance and its longing for a satisfying communion with God. And they are reinforced in every direction by the restless and unsettled temper of a time subject to great changes of habit and outlook through the breaking up of old industrial and social orders and the impact of new forces driving in from every direction.

We shall need to relate these conditioning causes more definitely to the various cults and movements as we go on to study them, but here at least are the backgrounds against which they must be studied and the lines of testing down which they must be followed. We shall begin in our more detailed study of these movements with the modern religious quest for health and healing. But even here we shall find it worth while to trace broadly the history of faith and mental healing.

Those cults which are either founded upon faith healing or involve it have a long ancestry. George Barton Cutten's very suggestive book[8]makes that clear enough and supplies an informing mass of detail. Medical Science and Psychology have been slow to take into account the facts thus submitted, but they have of late made amends for their somewhat unaccountable delay, and we have now reached certain conclusions about which there is little controversy except, indeed, as to the range of their application. Beneath all faith healing and kindred phenomena there are three pretty clearly defined bases. First, the action or reaction of mind upon body; second, the control of mental attitudes by the complex of faith; and, as an interrelated third, the control of the lower nerve centers by suggestion.

[8]"Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing."

The Bases of Faith and Mental Healing

There is an almost baffling interplay of what one may call these three controlling principles, and the exhaustive discussion of the whole subject demands the knowledge of the specialist. But we do know, to begin with, that just as there are demonstrated bodily approaches to both the mental and spiritual aspects of life, so there are equally undeniable mental and even spiritual approaches to physical conditions. We have here to fall back upon facts rather than upon a definite knowledge of what happens in the shadowy border-land across which the mind takes over and organizes and acts upon what is presented to it by the afferent nervous system. Nothing, for example, could be really more profound than the difference between waves of compression and rarefaction transmitted through the luminiferous ether and the translation of their impact into light. Somewhere between the retina of the eye, with its magic web of sensitive nerve ends, and the proper registering and transforming regions of the brain something happens about which Science can say no final word.

What happens in the case of light is equally true of sound and tactual sensation. That vivid and happy consciousness of well-being which we call health is just the translation of normal balances, pressures and functionings in the mechanism of the body into an entirely different order of phenomena. Health is a word of manifold meaning and if its foundations are established in the harmonious coöperation of physical processes, its superstructure rises through mental attitudes into what, for want of a more clearly defined word, we call spiritual states. Two orders meet and merge within us. Above a world of idea, insight, desire and subordination of means to ends, the whole driven by the will and saturated with emotion, a world which has its contacts with the unseen and eternal and derives its strength from the truly immaterial; below a world of material and forces in subjection to the laws of physics and chemistry and involved in the processes of the conservation and transformation of physical energy, and consciousness the clearing-house for the whole.

Cannon's Study of Emotional Reactions Upon Physical States

This interplay of body and mind has of late been made the subject of careful and long continued experimentation with a special reference to the reactions of strong emotion upon bodily states, particularly as registered in chemical changes. These experiments have been carried on with an almost incredible patience and attention to detail under the most difficult circumstances, and their conclusions seem final. Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard University has recently put the result of such investigation at our service in a most interesting way.[9](It ought to be said, however, that a similar series of experiments repeated at the laboratories of the University of Chicago failed to produce the same results.)

[9]"Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage," quoted without page references.

Strong emotion affects almost every physical region, modifies almost every physical function. The normal secretion of digestive fluids is greatly increased by hunger (though here, of course, hunger itself may have a physical basis) and also by what the investigator calls sham feeding—food, that is, taken by an animal and so deflected as not to pass into the digestive tract at all stimulates the gastric flow quite as much as if it were actually received into the stomach. On the other hand unhappy emotional disturbance greatly retards the digestive processes. Pain, for example, results in pronounced inhibitions of the secretion of gastric juice while happy emotional states produce naturally the opposite effect. Pain is often accompanied by nausea, indeed the nausea of a sick headache may be only secondary, induced by a pain springing from quite another source than retarded digestion.

Professor Cannon's experiments are most interesting as he traces the variations of the flow of adrenal secretion induced by emotion and then retraces the effect of the chemical changes so produced upon bodily and mental states. The secretion of adrenin[10]is greatly increased by pain or excitement. The percentage of blood sugar is also greatly increased by the same causes. The heaviness of fatigue is due, as we know, to poisonous uneliminated by-products resulting from long continued or over-taxing exertion of any sort. Under the influence of fatigue the power of the muscles to respond to any kind of stimulus is greatly reduced. (It is interesting to note, however, that muscular fibre detached from the living organism and mechanically stretched and relaxed shows after a period the same decrease in contractability under stimulation.) On the other hand any increase in adrenal secretion results in renewed sensitiveness to stimulation, that is by an increased power of the muscle to respond. Falling blood pressures diminish proportionately the power of muscular response. Rising blood pressure is effective "in largely restoring in fatigued structures their normal irritability" and an increase of adrenin seems to raise blood pressure by driving the blood from the interior regions of the body "into the skeleton muscles which have to meet, by extra action, the urgent demands of struggle or escape."

[10]I follow Cannon in the form of this word.

Adrenin is of real use in counteracting the effects of fatigue or in enabling the body to respond to some unusual call for effort. The coagulation of the blood is also affected by the same agent, that is, it coagulates very much more rapidly.[11]Coagulation is also hastened by heightened emotion; a wound does not bleed so freely when the wounded one is angry or excited. A soldier, then, in the stress of combat is not only rendered insensible to fatigue and capable of abnormal activity, but his wounds are really not so dangerous as they would otherwise be. There are here suggestions of elemental conditions having to do with struggle and survival, conditions which play their very great part in the contests of life.

[11]Cannon thinks, however, that this effect is produced indirectly.

Emotions set free, as has been said, larger percentages of sugar which are immediately utilized by the muscles in heightened or fatiguing effort. All these experiments point very clearly to reservoirs of power, both physical and mental, upon which we may draw in times of stress and under emotional excitement.[12]Such emotionally induced chemical actions and reactions as have been indicated release these stored energies, render us for the time being unconscious of fatigue and even guard us against the too rapid exhaustion of vital power. Whatever heightens emotion, therefore, modifies the very chemical structure of the body.

[12]Excessive emotional reactions upon bodily states may explain, as Cannon suggests, the more obscure phenomena of religious frenzy such as the ceremonial dances of savages, the "Danse Macabre" of the Middle Ages, the feats of the whirling dervishes, the jumping and shouting of revivalism; also, maybe, the modern jazz.

The Two Doors

There are other changes as well. The breath is quickened, the lungs are expanded, waste products are very much more rapidly eliminated and so in answer to summoning states of the soul the body as a whole readjusts itself in marvellous subtle forms, mobilizing all its forces for the contests which the emotion anticipates, or indeed which the emotion itself calls out. And if all this seems unduly technical it is only to bear out with something like a scientific accuracy the statements made a little earlier that two orders meet and merge within us and that the reactions of our loves, our fears, or our longings upon our bodily processes may be stated in terms of the test tube and the chemist's scale.

Such changes as are thus registered react in turn upon mental attitudes. Fatigue produces mental depression. An accumulation of uneliminated waste darkens all our horizons; irritability of mind and soul attend physical irritability; any unhappy modification in the balance of the physical registers automatically an equally unhappy modification in the balance of the psychic. Most of us, as we come to know ourselves better, recognize marked alterations even in spiritual states which we are taught to refer to physical condition, but just as truly altered spiritual conditions produce altered physical states. There is an endless give and take and there are, therefore, two doors of approach to our pains, wearinesses and sicknesses.

The Challenge of Hypnotism

Medicine, surgery and hygiene as at present organized largely approach personal well-being from the physical side. They have for their support a body of fact and a record of accomplishment which cannot be put out of court without sheer intellectual stultification. Modern medicine has been so massively successful in dealing with disease on the basis of a philosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body and nothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger of becoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of our sciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backgrounds in which they recognized the interplay of realities too great for their formulæ and forces too subtle for their most sensitive instruments. But medicine was almost in the way of forgetting all this when it was compelled—and that for its own good—to take account of an entirely different set of forces.

This was, to begin with, as far as the modern scientific approach is concerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems to be such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power of commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normal consciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if one may use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, it has always been directed and centered upon one single thing.[13]

[13]Sidis defines Hypnosis as the disassociation of the superior and inferior nerve centers. They commonly work in perfect harmony, their blended unity forming one conscious personality. "In hypnosis the two systems or nervous centers are disassociated, the superior centers and the upper consciousness are inhibited or better cut off, split off from the rest of the nervous system with its organic consciousness, which is thus laid bare, open to the influence of external stimuli or suggestions.... In hypnotic trance ... we have direct access to man's organic consciousness and through it to organic life itself."... If we broaden this last sentence to include not only organic consciousness but the deeper strata of personality in which not only individual but perhaps racial experience is bedded, we have the key to a vast range of obscure phenomena. Sidis believes that "strong permanent impressions or suggestions made on the reflex organic consciousness of the inferior centers may modify their functional disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic structure" and this in a sentence is probably what lies behind all faith and mental healing.—"The Psychology of Suggestion," pp. 69 and 70.

The hypnotized person becomes, therefore, unconscious of any reporting agencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normal conditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real. Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given a new direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those messages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon the subject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing lines produce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postage stamp be placed upon the hand of the hypnotized subject and he be told that the stamp is a mustard plaster, the stamp reddens the skin and presently raises a blister. In other words, heightened and intensified expectant attention is able to produce the same results as an irritating agency.[14]

[14]Experiments by Krafft-Ebing and Forel. To be taken with caution. See Jacoby, "Suggestion and Psycho-Therapy," p. 153.

Changed Attention Affects Physical States

We are concerned here chiefly with the fact and it is a fact capable of far-reaching application. Of course the nature and extent of the changes thus produced are the battlegrounds of the two schools. Medical Science is quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus be modified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-land so much still in shadow that no final word can be said about the whole matter, but it is incontestably true that modifications of attention have a reflex in the modification of physical states.

A pain which is not registered does not, for the time being at least, exist, and if the attention can either through hypnotism or by a persistent mental discipline be withdrawn from disturbing physical reports, then the conditions which produce them will at least be left to correct themselves without interference from consciousness and since the whole tendency of disturbed physical organism is to correct itself, the whole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on with less discomfort if attention is withdrawn.[15]The assumption of health is a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remedied is really due to a mental complex which needs only some strong exertion of the will or readjustment of attitude to change, then marvellous results may follow changed mental and spiritual states. The apparently dumb may speak, the apparently paralyzed rise from their beds, the shell-shocked pull themselves together and those under the bondage of their fears and their pains be set free. There are so many illustrations of all this that the fact itself is not in debate.

[15]Organic changes (the storm center of the controversy) may possibly be induced through a better general physical tone. Such changes would not be directly due to suggestion but to processes released by suggestion. Organic change may certainly be checked and the effect of it overcome by increased resistance. So much conservative physicians admit. How far reconstruction thus induced may go is a question for the specialist.

The Power of Faith to Change Mental Attitudes

Now since mental attitudes so react upon bodily states, whatever strongly controls mental attitudes becomes a very great factor in mental healing. There is a long line of testimony that what may be called the complex of faith does just this with unique power, for faith implies supernatural intervention. If there be anywhere an all-prevailing power whose word is law and we could really be persuaded that such a power had really intervened—even if it actually had not—on our behalf and brought its supernatural resource to bear upon our troubled case, then we should have a confidence more potent in the immediate transformation of mental attitudes than anything else we could possibly conceive. If we really believed such a power were ready to help us, if we as vividly expected its immediate help, then we might anticipate the utmost possible therapeutic reaction of mind upon body. A faith so called into action should produce arresting results, and this as a matter of investigation is true.

In following through the theories of faith healing we may take here either of two lines. The devout may assert a direct divine interposition. God is. He has the power and the will; all things are plastic to His touch; He asks only faith and, given faith enough, the thing is done and there is no explaining it. Those who believe this are not inclined to reason about it; in fact it is beyond reason save as reason posits a God who is equal to such a process and an order in which such results can be secured. This is rather an achievement of faith than reason but the Christian Church generally has held such a faith—a faith sustained by the testimony which favours it and unaffected by the testimony which challenges it. The scientific temper which seeks economy in all its explanations and asks only for a cause sufficient for the effect and which is, moreover, constantly trying to relate the unknown to the known, takes another line and finds in faith healing just one more illustration of the power of mind over body. This does not exclude God but it discovers Him in resident forces and finds in law the revelation of His method. The conclusions, then, to which we are generally coming may not only be reconciled with a devout faith, they may, when followed through, enrich faith; but they do subdue the whole great matter to a sequence of cause and effect and they are gradually finding a satisfactory explanation for what has heretofore been deeply involved in mystery.

Just as Hypnotism, through the very dramatic abnormality of it, in altering the sensitiveness of those physical tracts from which attention is withdrawn or in producing physical effects through suggestive focusing, has helped us to understand the part which attention plays in the flux of physical states, so our later studies of the subconscious help us here. We do know that a great deal may really take place in personality of which consciousness takes no account. Consciousness in its most active phases is alert, purposeful and preoccupied with the immediate concern of the moment. Consciousness heeds commands and takes account of such conditions as strongly assert themselves, but does not in its full drive take much account of suggestion unless the suggestion possesses unusual force. Suggestions usually need leisurely turning over in the mind and the mind commonly refers them—often without knowing it—to those regions of mental action which lie beneath the threshold of strongly focused consciousness.

But suggestion does not thereby cease to work. It starts processes all its own which go on till they are worked through. After a longer or shorter period of incubation the outcome of suggestion is lifted into the light of consciousness, often to produce results all the more striking because we cannot explain them to ourselves or any one else. All this does not withdraw such phenomena from the realm of law; it only clothes them with the mystery of the unknown and extends the fields in which they may operate. Proper suggestion let fall into these unknown depths or improper suggestion as well, becomes an incalculable force in shaping the ends of life. We have here, then, well attested truths or laws—it is difficult to know what to call them—which help us to understand the bases of faith healing or mental healing by suggestion. Now directly we turn to such records as remain to us we find that such forces as these have been in action from the very beginning. All disease was in early times referred generally to spirit possession. If only the evil spirit could be exorcised the patient would get well and the priest was, of course, the proper person to undertake this. Religion and medicine were, therefore, most intimately united to begin with and healing most intimately associated with magic. The first priests were doctors and the first doctors were priests and what they did as priests and what they did as doctors were alike unreasonable and capricious. The priest and his church have very unwillingly surrendered the very great hold over the faithful which this early association of medicine and religion made possible. Any order or institution which can approach or control humanity through the longing of the sick for health, has an immense and unfailing empire.

Demon Possession the Earliest Explanation of Disease

There are, says Cutten, three fairly well defined periods in the history of Medicine. The first, beginning as far back as anything human begins and coming down to the end of the second century; the second, ending with the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; and the third from perhaps the sixteenth century on. The second period, he adds, was by far the most sterile and stationary of the three "largely due to the prohibitive attitude of the Church. The science of Medicine, then, is almost wholly the result of the investigations and study of the last period. This means that medicine is one of the youngest of the sciences, while from the very nature of the case it is one of the oldest of the arts."

Demon possession was, as has been said, the earliest explanation of disease. This would naturally be true of a time almost wholly wanting in any conception either of law or any relation of cause and effect beyond the most limited regions of experience. Since the only cause of which man had any real knowledge was his own effort he peopled his world with forces more or less like himself, except that they were invisible, who operated practically the whole of natural phenomena. There was a spirit for every place and every happening; spirits for fields and hearths, thresholds and springs. Some of them were friendly, some of them naturally unfriendly, but they were everywhere in existence, everywhere in action and naturally if they were unfriendly they would from time to time and in various most curious ways get into the body itself and there do any amount of mischief.

The priest-doctor's task, therefore, was to get them out. He might scare them out, or scold them out, or pray them out, or trick them out. He would use his medicine as much to make the place of their temporary abode uncomfortable for the demon as remedial for the patient and, indeed, the curious and loathsome things which have been used for medicines might well disgust even a malevolent demon. One thing stands out very clearly and that is that whatever the medicine did or left undone, it worked through its influence upon the mind of the patient and not through any real medicinal value.

The Beginnings of Scientific Medicine

Of course along with all this would go a kind of esoteric wisdom which was part of the stock in trade of the healer. There were charms, incantations and magic of every conceivable sort. The medicine man of uncivilized or even half-civilized peoples really makes medicine for the mind rather than the body. There were, however, gleams of scientific light through all this murky region. The Egyptians knew something of anatomy though they made a most capricious use of it and there must have been some knowledge of hygienic methods; the prohibitions of Leviticus, for example, and of the Jewish law generally for which the Jew must have been, as far as medical science is concerned, somewhat in debt to the Egyptian and the Chaldean, really have sound hygienic reasons behind them. The Greeks began with demons but they ended with something which approached true science.

The real contribution of Greece, however, seems to have been on the positive rather than the negative side. They made much of health as an end in itself, had gods and goddesses of physical well-being. The Greek had constantly held before him such an ideal of physical excellence as had never before been approached and has never since been equalled. He seems to have been abstemious in eating; he practiced the most strenuous physical exercises; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and so created a civilization in which health very largely took care of itself. An examination of what records remain to us hardly sustains the accepted opinion that the Greeks had made substantial advances along purely scientific lines,[16]but at any rate as far as medicine goes, there is little to choose between the Greece of the fourth century before Christ and the Europe of the sixteenth century after, save that the life of the Greek was far more normal, temperate and hygienic and the mind of the Greek more open, sane and balanced.

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