Dissociation of Consciousness

In the history of the art of thought, an important part has been played by the invention of a number of psychological expedients, differing among themselves, but having this in common, that they so modify the normal co-ordination of the factors of the human organism, as to “separate off,” or “dissociate,” all or part of our normal consciousness.

The simplest of these expedients has been known at least since the early Stone Ages, and consists of the more or less complete dissociation of consciousness by hypnotism or self-hypnotism. Innumerable methods have been invented for producing this result, the monotonous sound of the “bull-roarer”; the monotonous movements of the dance; the prolonged maintenance of a difficult bodily attitude; the prolonged direction of the eyesight towards one object, such as a crystal ball or Boehme’s polished pewter dish; holding the breath; listening to the rustling of leaves in a tree; the repetition of monotonous phrases; the use of the rosary, etc., etc. The efficacy of these methods is often increased by the action of drugs, by abstention from food or sleep, and by certain kinds of music. For good or for evil, the combined physiological discoveries of self-hypnotism and of the use of alcohol and other narcotics, stand, with the inventions of fire-making and of the artificial cultivation of food-plants, among the most important events in human pre-history. In the development of religion, peculiar importance attaches to the fact that if in the hypnotic or quasi-hypnotic state certain beliefs are “suggested” to the devotee, those beliefs will probably be retained with singular tenacity after the state is past.

The literature of mysticism, whether Hindu, Sufist, Neoplatonist, Christian, or Theosophist, contains hundreds of descriptions of the forms taken in consciousness by the various degrees of the hypnotic state. They all emphasize the fact that hypnotism, at that stage where it produces the exalted consciousness which precedes unconsciousness, is, like the effects of morphia and alcohol at the same stage, extraordinarily pleasant. The descriptions are also agreed in noting that this pleasantness is often associated with an intense conviction that the hypnotized subject is on what some of them call “a higher plane of being.” This conviction may perhaps be in part suggested by the peculiar feeling of “levitation” which often results from a slight dislocation of the nervous system, and which produces in dreams the familiar conviction that we are floating in the air or falling through it. If we take St. Paul’s words “caught up into the third heaven . . . whether in the body or apart from the body” (2 Corinthians xii. 2), as an account of a psychological experience, they indicate very exactly this feeling of levitation.

There is, of course, no necessary presumption that the production of the hypnotic state cannot, because it is an interference with nature, be a helpful factor in the art of thought. The use of mathematical symbols, or the conscious observation of such normally less-conscious states as Intimation, are also interferences with nature, and yet are helpful in thought; at any moment, indeed, some invention may be made in the application of hypnotic methods which may constitute an invaluable addition to the process of creative thought. But at present, all we can ask is whether hypnotism, judged by its ascertained results, has in fact shown itself to be helpful or not. In attempting to answer that question one has first to distinguish between the effects of hypnotism or similar expedients upon the functions of the rest of the organism, and its effects upon the intellectual processes of the upper brain. There is a very large body of evidence indicating that when the “sympathetic” nervous system is removed from conscious cerebral control, and is directly stimulated by “suggestion,” or by what MM. Coué and Baudouin call “auto-suggestion,” a great increase in the energy of that system may take place. This increased energy may be made useful in medical treatment; tics and other apparently incurable acquired reactions can be inhibited; warts (as has been known by “white witches” for thousands of years) can be cured; parturition can be brought on; “stigmata” can be produced; and perhaps tuberculosis and certain other germ-diseases can, in their early stages, be checked. There is also evidence that hypnotism or “auto-suggestion” may temporarily increase muscular strength, may temporarily improve such simple mental processes as recollection or arithmetical reckoning, and may initiate important improvements in our less-conscious nervous habits.

And, before estimating the effects of hypnotism upon the delicate and complex processes of creative thought, one must further distinguish between the more profound and the slighter degrees of hypnotic dissociation. Completely hypnotized persons have written poems and philosophical treatises and novels, and have made drawings and pictures; and poems have been composed in the analogous condition of natural sleep. But the results seem to indicate that neither the full hypnotic trance nor the dream-condition are really favourable to the working of the higher intellectual processes. Where finished intellectual work, as, for instance, Coleridge’s poem of Kubla Khan, has been produced in a dream, there is often reason to believe either that the dream-state was incomplete—as may have happened in Coleridge’s laudanum-sleep *—or that the work has been afterwards developed by more or less conscious elaboration in the waking state. The best of the recorded dream-work would seem to consist of the occasional production of vivid and coherent plots and scenes for novels, or poems, or dramas. The continuous intellectual work known to have been produced in the full hypnotic trance, though it is often much more finished and coherent than that produced in dreams, is poor stuff at the best. And, even if we put aside any doubt as to whether the poems, essays, and novel produced on the ouija board by Mr. John H. Curran, of St. Louis, Mo., under the dictation of Patience Worth, owed nothing to conscious effort, they are not books which many of us would read for their own sake.

On the other hand, there is evidence that a slight degree of dissociation may be useful, or at least harmless, for the purpose of certain kinds of creative thought. The thinker may be helped in that condition to escape from some of the habits and inhibitions which hinder the free association of his ideas. The Indian princes who, riding away from the stifling atmosphere of intrigue in their petty courts, used to visit the rishi seated in a half-trance at the foot of a tree, often heard from him a much better exposition of their duty toward the simple problems of their tributary villages than they heard every day from their ministers or wives or concubines. The psycho-analyst who boasted that he could have cured Blake of the habit of trance-thought might, if he had done so, have made it more difficult for the English people to feel the significance of certain factors in the English social system of a hundred years ago. One form of slight dissociation—the hallucination of “voices’—though it is very like the illusions produced by serious brain disease, yet has often occurred in the case of sane persons of strong imagination, and does not seem to be inconsistent with effective creative thought. Such “voices,” indeed, may only represent an unusually vivid form of Intimation and Illumination. Many novelists and dramatists have described themselves as actually hearing the voices of the characters which they have created; and in the case of a person ignorant, as Joan of Arc and Socrates were, of modern psychology, it is easy for a perfectly rational opinion to be held that such voices have a supernatural origin.

It is also important to distinguish between the cases where automatic inspiration takes place during the full consciousness of the thinker, and the cases where it takes place when the thinker is unconscious or only partially conscious. Plato could see no distinction between his own vivid inspiration (or what I have called Illumination) while writing, with full consciousness, the Phædrus or the Timæus, and the inspiration which came to the Delphic priestess when she was in a state of trance.[1] But that distinction exists, and is responsible for a large part of the difference between real poetry and science, and the fluent rambling utterances of a spiritualist medium. The energy of the higher mental powers seems, indeed, to be diminished by any approach to the state of trance; and the nearer Illumination approaches hallucination the more necessary is it that intellectual energy should be maintained throughout the whole Illumination stage, and be carried through to the stage of Verification.

These problems are, of course, important, not only for literature and science, but also for the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. The whole question as to the most favourable physiologico-psychological state for creative artistic production is now being discussed by artists in connection with the various forms of “postimpressionism,” “dadaism,” etc., and it would be an advantage if the discussions of the psychologists and those of the artists could be brought into touch with each other. A slight degree of dissociation may be useful for an artist who wishes to break with his own habits of thought and vision and those of his school, but the highest form of artistic production seems to take place when, at the moment of production, a harmony is attained between an intense activity of the whole nervous system, higher and lower alike, and the conscious will. Velasquez and Rembrandt, Mozart and Beethoven, or Phidias and the Egyptian sculptor of Nefret-Iti’s bust, seem to me to have, like Dante and Plato, added more to the inherited treasury of mankind than would have been the case if they had dissociated their imagination from their conscious will.

In religious and metaphysical thought, the problem of the relation between intellectual creation and full

1See Mr. Roger Fry’s little book, The Artist and Psycho-analysis (1924). Varendonck says that we find the greatest energy of imagination, and the most valuable creative work, when the conscious “volition” most completely coincides with the subconscious “wish.” (Day Dreams, p. 303). consciousness has always been complicated by an argument which may be put in the following way: “For human beings the final test of truth is the feeling of conviction, just as the final test of form is the esthetic feeling. One may go through every kind of Verification, by logic and mathematics and experiment, but the final test will still be our feeling of conviction. Why should we not, therefore, accept the evidence of conviction when it presents itself under circumstances which do not permit of experimental Verification?” Dean Inge, for instance, in his touching little tract on Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion (1924), while describing a state of mystic consciousness, says (p. 19) : “We did not feel as if our ordinary self was in communication with the Divine Spirit, but rather as if the Divine Spirit had for the time being transformed our personality, raising it to a higher state in which it could breathe a purer air than that of earth, and see something of the invisible.” No one for an instant doubts Dean Inge’s personal sincerity. Why should we not accept the evidence of conviction in his case, when we accept it as the final test in all other cases?

One might offer the dialectical answer that the feeling of conviction arising in the mystic state has in the past supported many different conceptions of the universe, taught by many different religions and philosophies, and that they cannot all be true. But I believe that it is better to insist that the feeling of conviction, like the sensation of sight, is never an infallible guide, and that it only becomes the best guide that we have, when it is formed, as Aristotle would say, “in the right way, and at the right time.” We must, that is to say, go behind our feeling of conviction, and ask ourselves whether it was formed under those conditions which experience has shown to be most likely to guard us against error. William James was, I believe, prevented from developing his splendidly penetrating examination of the process of Intimation-Illumination into a reliable analysis of the whole process of thought by the fact that, being himself strongly desirous of retaining certain opinions, and finding that men and women had from time to time experienced immediate conviction of their truth, he never applied Aristotle’s test to those experiences with sufficient vigour. He protested, with a vehemence which was unusual in him, against current interpretations of his phrase “The Will to Believe”; but never satisfied some of his readers that those interpretations were wholly unjust. His most careful and considered account of his own position on this point is given in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1903), p. 422: “Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.” Here the important words are those in the first sentence, “and have the right to be.” James has just been describing in great detail (p. 387 et seq.) the fact that “nitrous oxide gas when sufficiently diluted with air stimulates the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree . . . and I know of more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.” Have (to use James’s own term) such persons the “right” to believe in the validity of revelations so received? We can only answer that, because the human brain is not an infallible instrument for the discovery either of positive or of negative truth, no one can be absolutely sure that any metaphysical opinion may not be true, but that experience seems to indicate that conviction reached through such means as nitrous oxide gas has not been reached “as it ought to be.” The authority of any type of revelation, even to the recipient himself, should again depend, not only on the circumstances of its reception, but also, to some degree, on its observed results. Throughout his Varieties of Religious Experience, James refers at intervals to the vivid accounts of mystical experiences given by Saint Teresa. Yet he says of Saint Teresa: “She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the Church’s triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the devotee and the deity; and, apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest” (pp. 347-8). If Saint Teresa at some moment of clear-sighted disillusionment could have seen her life’s work as James saw it, she would not have ‘had the right” to treat the result of her visions as irrelevant to their authority.

This problem of the relation between the authority of the feeling of conviction and our knowledge in any particular instance of its causes and effects, is vital for the future intellectual life of India. I have, in talking to an able Indian friend of my own, found it curiously difficult to make him realize that such a problem can exist, or that the reality of a conviction can ever be an insufficient proof of the reality of that of which we are convinced. And while hearing Indian students argue amongst themselves on the part played by mystical forms of consciousness in the discovery of political truth, I have felt that the future political history of India may depend, in large part, upon the solution by Indian thinkers themselves of the essentially psychological problem which is now disguised by its connection with their religious traditions, and by the political circumstances of their contact with Western thought.

On the other hand, in the history of Christianity, psychological methods of producing belief have existed, almost from the beginning, which are consistent with a conscious determination to avoid the dangers involved in the various expedients for producing the hypnotic or quasi-hypnotic state. Dr. R. H. Thouless, of Manchester University, said, in his paper on the Psychology of the Contemplative Life, at the Oxford International Psychological Congress (1923), that in “the Christian mysticism of the Western Churches . . . exercises which have clearly no other end than that of producing peculiar states of consciousness . . . are not encouraged” (Proceedings, p. 131); and Professor Asin Palacios in his Escatologio Musselmana, says that “there is no hint of ecstasy in St. Thomas Aquinas.” One, in intention, non-hypnotic method (of which the best-known and most authoritative instance is the “Spiritual Exercises” of Ignatius Loyola) consists of the use of the fully conscious will in an attempt to direct the train of mental association upon a desired path, and to inhibit any associations which diverge from that path. This method is well described by Professor J. Howley, of Galway, in a book, Psychology and Mystical Experience (1920), which bears the official Imprimatur of his Church, and in which he warns his readers against the mere production of dissociation by hypnotic methods (pp. 205 et seq.). In discussing (p. 45) the “essence” of the Ignatian meditation, he says, “Those conscious elements which will not fit into the scheme are promptly expelled as distraction, and all extraneous thoughts are carefully checked. This may entail a certain constraint, but the very effort tends to unification, and the effective massing of all the conscious elements of value, with the dispersion into oblivion of antagonistic feelings, images, volitions, and ideas.”

The literature of religious experience shows, however, the extreme difficulty of this process. To sit in the mental attitude of strained expectancy, with a given subject of meditation before one, invites the free entrance of associated ideas with as much compulsive force as for a fasting man the sight of food invites the access of hunger. Cassian, the founder of monasticism in France, describes in his Institutes (A.D. circa 419- 426) the struggles against such intrusive thought-trains of the solitaries in their huts in Egypt. He quotes, for instance, that which his friend Germanus said to the Abbot Isaac as to the difficulty of carrying out a prescribed meditation on a passage in the Psalms: “For when the mind has taken in the meaning of a passage in any Psalm, this insensibly slips away from it, and ignorantly and thoughtlessly it passes on to a text of some other Scripture. And when it has begun to consider this with itself, while it is still not thoroughly explored, the recollection of some other passage springs up, and shuts out the consideration of the former subject . . . and the soul always turns about from Psalm to Psalm and jumps from a passage in the Gospels to read one in the Epistles . . . unable . . . either to reject or keep hold of anything.” Cassian says that his own difficulties arose partly from his early education (apparently at a school in the south of France) in Greek and Latin literature: “A special hindrance to salvation is added by that knowledge of literature which I seem already to have in some slight measure attained . . . now my mind is filled with those songs of the poets, so that even at the hour of prayer it is thinking about those trifling fables, and the stories of battles with which from its earliest infancy it was stored by its childish lessons; and when singing Psalms or asking forgiveness of sins either some wanton recollection of the poems intrudes itself or the images of heroes fighting presents itself before the eyes . . . so that this cannot be got rid of by my daily lamentations” (ibid., p. 441).

Professor Howley points out that the experience of the medieval ascetics shows that, if one takes an abstract proposition as the subject of meditation, and waits for ideas and visual images to arise from it, full inhibitory control is almost impossible; and that one of the great discoveries of Loyola was the need of providing the young ascetic with a prescribed train of images as well as a prescribed subject of thought. He quotes Father Berthier: “In the thirteenth century one must strip oneself of imaginary images; in the sixteenth one must multiply images, and even display them in violent colours. The unmortified imagination, if not supplied with suitable images, will soon construct a series of its own, and we shall have conflicting trains of thought started, and the psychic unity disturbed. Brother Ass when left unchastised brays” (l.c., pp. 47-48).

In certain passages which obviously record his own intimate experience, Professor Howley describes the special difficulties during “meditation” of a modern thinker whose mind is accustomed to link innumerable causes and effects into connected systems. One may imagine him, for instance, while meditating on an Old Testament miracle, being reminded of something in the literature of some other religion, and then finding that his mind has in a moment created a whole scheme of causation in the development of religious mythology. ‘At times,” he says, “the imagination goes flatly rebellious. A stream of more or less connected and associated images flickers through like a cinematograph gone mad or a disordered dream. It becomes, as it were, something not ourselves of which we are mere spectators . . .” (ibid., p. 67). And again (p. 149), “We have seen how potent is the new idea springing into consciousness. It is a change, and we are curiously avid of change. The idea effects a lodgement before we are well aware of its nature and our spontaneous attention is hooked before the automatic attention of mere curiosity has had time to die down. Once we are interested our whole field tends to shift so as to leave the new notion in the focus.”

I have already argued (Chapter III) that association of emotions and impulses may be intermingled with association of “ideas.” The discipline, therefore, of “meditation” often aims at securing that the train of emotions as well as the train of ideas and images shall follow a prescribed path; but the literature of the contemplative life is full of descriptions of states in which, even if the desired visual and verbal images are secured, the desired emotions do not follow, and other feelings and impulses force themselves into consciousness. Cassian describes how, when he sat down to his daily meditation, he was afflicted “especially about midday” (l.c., p. 266) with the conviction that he was wasting his life in a vain struggle to control the natural train of his feelings, while the world outside needed his active help. Alaric, one must remember, had in A.D. 410 sacked Rome; the Vandals were, as Cassian wrote, destroying the civilization of North Africa; and war and famine and confusion and ignorance were spreading over all that was left of the Western and Southern Roman Empire. Cassian says that the feeling which invades the “solitary” who attempts without success to dictate the course of his emotions “produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance, as if they were careless or unspiritual . . . he often groans because he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society .. . as if he were one who, though he could govern others and be useful to a great number of people, yet was edifying none. . . . Lastly he fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place . . . besides this he looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun as if it were slow in setting

then the disease suggests that he ought to show

courteous and friendly hospitalities to the brethren, and pay visits to the sick whether near at hand or far off

. and that he ought piously to devote his time to these things instead of staying uselessly and with no profit in his cell” (p. 267).

One way of fighting against this tendency of the natural man to rebel against directed meditation is to start a train of feeling along one of the paths biologically fixed by the major instincts. We form, for instance, an anthropomorphic conception of a divine person or personification, and then enter on a series of instinctive reactions of pity, or humility, or fear, or loyalty. I have before me a clear and practical little pamphlet by Dom John Chapman, the head of the Benedictine Order in England, called “Contemplative Prayer; A few Simple Rules.” He is dealing with the condition of the “dark night,” in which men cannot “meditate,” i.e., cannot bring about the appearance in their minds of the desired images and emotions. “They cannot,” he says, “meditate—it is a physical impossibility. (When they attempt it, either they cannot even fix their thoughts on the subject at all, or else they fall into distractions at once, in spite of themselves.) Nor do they wish to meditate . . . it is the ordinary state of mind of most of those who belong to a contemplative order” (pp. 2, 3). Among other expedients he recommends the stimulation of the instinct of pity—“Most people will find it very easy and helpful to make the Stations of the Cross in private” (p. 6); or the instinct of submission—''To feel utterly crushed and annihilated, incapable of any good, wholly dependent on God’s undeserved and infinite mercy, is the best and only preparation for prayer” (ibid., p. 6). The instinct most commonly desired to be stimulated is that of “love,” sometimes as the most exalted type of the maternal or filial or social instincts, sometimes as a more or less sublimated sex-instinct.[1] But this expedient of the self-stimulation of association-trains of instinctive emotion is only partially and occasionally successful. When the devotee is not fighting against undesired feelings and impulses, he often finds himself in the state of weary indifference which monks and hermits from the third century onwards called Accidia or Accidie (from a Greek word meaning “not-caring”). This state has always been recognized as the special curse of monastic life, and was even included in the mediæval list of the seven deadly sins. Father F. W. Faber, whose Spiritual Conferences (1859) were much read by the Roman Catholic converts of the middle- Victorian period in England, vividly describes this state in a discourse on “The Monotony of Piety.” He says that “Most men in most stages of the spiritual life complain that piety is monotonous... . I admit it. I admit it to be my own experience .. . I will freely confess that I know nothing in the world to which I can compare for monotony the occasional drag of a pious life, except either the being detained at a country inn during a hopelessly wet day, or driving a tired horse in a gig for a long stage which is on the collar the whole way” (pp. 333-35). But though Accidie in its original sense simply meant the absence of the desired emotion, it came to be used also of that condition in which undesired emotions and images insist on forcing themselves into the empty rooms of the mind. Cassian’s vivid description, for instance, of the intrusion of images from literature and of desires for a more active life is part of a discourse on Accidia. For Accidie, in both senses, the traditional cures were two: severe and useless labour, and the self-infliction of serious bodily pain. Cassian tells us that the fourth-century Abbot Paul in Egypt used to fill his whole cave year by year with palm-leaves, and at the end of the year burn them. Sometimes in the descriptions of self-inflicted pain one detects a slight gloating, which seems to indicate what modern psychologists would call a ‘masochistic’ element in the process. Father Faber, to give one out of many cases, when speaking of “the entanglement of monotony,” says, “Mortification, especially bodily mortification, is the shortest way out of it, as indeed it is always the shortest way to cheerfulness and supernatural joy” (ibid., p. 352); and again, “Anything like a satisfactory spiritual life implies a great deal of steady self-punishment. A certain quiet unmercifulness towards self is the indispensable condition of all inward peace” (p. 341).

But at this point the expedient of the fully conscious direction, along prescribed paths, of the process of mental and emotional association tends to transform itself into the simpler and earlier expedient of self-hypnotism. The reason why the long hours of weary struggle against Accidie, followed by monotonous and useless toil and bodily pain, produce what Father Faber calls “supernatural joy” and “inward peace” seems to be that they finally result in the same kind of “dissociation of consciousness’ as that produced by Boehme’s pewter dish or a dervish dance. In the twentieth-century Catholic advice to mystics there is, indeed, a frequent tendency to recommend the production of the ecstasy that rewards successful meditation, not by pain and monotony and nervous fatigue, but by the shorter and much less painful method of “autosuggestion.” Dom Chapman, for instance, in the little tract from which I have quoted, recommends the contemplative to aim at producing “an idiotic state” which “feels like the completest waste of time until it gradually becomes more vivid’; a state of “irrational and unmeaning craving for God” (p. 4), a “curious and paradoxical condition” which includes “flashes of the infinite —(it is difficult to find an expression for this) when for an instant a conception passes, like lightning, of reality, eternity, etc.” (p. 5). This is the dissociated state described by Eastern and European mystics for the last three thousand years. Dom Chapman, in describing the methods by which this condition is to be brought about, uses almost the same words as those used by M. Baudouin in his Suggestion and Auto-suggestion. “Let the acts [i.e., the mental events] come,” says Dom Chapman. “Do not force them. They ought not to be fervent, excited, anxious, but calm, simple, unmeaning, unfelt. . . . There are to be no feelings. We are not to know what we mean... . I speak to beginners. Let us be thankful if we are like this for no more than twenty years” (p. 3). In Professor Howley’s analysis the contemplative reaches, after the fatigue of his struggle with the automatic process of association, and because of that fatigue, “the ultra-violet region of mental vision” (p. 165); and “the very effort leads to unification” (p. 45). At the same time Professor Howley knows, as a sincere student of psychology in the twentieth century is forced to know, that to base one’s whole religious faith on the psychological feeling of certainty is to leave oneself unshielded against the thought that certainty is not the same thing as truth. I could not read without a stab of sympathy his cry from the heart, “Is the sense of unity in totality, of indefectible certitude, hallucinatory? If so, the Catholic Church is one vast madhouse .. .” (ibid., p. 178).

The Ignatian Meditation has so far proved to be the most successful Christian expedient for directing thought and belief on to lines laid down beforehand by an act of will. In every branch of the Christian Church in which that act of will, among the whirl of modern historical and psychological criticism, is accepted as a duty, the Ignatian Meditation, or some modification of it, is increasingly used. The powerful Anglo-Catholic section of the Church of England is increasingly trusting to Retreats on the Ignatian model for the preservation of the faith. The Church Times, for instance, of October 5, 1923, in a leading article on “The future of the Retreat Movement,” said, “The Retreat ideal seized us all unready . . . we were too cursory in our study of the classic models, and notably, of course, of the Ignatian. . . . We have neglected, especially, to study the psychology of Retreats and of the Ignatian in particular. ... The rigours of a Retreat based upon the Ignatian principle will frighten some people, but the prospect of a series of thoughtful and pleasantly edifying addresses will not stir the emotions of any one.” To me, indeed, when I had been reading in the history of mysticism, there was something which sounded amateurish and half-hearted in the pronouncement of the American Episcopal House of Bishops on November 15, 1923: “So far from imposing fetters on our thought, the Creeds with their simple statements of great truths and facts without elaborate philosophical disquisition, give us a point of departure for free thought and speculation on the meaning and consequences of the facts revealed by God. The Truth is never a barrier to thought. In belief as in life, it is the truth that makes us free.” The American Anglican bishops desire, e.g., that their clergy should sit down to think of the birth-chapters in Matthew and Luke. If trains of thought start themselves as to the religious corollaries of the facts there stated, they are to let them proceed. If thoughts as to the inconsistency of the two narratives present themselves, or as to the relation of that inconsistency to the credibility of the narratives themselves, they are, apparently, to inhibit them by an effort of will. The Jesuits have proved that such an inhibition, even in young and eager minds, can still be brought about. It is to be done, however, not by vague talk about “free thought,” but by the full rigours of the Ignatian Meditation.

And in judging the value of the Ignatian Meditation as an expedient in the art of thought, one of the tests which we should apply to it, as to other forms of intellectual discipline, is an examination of its results. The Society of Jesus has been in existence for three hundred and ninety years. It has recruited members from among the ablest, most generous, and most devoted of the young Catholics of each generation, and has trained them by the methods of Saint Ignatius. It has, since its foundation, influenced the policy of some of the most powerful European States. What has been its effect in aiding the development of a peaceful, kindly, and progressive European civilization?

Notes

1See Baudouin, Suggestion and Auto-suggestion (pp. 22, 23).

1See above Chap. III, p. 72, on the illusion of great poetry, etc., occurring at the lower levels of consciousness. 2 Coleridge says that he composed “Kubla Khan” when sleeping in his chair from the effects of an anodyne. See Coleridge’s Poetical Works, edited by E. H. Coleridge (1912), Vol. I, p. 296.

1 See above pp. 55-56.

1 Ethics, Book II, Chap. III, § 5.

1See an interesting letter on Dr. De Lacy O’Leary’s Archaic Thought and its place in History, The Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 19, 1922.

1 Wace and Schaff, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (1894), Vol. XI, pp. 405-9.

1 Unfortunately some of the ugliest chapters in the history of religion are those in which the sexual instinct is aroused in its crudest form by religious observances. The cult of Adonis in the eastern Mediterranean was full of this element (see Frazer, Golden Bough, 1914; Part 4). The history of early Christian “meditation” shows how constantly those who gave themselves to contemplation were tormented by undesired invasions of sexual impulses, and how enormous a part the struggle against those impulses played in their lives (see e.g., Book VI in the Latin version of Cassian’s Institutes). It is fatally easy for such impulses to transfer themselves, even without the disguise of sublimation, to an imaged saint or deity. I was astonished to find, in reading the letters of spiritual direction sent by the well-known Mgr. d’Hulst to an aristocratic French married lady between the years 1875 and

1896, among a good deal of shrewd psychological advice, a number of passages whose intended and almost inevitable effect seemed to be the stimulation of crude sexual feeling towards an anthropomorphic conception of her Saviour. (See The Way of the Heart, by Mgr. d’Hulst (M. Le Sage d’Hauteroche), translated by W. H. Mitchell, 1913, especially pp. 2, 4, 5, 8, 73, 222 and xxv.) See also Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, 1925, pp. 137-55.