anxieties which good health would dissipate. We fear and scorn "materialism." But he who knew all about it, and could apply his knowledge, might become the preacher of a new gospel. Not, however, through the ecstatic moments of the individual does such knowledge come, but through the revelations of science, in connection with the history of mankind.
Why should the Roman Catholic Church call gluttony a mortal sin? Why should prayer and fasting occupy a place in the disciplines of a religion? What is the meaning of Luther's advice to the young clergyman who came to him, perplexed with the difficulty of predestination and election, if it be not that, in virtue of its action upon the brain, when wisely applied, there is moral and religious virtue even in a hydro-carbon? To use the old language, food and drink are creatures of God, and have therefore a spiritual value. The air of the Alps would be augmented tenfold in purifying power if this truth were recognized. Through our neglect of the monitions of a reasonable materialism we sin and suffer daily. I might here point to the train of deadly disorders over which science has given modern society such control—disclosing the lair of the material enemy, insuring his destruction, and thus preventing that moral squalor and hopelessness which habitually tread on the heels of epidemics in the case of the poor.
Rising to higher spheres, the visions of Swedenborg, and the ecstasy of Plotinus and Porphyry, are phases of that psychical condition, obviously connected with the nervous system and state of health, on which is based the Vedic doctrine of the absorption of the individual into the universal soul. Plotinus taught the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy. Porphyry complains of having been only once united to God in eighty-six years, while his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years.[1] A friend who knew Wordsworth informs me that the poet, in some of his moods, was accustomed to seize hold of an external object to assure himself of his own bodily existence. The "entranced mind" of Mr. Page-Roberts, referred to so admiringly by the Spectator, is a similiar phenomenon. No one, I should say, has had a wider experience in this field than Mr. Emerson. As states of consciousness those phenomena have an undisputed reality, and a substantial identity. They are, however, connected with the most heterogeneous objective conceptions. Porphyry wrote against Christianity; Mr. Page-Roberts is a devout Christian. But notwithstanding the utter discordance of these objective conceptions, their subjective experiences are similar, because of the similarity of their finely-strung nervous organizations.
But, admitting the practical facts, and acting on them, there will always remain ample room for speculation. Take the argument of the Lucretian. As far as I am aware, not one of my assailants has attempted to answer it. Some of them, indeed, rejoice over the ability
- ↑ See Dr. Draper's important work, "Conflict between Religion and Science."
