much as our sensibilities; we do not now believe that God takes
pleasure in sufferings inflicted in His honour. Moreover, the erotic
symbolism of the visions is occasionally unpleasant: we are no
longer in the company of such sane and healthy people as Eckhart and
Tauler. The half-sensuous pleasure of ecstasy was evidently a
temptation to Suso, and the violent alternations of rapture and
misery which he experienced suggest a neurotic and ill-balanced
temperament.[26]

On this subject--the pathological side of mysticism--a few remarks
will not be out of place, for there has been much discussion of it
lately. A great deal of nonsense has been written on the connexion
between religion and neuroticism. To quote Professor James' vigorous
protest, "medical materialism finishes up St Paul by calling his
vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital
cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out St Teresa as an
hysteric, St Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George
Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for
spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.
Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal
catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come
to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis
(auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of
various glands which physiology will yet discover."[27] Now, even if
it were true that most religious geniuses, like most other geniuses,
have been "psychopaths" of one kind or another, this fact in no way
disposes of the value of their intuitions and experiences. Nearly
all the great benefactors of humanity have been persons of
one-sided, and therefore ill-balanced, characters. Even Maudsley
admits that "Nature may find an incomplete mind a more suitable