expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and
hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities,
our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of
the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism
could be made to hold its tongue.

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too
simple-minded system of thought which we are considering.
Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision
on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital
cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an
hysteric, Saint 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 overtensions, 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. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual
authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.[2]

[2] For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning,
see an article on "les varietes du Type devot," by Dr.
Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.



Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way.
Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections