to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the
dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be
thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of
course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a
general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had
once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was
an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly
auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which--and the
rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of
facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their
spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of
psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our
states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some
organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are
organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are;
and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should
doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy
atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under
conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the
blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another
way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and
our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and
beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious
or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind,
then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual
value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has
already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory
connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of