No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them
here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love
of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too
glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to
impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such
works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to
enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments.[4] But for
the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the
medical line of attack either confines itself to such secular
productions as everyone admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or
else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations.
And then it is because the religious manifestations have been
already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or
spiritual grounds.

[4] Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.



In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to
anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's
neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by
logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's
neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious
opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual
judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own
immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can
ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and
to the rest of what we hold as true.