I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and
that fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may
have arisen among some of you as I announced my pathological
programme. At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the
religious life by its results exclusively, and I shall assume
that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize your piety no
more.

Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our
final spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten
us at all with so much existential study of its conditions? Why
not simply leave pathological questions out?

To this I reply in two ways. First, I say, irrepressible
curiosity imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it
always leads to a better understanding of a thing's significance
to consider its exaggerations and perversions its equivalents and
substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may
thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we
pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by
contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist,
by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of
corruption it may also be exposed.

Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special
factors of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them
unmasked by their more usual surroundings. They play the part in
mental anatomy which the scalpel and the microscope play in the
anatomy of the body. To understand a thing rightly we need to
see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have