we shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete
religious evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious
belief confers. Take the trancelike states of insight into truth
which all religious mystics report.[8] These are each and all of
them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider
scope. Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have
qua religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is
happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the moment we
renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon
as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment
we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in
judging of values--who does not see that we are likely to
ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy
and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing
them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of
melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider
their place in any more general series, and treating them as if
they were outside of nature's order altogether?

I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this
supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many
religious phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or
disconcerting, even were such phenomena certified from on high to
be the most precious of human experiences. No one organism can
possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us
are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very
infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic
temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of
moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis
which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the