The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, S. 830

BOOK 8

bility, the dear safety of the nursery again. McDougall gives a case of a wounded man, further distressed by the fear of air raids, who relapsed to childish crawling, childish ways of feeding, fretful crying and complete dependent helplessness. Slowly as fear ceased to press upon him, he grew up again. He is the type case of a whole series of such instances of retreat from adult distresses.

From such strange wholesale reversions, there are all grades and variations up to apparently normal people who merely prefer to look back instead of pushing forward with life. Regression in one form or another is one of the commonest symptoms of maladjustment, and one of the most potent causes of wasted human energy.

§ 8 Exaltation

The hysterical exaggeration of inhibition does not always recall the ideas of our greatgrandparents about diabolical possession. It may sometimes produce saints. The normal personality may be in conflict not only with tangles of suppressed desire of a lower moral type. Its aims and discretions may also be in conflict with excessively noble and generous impulses. And when the insurgent factor gets loose and is able to inhibit the normal motives of the personality, it may be that the inhibition is not of good, sane and high-minded activities, but of commonplace and lowly desires. ‘There is a higher as well as a lower hysteria. .

Many of those who are called mystics are the exalted outcome of a distressful mental conflict. ‘They may believe themselves, and other people may believe them, to be not “ possessed ’? but “‘ inspired.’? An inspiring force may be interpreted and personified in very different ways according to the atmosphere of ideas about the individual. The religious mystic finds it is his Divinity with whom he has become united and identified. The exalted naturalist, like the late Richard Jefferies, will find he is ‘‘ at one” with Nature.

We cannot go into all the fascinating questions involved in a full exploration of mystical experience. Sometimes it is the product of a special kind of training and concentration, jtst as is the power of following and appreciating a difficult mathematical theorem or a difficult piece of music ; and then its machinery has little in common with hysteria. But when there is repressed conflict in the mystic’s mind and a sudden illumination, then the machinery is similar,

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and then may show the completest parallelism with what we have identified as operating with demoniac possession.

In passing, let it not be supposed that the value of mystical experience is destroyed if we find out that it has a psychological cause within our own minds and is not due to a spirit or spirits outside and separate from us. To avoid theological entanglements, we can best illustrate the point from the experience of poets and artists ; though with the proviso that there seems no difference of principle between this and the experiences of religious mystics. When Wordsworth wrote of

“a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ”’

he was describing an experience which, however he or anybody else may interpret it, can become to any man, as it did to him, one of the mainsprings of life.

And whether we believe that Kubla Khan (which came to Coleridge in a dream) or Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind were inspired by some spirit or being other than themselves, or were the products of their own minds in a particular state of exaltation, the poems remain great poems, sources of joy and delight, things of permanent value.

The phenomena of religious experience may parallel those of morbid hysteria in the closest way. ‘The most remarkable among such parallelisms is undoubtedly what is called stigmatization—the appearance on the worshipper of marks like the wounds inflicted on Jesus at crucifixion. The most famous man to receive the stigmata was St. Francis of Assisi, but there are now several score cases (mostly women) on record, many of them quite recent, and authenticated without any shadow of doubt. In addition to the marks in hands, feet, and side, some have developed marks which simulate those made by scourging, by the crown of thorns, and so forth. In every case the stigmatization has: only appeared after prolonged meditation upon the passion and crucifixion. In some people, once initiated it was repeated at more or less regular intervals ; in Louise Lateau, a Belgian peasant girl who received the stigmata in 1868, they bled regularly every Friday. In those cases which have been at all properly looked into, it seems that the region affected becomes tender and red, with blood leaking out of the capillary walls. Almost always, there is acute pain in the region of the stigmata ; and sometimes only