re
different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more
formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a
mal-adjustment with THINGS, a wrong correspondence of one's life with
the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least,
upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the
things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go
merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is
no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but
something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his
essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any
superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which
requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have
leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of
ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic
races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a
capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural
subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal
operations.[70] These comparisons of races are always open to
exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined
to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling,
being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for
our study.

[70] Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim.

Recent psychology has found great use for the word "threshold" as a
symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes
into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness
in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer
stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a
high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with
a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is
sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has
a low "difference- threshold"--his mind easily steps over it into the
consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might
speak of a "pain-threshold," a "fear-threshold," a "misery-threshold,"
and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some
individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their
consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live ha