teth after thee, O my
God:" God's Breath in Man is the title of the chief work of our best
known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris), and in certain
non-Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline
consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration.

These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor
of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say
that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main
phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will
say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore
synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort
again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as
a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the
entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might
then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics,
chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during
adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a
perversion of the sexual instinct:--but that would be too absurd.
Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be
done with the fact that the religious age par excellence would seem to
be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past?

The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look
at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment
one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from
the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two
things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled
to. Any GENERAL assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most
often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the
sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that
without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the
blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious
activities, this final proposition may be true or not true; but at any
rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no
consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or
value. In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the
spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and
the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vag