can such an existential
account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon
their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of
psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of
mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process
as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just
as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts
intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the
dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the
Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in
one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in
another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures
and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and
beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of
non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite
illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance
some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with
determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our
thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our
DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for
every one of them without exception flows from the state of its
possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact
no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every
simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to
others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of
an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the
production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them;
and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely
associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names
connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with
ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind
superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their
organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different
reasons. It is either