eves that the psychomedical treatment
demands a new equilibrium of the patient to be secured by religion,
there the minister should be called for assistance. Psychotherapeutic
hospitals would offer the most favorable conditions for such
cooeperation. But the minister ought to enter even such a hospital with a
strictly spiritual aim, and he should never forget that the task of the
church stands much higher than the utilitarian task of removing pain
from the sick room. But if those psychotherapeutic hospitals will
flourish and the physicians will at last make use of psychical factors
in their regular practice, they ought not to forget on their part that
the important step forward was taken under the pressure of popular
religious movements. The ministers first saw what the physicians ought
to have seen before, but the physicians will see it more fully and more
correctly.

XIII

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE PHYSICIAN

Every thought of the physician moves in a world the structure of which
is determined by the thought forms of cause and effect. He knows the
effect which he wants to produce; it is the restitution of the organic
equilibrium. He studies the causes which can secure that end. And again
the disturbance of the equilibrium itself, the disease, is for him an
effect which he seeks to understand by an analysis of the preceding
causes. The means which he applies can therefore be valued only in
reference to their efficiency; no other point of view belongs to his
world. The religiously valuable may be indifferent or even undesirable
in the interplay of causes, and the morally indifferent may be most
important for the physician's interests. The religious emotion
accordingly has to stand in line with any other mental excitement or
with a hundred physical means which the laboratory and the drug store
supply. The physician will welcome the methods of treatment without
reference to metaphysical systems or to religious beliefs. To him it is
an empirical fact that many disturbances of mind and body which
interfere with the equilibrium of life can be repaired by influences on
certain psychophysical organs. A part of these repairing influences he
finds in the sense stimuli, for instance, of spoken or written words
which reach the brain and awaken associative and reactive processes. He
finds further that these influences can be reenforced in their
effectiveness by certain general conditions of the nervous system and
again finds