affiliated to the phenomena described as non-religious, it must be shown—beyond all possibility of doubt—that their explanation in terms of known forces is impossible. As I have said in the body of this work, the question at issue is essentially one of

interpretation. The 'facts' of the religious life are admitted. Science no more questions the reality of the visions of the medieval mystic than it questions the visions of the non-mystic admittedly suffering from neural derangement. The crucial question is whether we have any good reason for separating the two, and while we dismiss the one as hallucination accept the other as introducing us to another order of being? I do not think there is the slightest ground for any such differentiation, and I have given in the following pages what I conceive to be good reasons for so thinking. And I hope that the fact of the explanations there offered running counter to the traditional one will not prevent readers weighing with the utmost care the proofs that are offered.

RELIGION AND SEX
CHAPTER ONE
SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Accepting Professor Tylor's famous minimum definition of religion as "the belief in Spiritual Beings," it is safe to say that religious belief constitutes one of the largest facts in human history. No other single subject has occupied so large a share of man's conscious life, no other subject has absorbed so much of his energy. In very early stages of culture religious belief is universal in the fullest sense of the word. It shapes all primitive institutions; it dominates life from the cradle to the grave, and creates a shadow-land beyond the grave from which the dead continue to influence the actions of the living. At a later stage of culture we see a distinction being drawn between the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the spiritual, and the beginning of an antagonism that is still with us. Of all antagonisms conceived by the brain of man this is the deepest and the most irreconcilable. Each feels that the growth of the other threatens its own supremacy, with the result that advance from either side has been contested with the greatest obstinacy and determination. And although it is true that at present the supernatural is very largely "suspect," it is still powerful. Nor is its influence confined to the lower strata of European society. It has very many representatives among the higher culture, disguised it may be under various pseudo-philosophic forms. Altogether we may say that the supernatural has never been without its "cloud of witnesses." At all times there have been individuals,

or groups of individuals, who have believed themselves, and have been believed by others, to be in touch with another order of existence than that with which people are normally in contact. And apart from these specially favoured persons, the wide vogue of the belief in good and evil portents, in lucky and unlucky days, the attraction of the "occult" in fiction and in fact, all serve as evidence that belief in the supernatural is still a force with which one has to reckon.

To what causes are we to attribute the persistence of this belief in the supernatural? It is useless replying that its persistence is evidence of its truth. That clearly begs the whole question at issue. Mere social heredity will doubtless count for much in this direction. Men do not start their thinking afresh with each generation. It is based upon that of preceding generations; it follows set forms, and is generally influenced by that network of ideas and beliefs into which we are born and from which none of us ever completely escapes. Still that is hardly enough in itself to account for the persistence of supernaturalism. Assuming that originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good or bad. All evidence, it is important to bear in mind, is good to some one. The "facts" upon which thousands of people were put to death

for witchcraft would not be considered evidence to anyone nowadays, but they were once accepted as good ground for conviction.

What kind of evidence is it, then, that has been accepted as proof of the supernatural? Or, to return to Tylor's definition of religion, seeing that the belief in spiritual beings has persisted in every generation, upon what kind of evidence has this belief been nourished? Various replies might be given to this question, all of which may contain some degree of truth, or an aspect of a general truth. In the present enquiry I am concerned with one line of investigation only, one that has been strangely neglected, but which yet, I am convinced, promises fruitful results. In other directions it has been established that a great aid to an understanding of the human organism in times of health is to study its activities under conditions of disease. Abnormal psychology is now a recognised branch of psychology in general, and a glance through almost any recent text-book will show that the two form parts of a natural whole. The normal and the abnormal are in turn used to throw light on each other. And it appears to the present writer that in the matter of religious beliefs a much clearer understanding of their nature, and also of some of the conditions of their perpetuation, may be gained by a study of what has happened, and is happening, in the light of mental pathology.

To some, of course, the bare idea of there being a pathology of religion will appear an entirely unwarrantable assumption. On the other hand, the scientific study of all phases of religions having made so great headway it is hoped that a larger number will be prepared

for a discussion of the subject from a point of view which, if not quite new, is certainly not common. Of course, such a discussion, even if the author quite succeeds in demonstrating the truth of his thesis, will still leave the origin of the religious idea an open question. For the present we are not concerned directly with the origin of the religious idea, but with an examination of some of the causes that have served to perpetuate it, and to trace the influence in the history of religion of states of mind, both personal and collective, that are now admittedly abnormal or pathological in character. The legitimacy of the enquiry cannot be questioned. As to its value and significance, that every reader must determine for himself.

One may put the essential idea of the following pages in a sentence:—Given the religious idea as already existing, in what way, and to what extent has its development been affected by forces that are not in themselves religious, and which modern thought definitely separates from religion?

Under civilised and uncivilised conditions we find religious beliefs constantly associated with various forces—social, ethical, and psychological. Very seldom is there any serious attempt to separate them and assign to each their respective value; nor, indeed, is the task at any time an easy one. The difficulty is made the greater by the way in which writers so enlarge the meaning of "religion" that it is made to include almost everything for which one feels admiration or respect. This practice is neither helpful nor accurate. Human nature under all aspects of intellectual conviction presents the same