LECTURE 01: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this

desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of

receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of

European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not

a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from

Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or

literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to

cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were

visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the

Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans

listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure

it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.

Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American

imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of

this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.

Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the

first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe‐

struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s

class‐room therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first

philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was

immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of

reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self

promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official

here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries

with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that

it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic

obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say

only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to

run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go

by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the

Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the

United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher

matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,

as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English

speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.

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As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this

lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the

history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch

of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the

religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other

of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,

therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to

invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.

If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather

religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must

confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in

literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works

of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of

a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its...