Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

that case; belief could never have the certainty that it was in conformity with experience, nor an instant's confidence as to what would come to pass next; it would be no matter thenceforth how many miracles, big or little, occurred, nor how often or how seldom they occurred: the universe would practically be a chaos, not a cosmos. If the law of gravitation can be suspended even for a second of time without the universe going to wreck, then it is clear that there is no law of gravitation at all.*

Were the theoretical arguments for supernatural communications of any worth, the communications themselves could not fail to seriously weaken them, seeing how uncertain, confused, contradictory, and sometimes ridiculous they are, and that they are invariably rejected by those who, not believing, need to be convinced, and invariably accepted by those who, believing, have no need to be convinced. Comparing, then, as Hume recommends, the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men with the instances of the violation of the laws of nature by supernatural

*To base an argument against the perpetual uniformity of nature within the range of human knowledge, and for miraculous interventions, on the plea that human will intervenes to control and guide and otherwise modify natural events, is to base it on an ignorance of what the actual conditions of will are, and on the assumption that it is free from all conditions, on a capacity to be satisfied with barren conceptions, and on an innocent willingness to be duped by words.

visions and voices, in order to judge which of them is least extraordinary and most likely to happen, we should have to admit that the veracity of the testimony in such case would be a more extraordinary and miraculous event than the event which it is adduced to establish.

CHAPTER IV.

MANIA AND DELUSION.

HAVING said so much concerning hallucination, its interpretation and its misinterpretations, there is no need to say much concerning the features of more positive mental disorder. If a person has an insane hallucination and, believing it not insane, suffers it to affect his thoughts and conduct, it is evident that his reason shares in the disorder; for if reason were not overruled and deluded, it might be expected to reason against it, if not to reason it away, and in any event to keep it sequestered in harmless isolation, as a sort of mental alien, instead of receiving it into its intimacy, naturalizing it there, and admitting it to full rights of mental citizenship.

It is not very easy to conceive now that the incoherent ravings of madness were ever thought to be the utterances of a god in possession of the man, but so it certainly was in olden times.* In the

* Ούδεις ἔννους μαντεύεται, said Philo; i.e. No one prophesies who is in his right mind.

Hebrew and Greek languages, the same words were used to denote the ravings of insanity and the often equally unintelligible ravings of the diviner or revealer of divine things; so that it became necessary, in the course of time, to distinguish the mania which was the result of madness and proceeded from disease, from the mania which was the result of inspiration and proceeded from the gods or God. In both cases the individual was transported by a mysterious power into a mental state in which he became the organ of strange utterances; only it was perceived soon in some cases that the cause must be disease, whether devil-inflicted or not, the thoughts, feelings, words, and conduct of the individual being thoroughly insensate and destructive of all social order; while in the other cases, where the oracle was delivered in a more sober fashion and with greater mental composure, the notion of a supernatural cause preserved its credit for a long time, lost it very slowly, and has not even yet been entirely relinquished.*

* They were driven to distinguish alienation of reason, where the reason was disordered, from alienation from reason, where the reason was suspended and the individual spoke and acted in obedience to irresistible power. (See Clissold, op. cit., p. 163.) The mad things done and said by the latter were in no way the result of his reason, and therefore he was not mad. If a man make supernatural claims among a people who see nothing extraordinary in such claims, never for a moment regarding them as hallucinations and madness, he is practically not mad then and there, although he might be very mad if he made them here and now.

It was no objection to the ravings of the inspired person that they were as unintelligible nonsense, to all outward seeming, as those of the madman. That was their sacred seal and privilege, the prophet or interpreter being the necessary complement of the utterer of divine oracles; his was the function to expound the meaning of the incoherent utterances which the God-struck person-the theoleptic-poured out under divine compulsion; he was always one who, like Daniel, "had understanding in all visions and dreams," and to whom they revealed their dark and sometimes awful meaning, as the mysterious writing on Belshazzar's wall revealed to Daniel Belshazzar's awful doom. To the one was given "divers kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues;" "for he that speaketh in a tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God; for no man understandeth." Greater, then, according to Paul, was he that prophesied (that is, expounded the dark oracles) than he who spake in tongues, since the Church received no edifying from the latter, except he were interpreted.* Moreover, the confusion would be so great, if many were assembled and all spake with tongues, that unlearned or unbelieving persons would of a certainty

* The meaning of the word "prophet" was not then, as now, one who predicted events to come, but one who interpreted and expounded mysterious ravings, dark oracles, unknown tongues, and the like unintelligible utterances of the God-possessed person.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »