The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

It is difficult to say why this is so. As in every form of hysteria, suggestion is, of course, an important factor; but the manifestations are so marked that there must be some special disposition thereto. It almost seems as if a lack of other stimulants produced a pathological demand for religious excitement. Certainly in those portions of the country which are most affected, the life of the great masses, at least until recently, has been colourless and dull. There has been no stimulation of the fancy, such as is afforded by the Catholic Church, or in former days was provided by the romantic events of monarchical history. People have lacked the stimulation of amusements, festivals, the theatre and music; daily life has been hard, morality rigorous, and alcohol was thought sinful. Where religion has been the single intellectual stimulus, it has become an intoxicant for the pining soul: and persons drank until they obtained a sort of hysterical relief from deadly reality.

The seeds of mysticism easily take root on such a soil, and it is no accident that the chief mystical movements of our times have gone on in America, the country which so many suppose to be the theatre of purely material interests. Here we find, first of all, the Spiritualistic movement which began in 1848, when mysterious knockings were heard by the Fox family in a village of New York State. The sounds were interpreted as messages from dead friends, and as soon as these spirits commenced their material manifestations it was only a short step for them to appear in person. The leading card of Spiritualism is its supposed proof of life after death, and all its other features are secondary.

On the other hand, it is natural for a teaching which depends on such mysterious phenomena to turn its interest to other supposably unexplained phenomena, and therewith to become a general rallying-ground for mysticism. Although the Spiritualistic Church has about fifty thousand members, these are by no means all of the actual Spiritualists in America. Indeed, if Spiritualism were to be taken in a broader sense, including a belief in telepathic influences, mysterious communications, etc., the number of believers would mount into the millions, with some adherents in the most highly educated circles. Even in enlightened Boston a Spiritualistic church stands in the best section of the town. Its services have been grievously exposed from time to time, but the deceptions have been quickly forgotten, and this successful “religious” enterprise is once more given credence. A short time ago, in Philadelphia, the spirit of Darwin was constrained to write a pious final contribution to his works for the benefit of a well-paying audience, on a typewriter which stood in the middle of the room, and which, of course, could be easily operated electrically from some other room.

To be sure, it would be unfair to say that all spiritualism is based on deception, although the lively wish to see dead relatives, or receive communications from them, puts a high premium on the pious fraud. Indeed, it would be over-hasty to say that all the spiritualistic conceptions go against the laws of nature; for, since the philosophy of Spiritualism has conceived of an ether organism which pervades the molecular body and survives death, it has fairly cleverly met the demands of casual explanation. And it may well be thought probable that in the world of mental influences there is much remaining to be found out, just as a hundred years ago there were hypnotism and Röntgen rays; so that the zeal of very many people to assist in the solving of these mysteries is, perhaps, easily understood.

But just where these most serious motives prevail and all idea of conscious deception is excluded, one sees the profound affiliation of intellectual interests with the mystical tendency. Even the Society for Psychical Research, which aims to investigate mysterious phenomena in a thoroughly scientific way, has, after all, mostly held the interest of men who are more inclined to mysticism than to science. Mrs. Piper, of Arlington, may be called the most important spiritualistic medium, and Hodgson her most interesting prophet. The whole movement is, after all, religious. Spiritualism has a near neighbour in Theosophy, which is specially strong in California. The great literary charm of Hindu philosophy makes this form of mysticism more attractive to minds that are repelled by its vulgar forms. Hindu mysticism has, undoubtedly, a future in America.

There is a still larger circle of people who believe in Christian Science, the discovery of Mary Baker G. Eddy. When Mrs. Eddy suffered a severe illness at Lynn in 1867, she was seized by the idea that all illness might be only an illusion or hallucination of the soul, since God alone is real, and in Him there can be naught but good. It was therefore necessary only to realize this deceptive unreality, in order to relieve the soul of its error and so to regain health. She herself became well and proceeded to read her principle of mental healing into the Bible, and so to develop a metaphysical system. She commenced her work of healing without medicine, and in 1875 published her book, “Science and Health, With a Key to the Holy Scriptures.” The book is a medium-sized work, has a system not unskilfully constructed, although unskilfully expressed, and one who is familiar with the history of philosophy will find in it not one original thought. In spite of this, the book must be called one of the most successful of modern times. It is a rather expensive book, but has been bought by the hundreds of thousands. Congregations have formed all over the country, and built some magnificent churches; and, finally, the infectious bacillus of this social malady has been wafted across the ocean. The great feature of this new sect is its practice of healing; there are to-day some thirty institutions giving instruction in the art of metaphysical healing, and the public supports thousands of spiritual healers.

The movement is benefited by the general mistrust of academic medicine which pervades the lower classes of America, as may be seen from the ridiculous popularity of patent medicines. The cult is also undoubtedly helped by actual and often surprising cures. The healing power of faith is no new discovery; the effects of auto-suggestion are always important in nervous disorders, and there are indeed few pathological conditions in which nervous disorders do not play a part. Mrs. Eddy’s disciples, in their consultation offices, do with the help of the inner consistency of their metaphysical system, which the logic of the average patient cannot break down, what Catholicism does at Lourdes by stimulating the imagination. The main support of Christian Science is, after all, the general mystical and religious disposition. Where religion plays such a mighty rôle in the popular mind, religious vagaries and perversions must be the order of the day; but even the perversions show how thoroughly the whole American people is pervaded by the religious spirit.

Not only would it be unfair to estimate the religion of America by its perversions, but even if the religious life of the country were amply described in the many forms of its conservative congregations and confessions, the most important thing would be still unmentioned: the spirit of moral self-perfection common to all the religions of the country. To be sure, it is not to be supposed that all the morality in this nation is of religious origin. One sees clearly that this is not the case if one looks at American social ethics, which are independent of religious ethics, and if one notices how often motives from the two spheres unite in bringing about certain actions. The Americans would have developed a marked morality if they had not been brought up in church; but the church has co-operated, specially when the nation was young and when far-reaching impulses were being developed. And while the forms of faith have changed, the moral ideas have remained much the same.

Benjamin Wadsworth was president of Harvard College in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and no greater religious contrast could be found than that between him and his present successor in office; between the orthodox Calvinist who said that it is by God’s unmerited grace that we are not all burning in the flames of hell, as our sins so richly deserve, and the liberal Unitarian of to-day. And yet President Eliot could rightly say that, even after these two hundred years, he gladly subscribes to all the moral tenets of his early predecessor. Wadsworth exhorted parents to teach their sons to live soberly, virtuously, and in the fear of God; to keep them from idleness, pride, envy, and malice; to teach them simple, kindly, and courteous behaviour; to see that they learn to be useful in the world, and so marry and carry on their daily business as to avoid temptation and to grow in grace and in the fear of God.

Benjamin Franklin’s catalogue of virtues which he desired to realize in himself, was: temperance, silence, order, simplicity, industry, honesty, justice, self-restraint, purity, peacefulness, continence, and modesty. In this he was not thinking of the church, but his worldly morals came to much the same thing as the Puritan’s ethics. The goal is everywhere moral self-perfection—to learn, first of all, to govern one’s natural desires, not for the sake of the effect on others, but for the effect on one’s self. To put it extremely, the religious admonition might have read: Give, not that your neighbour may have more, but that you may have less; not in order to give your neighbour pleasure, but to discipline yourself in overcoming greed. The social morality developed the opposite motives; and even to-day the joining of both tendencies may be followed everywhere, and especially in many philanthropic deeds. The two extremes go together: social enthusiasm for being helpful, and the fundamentally religious instinct to give alms.