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...