Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/129

 with many actual sense perversions. Such, I mean, as have ever been associated with the ideas of the supernatural.

These are not necessarily caused by religious over-excitement or enthusiasm. They may assume the appearance of it, because, being the deepest and most real feelings, desires, and convictions of the perverted organic life or of the moral reaction which accompanies it, they cannot well be expressed or described except in strong moral terms. Over and over again does this appear, and often among those least likely to be suspected of any religious predisposition. That these feelings should be clothed according to the prevailing ideas and creed of the patient is an essential reproduction of the mind. But, after all, this only relates to the form of their appearance, and there are many things which lie deeper.

Religious excitement is not infrequently assigned as a cause of insanity. The writer has stated elsewhere his belief that the philosophy of the infinite, far from being a source of aberrations of thought which may be deemed insane, is the ultimate point of our mental evolution, and that a true and philosophical religion raises the mind above a mere incidental emotionalism and gives stability. With no religion and no moral obligation the organism