Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/96

90 of the most remarkable religious movements of the nineteenth century was that inaugurated by Joseph Smith, Jr., from 1820 to 1830. The announcement of the finding of a set of golden plates hidden in a hill in New York state and revealed to the prophet of the Almighty; said plates when interpreted by the prophet proving to be the history of the lost ten tribes of Israel, their journeying to America, their identification with the Indians, their further trials and tribulations, and their ultimate salvation and reconstruction in the Church of the Latter Day Saints,—this is indeed a sufficiently fantastic story. Mr. I. W. Riley devotes a volume (Dodd, Mead & Co.) to an analysis of the character of the founder of this sect. His interest is not in what the man did and the ultimate consequences of his establishment of a peculiar sect, but in the motives and impulses that led to the doing of it and to its successful propagandum. The study is psychological; and in the abnormal mentality of the founder Mr. Riley finds the clue to his actions. The tale is by no means complete, but the author has been most diligent in his search; and circumstantial evidence and arguments by analogy reach a high degree of probability. As a young man, Smith gave evidence of epileptic attacks; he was given to visions and was absorbed in crass forms of religious devotion; the 'Book of Mormons' was dictated while the author was in a semi-hypnotic condition sel-finduced, and directing his thoughts to the conviction of his own inspiration; his first converts were themselves credulous and suggestible, and the testimony of the witnesses to the vision of the plates was probably the result of a hypnotic suggestion. In brief, a study of abnormal psychological states convinces the author that Joseph Smith was a neurotic degenerate, with an ancestry of like temperament, and that his revelations were the riotous imaginings of his automatic imagination, exhibiting the kind of shrewdness and adaptation to existing conditions often to be found in mental products of such origin. The cumulative evidence for this view can be appreciated only by a direct reading of the book; it forms an interesting example of the application of modern psychological conceptions to the comprehension of a most unusual factor in the religious history of this country.