• LECTURE 01: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

  • Jul 4 2024
  • Length: 43 mins
  • Podcast

LECTURE 01: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

  • Summary

  • 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.


    ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐


    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...

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