iments tried was enough to make them converts to the system. And
although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to
get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own
satisfaction any more than every one can be cured by the first regular
practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and
over-scrupulous for those who CAN get their savage and primitive
philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as
this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific
therapeutics.

What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim?

[64] See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by
friends.

I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the
least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during
this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are
like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair
than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end,
are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less
isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have
framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only
one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total
experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems
of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give
some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler,
while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or
postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting,
and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount
of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us
serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of
disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of
persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of
them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house to him who
can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is
exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And why,
after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many
interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in
alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different
attitudes, just as mathematicians