sults, in any case it is certainly not an
effort which can be said to be in harmony with modern science. The idea
of science is always to understand the complex from its elements and to
restore the disturbed complex object by recognizing the disturbances in
the elements and by bringing those disturbed elements into right shape
again. Certainly the psychologist, too, in examining carefully the
injured mental mechanism may discover emotional injuries which might be
cured by the introduction of religious ideas, but he will not give to
them a value different from the introduction of any other ideas and
emotions, for instance, those of art and music and poetry, those of
social company or civic interest, of travel or sport or politics. Each
may have its particular value and to cure every mind with religious
emotion would be from a psychological point of view as one-sided as it
would be to cure every disturbed stomach by milk alone. Moreover in very
frequent cases, for instance, of neurasthenia or hysteria or
psychasthenia, such wholesale remedies can form only the background of
the treatment, but all the details have to be furnished with reference
to a most subtle analysis of the special symptoms, and a particular
organic symptom or a particular memory idea or a special inhibition by a
well-selected counter-idea will do much more than any great emotional
revival.

Stereotyped religious appeal is not only insufficient in an abundance of
cases--it must never be forgotten that those who nowadays go to the
minister for their health are already selected cases more open to
religious suggestion than the average--but can easily be decidedly
harmful. Of course that holds true for every physical remedy too, and
the judgment of the exact limit is one of the chief duties of the
physician. It holds also for the other mental factors like sympathy. A
certain amount of sympathy may save a neurasthenic from despair, and
only a little more may make his disease much worse and may develop in
him a consciousness of misery which makes him a complete invalid. Still
more is it true for the religious emotion, from the standpoint of
nervous physiology the strongest next to the sexual emotion, that it can
be the healing drug or the destructive poison. Everything depends upon
the degree of the intrusion and upon the resistance of the
psychophysical system. From a purposive point of view there cannot be
faith enough, from a causal point of view there can