the very letter of Fechner’s conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth’s inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us.  But those regions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an academic audience, and the only evidence I feel it now decorous to bring to the support of Fechner is drawn from ordinary religious experience.  I think it may be asserted that there are religious experiences of a specific nature, not deducible by analogy or psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience.  I think that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off.  I shall begin my final lecture by referring to them again briefly.

LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to the existence of religious experiences of a specific nature.  I must now explain just what I mean by such a claim.  Briefly, the facts I have in mind may all be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon death.  By this I don’t mean immortality, or the death of the body.  I mean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within the individual’s experience, processes that run to failure, and in some individuals, at least, eventuate in despair.  Just as romantic love seems a comparatively recent literary invention, so these experiences of a life that supervenes upon despair seem to have played no great part in official theology till Luther’s time; and possibly the best way to indicate their character will be to point to a certain contrast between the inner life of ourselves and of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Mr. Chesterton, I think, says somewhere, that the Greeks and Romans, in all that concerned their moral life, were an extraordinarily solemn set of folks.  The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves were apparently of much the same opinion.  Cato’s veracity was so impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of anything was to say, ’I would not believe it even if Cato had told me.’  Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people.  Hypocrisy, which church-Christianity brought in, hardly existed; the naturalistic system held firm; its values showed no hollowness and brooked no irony.  The individual, if virtuous enough, could meet all possible requirements.  The pagan pride had never crumbled.  Luther was the first moralist who broke with any effectiveness through the crust of all this naturalistic self-sufficiency, thinking (and possibly he was right) that Saint Paul