Medical  materialism  seems  indeed  a  good  appellation
for  the  too  simple-minded  system  of  thought  which  we
are  considering.  Medical  materialism  finishes  up  Saint
Paul  by  calling  his  vision  on  the  road  to  Damascus  a
discharging  lesion  of  the  occipital  cortex^  he  being  an
epileptic.  It  snuffs  out  Saint  Teresa  as  an  hysteric.  Saint
Francis  of  Assi^  as  an  hereditary  degenerate.  George
Fox's  discontent  with  the  shams  of  his  age,  and  his  pining
for  spiritual  veracity,  it  treats  as  a  symptom  of  a  disor-
dered colon.  Carlyle's  organ-tones  of  misery  it  accounts
for  by  a  gastro-duodenal  catarrh.  All  such  mental  .over-
tensions,  it  says,  are,  when  you  come  to  the  bottom  of
the  matter,  mere  affairs  of  diathesis  (auto-intoxications
most  probably),  due  to  the  perverted  action  of  various
glands  which  physiology  will  yet  discover.
And  medical  materialism  then  thinks  that  the  spiritual
authority  of  all  such  personages  is  successfully  under-
mined.^

Let  us  ourselves  look  at  the  matter  in  the  largest
possible  way.  Modern  psychology,  finding  definite  psy-
cho-physical connections  to  hold  good,  assumes  as  a  con-
venient hypothesis  that  the  dependence  of  mental  states
upon  bodily  conditions  must  be  thorough-going  and  com-
plete. If  we  adopt  the  assumption,  then  of  course  what
medical  materialism  insists  on  must  be  true  in  a  general

way,  if  not  in  every  detail :  Saint  Paul  certainly  had
once  an  epileptoid,  if  not  an  epileptic  seizure ;  George  Fox
was  an  hereditary  degenerate ;  Carlyle  was  undoubtedly
auto-intoxicated  by  some  organ  or  other,  no  matter  which,

^  For  a  first-rate  example  of  medical-materialist  reasoning,  see  an  article
on  *les  Varidt^a  da  Type  ddvot/  by  Dr.  Binet-Sangl^,  in  the  Revue  de
VHypnotisme,  ziv.  161.
