The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

Appendix

(See note to p. 121.)

CASE I. “My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one
of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been
a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and
writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out
from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great
exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest
standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me
I had had great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when
I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things
that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it;
I had no great hope of getting any good from it—it was a chance
I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new
possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only
chance I then could see. I went to X. in Boston, from whom some
friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help;
the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little
carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted
was that of another person’s thought or feeling silently projected
on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as
we sat still together. I believed from the start in the
possibility of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to
shape, helping or hindering, the body’s nerve‐activities, and I
thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief
in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any
mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that
might have brought imagination strongly into play.