THE OPEN MIND LIBRARY BEING A SERIES OF WORKS DEALING WITH QUESTIONS AS HANDLED BY DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT, IN RELIGION, ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY & PSYCHOLOGY RELIGION & SEX STUDIES IN THE PATHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BY CHAPMAN COHEN T. N. FOULIS, PUBLISHER LONDON, EDINBURGH, & BOSTON _Published October 1919_ _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_ THE LIST OF CHAPTERS I. SCIENCE & THE SUPERNATURAL _page_ 1 II. THE PRIMITIVE MIND & ITS ENVIRONMENT 35 III. THE RELIGION OF MENTAL DISEASE 51 IV. SEX & RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE LIFE 89 V. THE INFLUENCE OF SEXUAL & PATHOLOGIC STATES ON RELIGIOUS BELIEF 120 VI. THE STREAM OF TENDENCY 145 VII. CONVERSION 169 VIII. RELIGIOUS EPIDEMICS 205 IX. RELIGIOUS EPIDEMICS--(_concluded_) 226 X. THE WITCH MANIA 243 XI. SUMMARY & CONCLUSION 269 PREFACE In spite of all that has been done in the way of applying scientific principles to religious ideas, there is much that yet remains to be accomplished. Generally speaking science has only dealt with the subject of religion in its more normal and more regularised forms. The last half-century has produced many elaborate and fruitful studies of the origin of religious ideas, while comparative mythology has shown a close and suggestive relationship between creeds and symbols that were once believed to have nothing in common. But beyond these fields of research there is at least one other that has hitherto been denied the attention it richly deserves. When the anthropologist has described those conditions of primitive culture amid which he believes religious ideas took their origin, and the comparative mythologist has shown us the similarities and inter-relations of widely separated creeds, religious beliefs have yet to submit to the test of a scientific psychology, the function of which is to determine how far the same principles apply to all phases of mental life whether religious or non-religious. Moreover, in addition to the normal psychical life of man, there is that vast borderland in which the normal merges into the abnormal, and the healthy state into a pathologic one. That there is a physiology of religion is now generally admitted; but that there is also a pathology of religion is not so generally recognised. The present work seeks to emphasise this last aspect. It does not claim to be more than an outline of the subject--a sketch map of a territory that others may fill in more completely.