4. _Permanent values of the ancient theory._ And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-physical states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic study. For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more and more, how real and remarkable are certain psycho-physical states and facts, whether simply morbid or fruitfully utilized states, so long derided, by the bulk of Scientists, as mere childish legend or deliberate imposture; and to see how natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both of the Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will neither measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them, nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admirable models of sympathetic docility towards facts, in the works of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his medico-psychological investigations of present-day morbid cases; of Hermann Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times and writings; and of William James, in his study of instances of various kinds, both past and present.[8] And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are turning out, more and more, to be the direct or indirect consequence of the action of mind: no doubt, in the first instance, of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-willing and automatically operative. And at the same time this action is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed, in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism. Yet if we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly active, limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we have also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless effect of mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet’s writings, those of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père Coconnier’s very sensible book register a mass of material, although of the morbid type.[9] And further, such remarkable peripheral states and phenomena are getting again to be rightly looked for in at least some types of unusual spiritual insight and power (although such states are found to be indicative, in exact proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a substantially different mental and moral condition of soul). Witness again the Unitarian Prof. James’s _Varieties_, and the Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German scholars Weinel, Bernoulli, and Duhm.[10]