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vol. title: vol. period: 1881 pages in vol.: 439 |
< Introduction to an Experiment Research (continued from page 11-288) >
me. I have preferred study to belief where I could not understand, and accordingly my opportunities as a physician have furnished me with occasions for providing myself with data for at any rate some superficial analysis of what may be called the Physiological Miracles of Holy Writ. We have human nature with us now as in those days, not much different in many respects, and certainly identical in its animal aspect. We have the same materials to experiment on as the men of old had, and we have better methods of recording and interpreting the results of such experiments.
More of the true significance of the nature of miracle can be understood from the study of its physiology than of its physics; for though by the aid of metaphysical abstractions we may persuade ourselves that any physical change, however stupendous, may be brought about, yet, as the details of the physical change cannot be followed, our solution, however satisfactory to ourselves, remains worthless as a matter of science.
Believing as I do that the domain of the physical universe is only to be successfully invaded from the frontiers of physiology, I have in my humble endeavours to grasp the import of the strange occurrences brought so prominently to notice during the last quarter of a century, endeavoured to picture them to myself as falling under certain corollaries to physiological propositions, the conservation of energy being always held in view. Thus if a man can pull against three horses or tear a beam of wood in two, the energy must come from his blood and tissues, though the mode of setting free that energy may involve a totally new psychical standpoint, and similarly in more complicated instances.
The healing influence of one individual upon another is the most fruitful corner of the field of miraculous record which the sober-minded rationalist sets himself to cultivate, and in connection with that subject it will be seen that the female nervous system and the functional element in disease, are points that are brought prominently forward in the expositions of the sacred writers.
Far be it from me to wish to be an offence to those who hold belief in the hard and fast facts of Christian miracles as recorded, to be essential to their salvation. From them I merely ask permission to speak rationally about miracles so far as I think it possible to apply my reason. Touching things up to which reason has not as yet taken its flight through the extension of acknowledged principles I remain silent, for the subject in old enough to keep a while longer.
In the meanwhile I would wish to call attention to the words “For I perceive that virtue is gone out of me;” and to the fact that contact was not necessary to the healing of the sick—“Yesterday, at the seventh hour, the fever left him,” being the corresponding instance of cure without contact and without faith, a reservation not addressed to Christians but to psychologist, in case they should have forgotten it In the first case the subjective recognition of a physical change is announced in terms of feeling, in the second an objective one is implied as depending for its physical causation upon just such another state of feeling as that which drew from the Healer the expression “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me,” with the single difference that in the one case the healing power was drawn from Him, in the other projected by Him: in either case “ there went virtue out of Him and healed them all.”
The question now arises:—Is this subject capable of being treated from the clinical point of view?
If I succeed in pointing out even a distant possibility of the reduction of such problems within the domain of natural knowledge, I feel I shall have done more honor to my profession and to myself than falls to the lot of many doctors.
The doctrines of Jesus and the position occupied by Jesus in the ranks of men need no apology from me. My business is with the relationship which the historical record of His life claims for his constitution, as that of a living being possessed of a nervous system and blood circulating machinery, with the constitution or diathesis of men and women met with every day, whom our modern physiological criticism enables us to group together from similarity of nervous perturbation, which may or may not in its departure from the standard, produce definite or useful results, the latter obtaining when the disturbing influence remove« itself from the body according to place.
Such of the physiological miracles as can be understood from the text, are matter of ordinary experience to those who have practically studied mesmerism and applied it to the cure of functional derangements.
The cases of death mentioned in the New Testament were to the eye of the rational believer cases of death short of dissolution, that is to say, to illustrate by an example, the stone was falling under the action of an acceleration, <... continues on page 11-290 >