"Will you take the desire away?" But it only kept saying, “Louisa, lay down smoking." Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantelshelf, and never smoked again, or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again.'

In the breaking of habits there is clearly a conflict between the old habitual course of action and a new set of nervous discharges which are trying to establish themselves. In the midst of the conflict there is pain. The continued trying, together with a corresponding cerebral growth in the direction of the effort, or of the external influence, cause the energy finally to shoot into the new direction, and the new thing is accomplished. In the last two instances above, one sees that at the critical point in the change the person is either an actor or largely an observer, as was true in conversion. In the last case, the ripening has gone on unconsciously, so that the final impulse comes to consciousness as something from without, as a sort of voice. The 'double think" seems to indicate that both courses of action—the old habitual one and the one just sprouting-have worth to consciousness at the same

time.

In these common experiences we find analogies to all the steps of conversion, even the most unaccountable and mysterious. Now let us think clearly on the significance of them. They do not explain conversion. The breaking of a habit, as far as ultimate explanation goes, is itself as mysterious as anything that happens in consciousness. These facts do make intelligible, however, the processes involved in conversion in the same way that any natural phenomena come to be understood. They help us to see a little way into the mental operations concerned in conversion. They also make it clear that, however inexplicable, the facts of conversion are manifestations of natural processes. We accept them as natural laws, because we see them

working here and there and everywhere in the psychic life.

Each of the above phenomena seems to be the special thing of which conversion is the general. To break a habit involves one small group of tastes, or desires, or faculties; conversion takes the whole bundle of them. It is not a surprise that a habit should be broken and never return. It is perhaps even more natural and easy that the entire group of tastes, desires and habits which make up a character should be radically changed; it is easier to take the whole skein than to extricate one tangled thread. It is this fact, doubtless, which makes it necessary that conversion be a complete surrender; assurance comes only when the entire being is given over to the new life. As with habits, so with the flashes of intellectual insight we have just noticed; an awakening to one specific truth involves one faculty, the great awakening of conversion into a new world of spiritual insight is so inclusive that we fitly call it a second birth. Each of the experiences described above is a part, of which conversion is the whole.

CHAPTER XII

A GENERAL VIEW OF CONVERSION

WE have followed through the various facts of conversion and seen, in some detail, their mutual relations; we have occasionally stopped to look into their significance when one set of phenomena has seemed to illuminate another. Now we have to view the facts as a whole and see them in their larger connections, and get at some things, if possible, which are central and fundamental in the process. We shall be concerned especially with the fuller psychological interpretation of the facts themselves; but before proceeding to that, we shall take up some sociological, biological and physiological considerations which the study of conversion suggests, and which in turn tend to bring the whole system of facts into unity.

A Sociological and Biological View.

Conversion is primarily an unselfing. The first birth of the individual is into his own little world. He is controlled by the deep-seated instincts of self-preservation and self-enlargement-instincts which are, doubtless, a direct inheritance from his brute ancestry. The universe is organised around his own personality as a centre. He is not conscious of it, however, except in an instinctive, emotional way, when it tends to make or mar the integrity of his own individuality. His own will and well-being are the controlling forces within him. But he soon becomes a conscious being and

K

moves on towards a period of self-consciousness. There is a world outside the self, a world-order and social organism whose demands begin to press in on the dawning consciousness. At first he is dimly conscious of its existence and its demands. He gropes after it, often painfully, to grasp its significance, and feels his way towards an appreciation of its worth and spiritual content. It is the larger world-consciousness now pressing in on the individual consciousness. Often it breaks in suddenly and becomes a great new revelation. This is the first aspect of conversion: the person emerges from a smaller, limited world of existence into a larger world of being. His life becomes swallowed up in a larger whole.

There is often a clash between the individual will and the social will, between the person's own insight and the spiritul order of which he is unconsciously a part.) In the life outside of him, the standard is already set when he comes on the scene. It is a complex order which has been calling out, meanwhile, his undeveloped self in this way and that. His own tastes and desires, together with chance forces in the environment which are unduly strong, may shape the growing self out of tune with the larger established order. When the friction comes, it belongs to his nature to insist on himself. It is part of his oldest and deepest-seated instinct to preserve his own integrity. But it is a part of Nature's way to crush that which is out of harmony with herself. The social will is stronger, and the individual must at last surrender himself to it. In its other aspect, then, conversion is the surrender of the personal will to be guided by the larger forces of which it is a part. These two aspects are often mingled. In both there is much in common. There is a sudden revelation and recognition of a higher order than that of the personal will. The sympathies follow the direction of the new insight, and the convert transfers the centre of life and activity from the part to the whole. With new insight comes new beauty. Beauty and worth awaken love-love for parents,

kindred, kind, society, cosmic order, truth and spiritual life. The individual learns to transfer himself from a centre of self-activity into an organ of revelation of universal being, and to live a life of affection for and oneness with the larger life outside. As a necessary condition of the spiritual awakening is the birth of fresh activity and of a larger self-consciousness, which often assert themselves as the dominant elements in consciousness.

The period of adolescence is naturally the time for the awakening into the larger life. We have seen in an earlier chapter that conversion is fairly coincident in general with most rapid bodily growth and with the awakening on the intellectual side. There appeared to be a connection between puberty and conversion among people in the mass, although conversion follows the physiological changes by a little. Biologically considered, the central thing underlying all these phenomena seems to be the birth of the reproductive life. That is the time when the person begins vitally and physiologically to reach out and find his life in another. It is the announcement, on the physical side, that one is gaining capacity to enter into the social whole through the avenue of the family. We shall see later that at the present stage in evolution the reproductive instinct. has a negative rather than a positive significance as a factor in religion; but in its biological import it conditions, in a certain sense, the great awakening on the physiological, psychical and spiritual sides which comes in adolescence. The lives of two persons united in the conjugal relation, each making demands on the other, and living for each other; and later their offspring calling out the activities and affection of the parents-this constitutes the family, the centre of organised life which reflects the whole social order. Family life furnishes the opportunity and necessity for the development of the individual in many new directions. He must be a defender of self and offspring, and so must grow strong physically; he must provide, consequently must possess