equally much physical disease is psycho-somatic in origin. Man is an amalgam of body, mind (or soul), and spirit. He is not ruled by cause and effect, save in the crude circumstances of physical accident, disease, and aging. Of course a man is subject to the constraints of the physical world, for though will-power enables the mountaineer to carry on long after the body has had enough, in the end the body succumbs; one cannot fight lack of oxygen indefinitely. But man is not ruled by cause and effect, save in the instances I have given. My guess is, that this is what the public instinctively knows; and the public's reaction very sensibly is to laugh at them. Let me give an illustration.
Freud in his book The Future of an Illusion describes religion as the universal illusion of the people of Western Europe; and he bases his argument upon the assertion that religious beliefs cannot be verified by experience, in the way that scientific assertions can. This is a mistake. It is an understandable mistake, because as Freud points out in Chapter 5 the authorities in the Church in former times forbade the questioning of items of religious belief, upon the severest penalties. However it remains a mistake. Religious beliefs can be put into practice in one's daily life, and one can find out from experience whether they are true, or whether they are false. It may be very dangerous to put them into practice, both on account of the violent opposition of one's fellow-men, and also the catastrophic disaster in one's mind if one's castles in the air come tumbling down. It may be very dangerous, but it is the easiest possible thing to do, provided one has the courage. I will be dealing with this at great length later. For the present, it is sufficient to point out that Christ himself poured scorn on those people who listened with interest to what he had to say, but did not act upon what he said. He described them as building their houses upon sand, waiting for the flood to sweep them away. And the Gospels were, after all, available for Freud to read; but he evidently wrote his book without doing…